The Foundations of English Racism

Continental-style racial theories made their way into England from about 1840 onwards. One of the earliest exponents was none other than Thomas Arnold, the famous headmaster of Rugby School, and a leading historian. He advanced a universal theory of world history, in which he assigned a special role to the Aryans, specifically the Germanic races, which included, of course, the Anglo-Saxons. Race theories in general made their way into the oddest corners of British intellectual life. Consider the following;

You never observe a great intellectual movement in Europe in which the Jews do not greatly participate. The first Jesuits were Jews; that mysterious Russian diplomacy which so alarms Western Europe is organised and principally carried on by Jews; that mighty revolution which is at this moment preparing in Germany, and which will be, in fact, a second and greater Reformation, and of which so little is as yet known in England, is entirely developing under the auspices of Jews, who almost monopolise the professional chairs in Germany...

Who wrote that? Why, none other than Benjamin Disraeli in his 1844 novel Coningsby, and himself of Jewish origin.. His view, for all its fancy, was benign: it was, nevertheless, to find a malign echo in the coming development of European anti-Semitism.

But we have to go further north, to Edinburgh, in fact, to discover the man who has been described as the "real founder of British racism." His name was Robert Knox, a leading anatomist and an anthropologist, best known now as the chief client of the Edinburgh body-snatchers, Burke and Hare. His published work included The Races of Men, in which he described the Jewish race as 'sterile parasites.'

For Knox, race was the key to all human activity-"...that the race in human affairs is everything, is simply a fact, the most comprehensive, which philosophy has ever announced. Race is everything: literature, science, art-in a word, civilization depends on it." The highest races were the Germans, the Saxons, and the Celts; the lowest were Black Africans. Though now Knox's work is almost completely forgotten, it was widely admired at the time, by Charles Darwin, among others

Aryans

There is a lot of good academic monographs on this topic. One of the best I ever read, though slightly dated now, is The Aryan Myth-A History of Racist and Nationalist Ideas in Europe by Léon Poliakov.

The main thing to focus on is the rise of nationalism in the nineteenth century, in particular the development of specific national myths used to explain the alleged superiority of a particular community or people. The seminal work here is Arthur de Gobineau's 1855 Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races , where the Aryans, the speakers of Indo-European languages, were held to be responsible for all of humanity's greatest cultural achievments; and at the peak of the Aryan pyramid, in Gobineau's estimation, were the Germanic races of northern Europe. The greatest danger was that the 'purity' of this original race was subject to etiolation and dilution:

After passing through the age of the gods when it was absolutely pure; the age of the heroes, in which the mixtures were moderate in strength and number; the age of the nobility, where human faculties remained considerable though they could not be renewed from dried-up sources, it has descended, more or less swiftely according to the environment, to the final confusion of all the elements...The portion of Aryan blood, already subdivided so frequently, which still exists in our countries and which alone sustains the edifice of our society, advances daily towards our last frontier before total absorption.

As you can see, the myth is based on a descent from an original, and mythical racial Garden of Eden, a source of all purity, moving by stages towards contemporary anthropological and political realites. Of necessity it is a theory that has to be modified by practice and reality.

Over time it goes through many subdivisions, with the Nazis devising their own categories of superior and inferior, giving Gobineau's cultural model a specific biological twist. As you have quite rightly hinted, the whole theory is eclectic and selective, allowing people like Rosenberg to 'adopt' races like the Finns: even the Japanese were later described as 'honorary Aryans.'.

One of the best critiques of this whole pseudo-intellectual farrago puts the position as follows:

Naturally there is no such thing as a pure race, not even a Jewish one...Race: it is a sentiment, not a reality; it is 95% sentiment. I don't believe that it is possible to prove biologically that a race is more or less pure.

Who said this? Why, Benito Mussolini, in an interview given to the historian Emil Ludwig in 1932. He went on to say, soon after meeting Hitler for the first time, that if Nazi race theories were correct the only pure race in Europe was the Laps! :))

Was Enoch Powell a Racist?

