Satnam Virdee

Racism, Class and the Racialized Outsider

Racism, Class and the Racialized Outsider offers an original perspective on the significance of both racism and anti-racism in the making of the English working class. While racism became a powerful structuring force within this social class from as early as the mid-Victorian period, this book also traces the episodic emergence of currents of working class anti-racism. Through an insistence that race is central to the way class works, this insightful text demonstrates not only that the English working class was a multi-ethnic formation from the moment of its inception but that racialized outsiders – Irish Catholics, Jews, Asians and the African diaspora – often played a catalytic role in the collective action that helped fashion a more inclusive and democratic society.

Migrant labour, racism and the British National Health Service

This study explores the dynamics of racism, specifically its generation and reproduction as an ideology, and its role in affecting the reception and occupational location of migrant medical labour in Britain. It is argued that the treatment of ‘overseas doctors’ in Britain draws on a complex interplay between racism and nationalism underpinned by the historical construction of ‘welfarism’ as a moral legitimator of ‘Britishness’. Through an exploration of internal and external immigration controls introduced with the aim of regulating migrant labour, we demonstrate how British social policy and elite discourses of ‘race’ combine to construct moral prescriptions of threat such that migrants and British-born ‘non-whites’ entering the British medical profession are forced to negotiate ‘saviour/pariah’ ascriptions indicative of discriminatory but contradictory processes specific to the operation of the British National Health Service as a normative institution.

'Race', employment and social change : A critique of current orthodoxies

Abstract This article focuses on two important questions. First, how can we explain changes in the employment position of Englands racialized minority groups over the past three decades? And second, why have these changes taken place at a different pace for different minority groups? It is argued that much of the increase in Asian self-employment represents working-class accommodation to the inferior conditions of employment available under neo-liberal modernity rather than evidence of upward social mobility as current orthodoxy claims. It is also contended that the growing representation of minorities in junior non-manual work was driven by anti-racist activism around a racialized ‘black’ identity and confirms the continuing significance of ‘race’ in the English labour market. By unravelling the complex relationship between the geographical distribution of different minority groups, their educational qualifications, anti-racist activism, and racism, the study establishes why such employment change has taken place at a different pace for different minority groups.

Black self‐organization in trade unions

This paper considers the significance of self-organization for black and minority workers in trade unions. It embodies a review of the theoretical and empirical evidence in support of black self-organization within unions; that is, a strategy of relative autonomy rather than separatism or submersion within a race-blind union. The theoretical support is derived from arguments concerning identity, participation and power. Much of the empirical material is based upon interviews with black and white lay members and shop stewards from three branches (‘Helthten’, Shaften’ and ‘Mounten’) of the National and Local Government Officers union (NALGO) and with NALGO national officials between 1989 and 1990.

Racism, Muslims and the National Imagination

This qualitative study investigates the relationship between racism and nationalism in two multi-ethnic British neighbourhoods, focusing specifically on the construction of ‘the Muslim’ as a racialised role sign. Through in-depth interviews with 102 ‘white’ and ‘non-white’ participants in Glasgow (Scotland) and Bristol (England) we investigate the extent to which ‘the Muslim’ is being demonised as an oppositional identity in the construction of English and Scottish codes of cultural belonging. We find that whilst Scottishness and Englishness draw on historically founded racialised (e.g. biological, phenotypical) referents of ‘whiteness’ at the level of the ‘multi-ethnic’ neighbourhood, such racialised codes of belonging are undermined in everyday life by hybridised codes: signifiers such as accent, dress, mannerisms and behaviours which destabilise phenotype as a concrete signifier of national belonging. However, those signifiers that contest the racialised referent are themselves reconfigured, such that contemporary signifiers of cultural values (e.g. terrorist, extremist) reinforce, but not completely, the original racialised referent. We conclude that a negative view of ‘the Muslim’ as antithetical to imagined racialised conceptions of nationhood cannot easily be sustained in the Scottish and English ‘multi-ethnic’ neighbourhood. The sign ‘Muslim’ is split such that contemporary significations perpetuate the exclusion of the ‘unhybridised foreign Muslim’.

Racism and the sociological imagination

Our chief purpose in this article is to argue for a restoration of a strong notion of agency to sociological accounts of social relations, and particularly those concerned with group formation and conflict. We contend that much contemporary sociological writing on this topic continues to rely on the concepts of race and ethnicity as primary explanatory or descriptive devices. This has two important consequences: on the one hand it reproduces the powerful theoretical obfuscation associated with these concepts, whilst on the other it prompts the notion that human agency has only an illusory role as an intentional agent. Drawing on the intellectual resources of a Hegelian-inflected historical materialism and realism, we challenge both claims by arguing for a post-race, post-ethnicity sociology of group formation, one which allows a greater scope for agency in the determination of social life.