I addressed myself in debate to this particular question. Here, below, is the answer I gave.

No, I do not think he was a racist. He was, rather, an angry man; angry at his party and angry at the leadership. His anger, his alienation, it is probably better to say, took him down a dangerous road, a road marked by insensitivity and misjudgement

The essential point to note was that the Rivers of Blood speech had the immediate effect of turning Powell into a kind of folk hero, even as he was being cast into the wilderness by the then leadership of the Conservative Party. London Dockers marched on Parliament to demonstrate their support, as workers in Wolverhampton and the Black Country demanded his reinstatement. Opinion polls taken at the time gave him an approval rating in excess of 70 per cent. He also received thousands of letters of support.

So, as far as race relations in the late 1960s are concerned, the picture revealed is not very attractive. On the basis if the measures I have given, one has to conclude that most of the British people harboured some form of racial prejudice. Powell did not create this; he simply gave shape and direction to underlying emotions, feelings that had slowly been building up ever since the arrival of The Empire Windrush from Jamaica twenty years before, beginning the first wave of post-war black immigration to England. At the time Labour back-benchers wrote to Prime Minister Clement Atlee, saying that "an influx of coloured people would cause discord and unhappiness among all concerned." By the late 1950s, with the rate of arrivals averaging 50,000 a year, this 'discord and unhappiness' achieved open expression in the Notting Hill race riots.

Although racism at this time was probably best explained as a kind of post-imperial hangover, it took on new and more worrying forms in the 1960s, the time just prior to Powell's speech. In sociological terms it was also becoming a largely working-class and, indeed, a regional phenomenon. There were two basic reasons for this. There was a large constituency of people, former Labour voters in the main, concentrated for the most part in the West Midlands, Powell's own political hunting ground, who felt they were being increasingly neglected by the government of Harold Wilson. This was the area, moreover, where black immigration was heaviest, leading to competition for housing and jobs. During one particularly notorious by-election for the Smethwick constituency, the successful candidate, Peter Griffiths, beat Patrick Gordon Walker, a senior Labour politician, by, amongst other things, the distribution of the most scurrilous forms of campaign literature, including one leaflet saying "Vote Labour for more nigger-type neighbours." This key event in British electoral politics showed that black immigrants had become scapegoats for more deep-rooted social ills. It really only needed the 'Rivers of Blood' to turn this from a local into a national phenomenon.

Racism is still with us; it will always be with us. But so much has changed since 1968. In general people are much more accepting; open discrimination is disallowed by law and black people are to be found at all levels of public life. There have been tragedies, there has been violence; but Powell was a poor profit. The Tiber is not foaming with much blood, and is never likely to.

Gatsby, Race and Cultural Pessimism

In The Great Gatsby F Scott Fitzgerald makes an oblique reference, in the character of Tom Buchanan, to the theories of Lothrop Stoddard on the decline of the white race. There is a background, in the fashion of Oswald Spengler, to this kind of cultural pessimism.

There is also, it might be said, wider concerns of sexual anxiety, fears at one and the same time of miscegenation and inadequacy. I'm thinking specifically here of Henry Champley, one time foreign editor of Le Temps, and his wonderfully eccentric White Women, Coloured Men, his bizarre and salacious travel book, published in 1936.

In this he urges white women to beware of the dark races; for his travels in the USA and the Far East have convinced him that The coloured people have discovered the White woman as an idol worthy of being desired above all else. The problem for Mr. Champley is that the white woman has also discovered the coloured races! She is therefore urged to resist the tempations of racial mixing and promiscuity in favour of 'heroic humility', which, I assume, means being at the disposal of dear old Mr. Champley! :-))

Actually this whole cultural trend has a wider resonance than Stoddard's specifically American concerns. It's already evident before the First World War, in work like The Conflict of Colour, where Putnam Weale warns his fellow Britons against the perils of the Japanese alliance. In the mid-1920s, independently of the American school, the poet Leo Chiozza Money published The Peril of the White, saying that The whites of Europe and elsewhere are set upon race suicide and internecine war.