Striking back against racist violence in the East End of London, 1968–1970

This article tells the hitherto untold story of how different Pakistani organisations mobilised in response to racist violence and harassment in the east London Borough of Tower Hamlets (1968–1970). In telling this story, the authors analyse the problematic nature of official and public understandings of, and responses to, racist violence, and how it distorted the lives of racialised minorities. Drawing on original archival research carried out in 2014, this piece identifies the emergence of two distinct political repertoires from within the Pakistani community: the integrationist approach and the autonomous approach. The integrationist approach involving the Pakistani Welfare Association (PWA) and the National Federation of Pakistani Associations (NFPA) tried to address the problem through existing local state ‘race relations’ apparatuses and mainstream political channels, while at the same time re-establishing consent for the police as the agents of law and order. In contrast, a network of Black Power groups, anti-imperialists and socialists led by the Pakistani Progressive Party (PPP) and the Pakistani Workers’ Union (PWU) challenged both the local political leadership and the authority of the police in Tower Hamlets, while also undermining the stereotype of Asian people as ‘weak’ and ‘passive’. In recovering this lost episode of resistance to ‘Paki-bashing’, unleashed in the aftermath of Enoch Powell’s inflammatory speeches, this essay makes a contribution to the history of autonomous anti-racist collective action undertaken by racialised minorities in Britain.

British Asian Entrepreneurs: Culture and Opportunity Structures

Asian Britons have rapidly assumed a major role in small business. However, this prominence conceals substantial diversity in the pattern of entrepreneurship and the nature of business across the three main South Asian groups. Indians, Pakistanis and African Asians differ markedly in their approach to business and in their success. They also differ in terms of the economic resources they bring to self-employment and in the cultural values which surround their economic activities. This diversity allowed a study of South Asian entrepreneurs to examine the complex interaction between culture and economic rationality in economic behaviour.

Forward to the past: race, the colour scale and Michael Banton

For more than fifty years, Michael Banton has been one of the leading figures in the study of race and ethnic relations. His contributions are manifold, and long-lasting. Beginning with his richly detailed empirical accounts of the settlement of, and reaction to, the early wave of post-war migrants to Britain (Banton 1955, 1959); to mapping the historical evolution of the idea of race (Banton 1987); through to his attempts to construct a rational choice theory of racial and ethnic competition (Banton 1983), Banton has been at the heart of many of the principal debates that have shaped the field, especially in Britain, but also beyond. Once upon a time he would have defined that field as the sociology of race relations, for which, along with John Rex, he was so influential in providing the institutional and theoretical ballast. But no more it seems. Instead, in recent years, and rather refreshingly for an academic, he has been engaged in a highly public exercise of ‘finding, and correcting, my mistakes’, as he terms it (Banton 2005). His most significant discovery and correction has been his wholesale rejection of race as an analytic or descriptive concept in sociological explanation on the grounds that it is a second-order abstraction (unlike skin colour he claims) and thus ‘only makes the intellectual problem more difficult to resolve’ (Banton 2011, p. 17). So, what is the intellectual problem that Banton seeks to resolve in this essay?

The second sight of racialised outsiders in the imperialist core

Abstract This essay focuses attention on a current of socialist internationalism within imperial Britain and the formative role played by racialised outsiders of Irish Catholic, Jewish and Indian descent in actualising anti-racism and anti-imperialism. The collective memories of colonial subjugation combined with their outsider status within Britain itself endowed them with a second sight that enabled them to see through the usual fog of blood and belonging and act as a leavening agent connecting the struggles of workers of different ethnicities within Britain, as well as with those beyond. The essay concludes with a call to accommodate the emancipatory potential of the racialised outsider position in critical theory and practice. In particular, if contemporary Marxism is to remain relevant, it must be stretched to accommodate the specificity of racism and anti-racism without reducing it to class. The lessons for political practice appear equally compelling: emancipatory politics today need to accommodate how identifications of race are materially inscribed social realities which can facilitate resistance against racism. In that sense, socialist political practice will have to be more intersectional if a sustainable solidarity is to be forged between the ethnically diverse proletariat in the imperialist core, as well as with those beyond.