Is it surprising, then, that Fitzgerald allows the ridiculous Buchanan to voice such views? Always remember Nick's thought in Gatsby I was tempted to laugh whenever he opened his mouth. I dare say Tom and Mr Champley would have got on well, though. :-))

The BBC and the Gypsy; the Manipulation of News

I assume most people in the UK saw the BBC news reports from Northern Ireland about the attacks on ‘Romanians’ in Belfast. I have to say the whole thing made no sense to me. Did the people of Northern Ireland have a particular prejudice against Romanians? Why Romanians and not, say, Poles, who have a higher visible presence throughout the United Kingdom? Why were Romanians concentrated in such numbers in such a confined location? I suspected there was something more to the whole story: it simply made no sense to me as it stood. Now, I have to tread carefully; for you see the people in question were not Romanians at all: they were Roma, gypsies, if you prefer.

Yes, I reached that conclusion myself because, well, they looked like gypsies rather than people of mainstream Romanian ethnicity. But it was James Delingpole, the Daily Telegraph blogger who revealed the full facts, repeated in The Spectator (27 June)

It maddens me to discover that news is being 'managed' in this fashion, that ‘Auntie’ is deliberate treating us as like children. It's not a question of racism; it is a question of being allowed to form our own judgments and make up our own minds. In place of this we get the usual tired and pious platitudes from politicians and the press, the same platitudes trotted out over the electoral advance of the BNP: how ‘disgusting’ it all is, how ‘abominable’ people are; and so on and so on, yawn, yawn. There is no attempt whatsoever to uncover motives; there is no attempt to explore all the nuances of the story in a way that would make it comprehensible.

The story as it stood did no service to the people of Belfast; it did no service to the general community, to the rest of us; above all, it did no service to the Roma themselves. Prejudice does not take shape out of nothing: it arises from a long tail of tradition. Let me say this and let me say it openly: the Roma are not liked and they are not trusted, neither here nor in Eastern Europe. In Italy, for example, as Delingpole reports, almost 70% of the population wants the Roma expelled. Pure racism, is it?

We have to face these questions, and face them openly. It does no good at all to hide behind news management. Actually it’s more than news management, far more: it’s a deliberate attempt at the management of morals; Lord forbid that we should reach the wrong conclusion. The point is lots of people will reach the wrong conclusion if they are treated in this way. Prejudice is only defeated by reason and policy not by half-truths and lies. Facts, key facts, must not be withheld. For when they are it is easy to conclude that there genuinely is something to hide. If anything is more guaranteed to perpetuate suspicion and dislike it is truth by half-measure. By this process the Roma will never escape being thrown into the role of victims.

The BBC is now manipulating the news in various ways: the point is to make it understandable

Fear and Loathing

I come across people on some of the social networks I belong to who express some Nazi sympathies, not people, I have to say, with whom I have any direct interaction, if I can avoid it. Some of them say that they want the right to declare their own pride of race, ‘white pride’, in the way that others express, say, black or brown pride. This is usually followed with a catalogue of complaints about this race or that ethnicity. The truth is, of course, that one does not need symbols of ‘white pride, certainly not Nazi symbols, if one has sufficient confidence in oneself and one’s inheritance. Such an identity is an expression, rather, of deep forms of fear and self-loathing, a fear of confronting oneself, a fear of confronting an essential truth: there are people who would always be at the bottom of the heap no matter how the human race was structured. I would go so far as to say that hatred of others, hatred of other races, is a form of self-defence, a way of misting the mirror. In the end if the all of the out-groups disappeared, if humanity were reduced to a homogenous whole, the mirror would demist. Then these people would see themselves for what they truly are. That is the real horror.