The Crisis of Multiculturalism: Racism in a Neoliberal Age by Alana Lentin and Titley, Zed Books, 2011, 284 pp.

Defending Multiculturalism: A Guide for the Movement by Hassan Mahamdallie (ed.), Bookmarks, 231 pp.

In 2011 David Cameron brought neo-Powellite racism to the heart of Government.  In a February speech in Munich he declared the failure of a ‘doctrine’ called ‘state multiculturalism’.  Thanks to this largely unheard of (yet apparently thoroughly discredited) doctrine, minority communities, Cameron claimed, have been encouraged to live ‘separate lives’ and to behave in ways ‘that run counter to our values.’  Muslims organisations have been ‘showered with public money’ and ‘preachers of hate’ have been tolerated and allowed to spread ‘the ideology of extremism’.  Meanwhile ‘we’ have been fearful of confronting ‘unacceptable views or practices’ amongst non-whites. 

Cameron’s concept of ‘state multiculturalism’ (which was loyally parroted across the mainstream media) was in fact only mentioned once in that speech.  It featured far more prominently in another speech he gave three years earlier at the Equality and Human Rights Commission (alongside its head Trevor Phillips who himself called time on multiculturalism in 2004).  ‘State multiculturalism’, Cameron explained in that earlier speech, had ‘fostered difference between communities’ and ‘stopped us from strengthening our collective identity’:

Whether it’s doing nothing about forced marriages or giving disreputable organisations Government money, or introducing Sharia law in our country, all we have done – or will do – is strengthen the hand of those cultural separatists who want division. 

Cameron reassured his audience, though that ‘we can move away from state multiculturalism,’ noting that, ‘This generation doesn’t have the hang-ups of the past. People today don’t worry that criticising multiculturalism is coded racism.’ 

Alana Lentin and Gavan Titley, the authors of The Crisis of Multiculturalism: Racism in a Neoliberal Age, maintain that, on the contrary, the ceaseless attacks on multiculturalism from politicians and political commentators are indeed a form of ‘coded racism’.  Their argument, in short, is that the supposed crisis of multiculturalism operates as a ‘mobilizing metaphor’, allowing for taboos to be circumvented and racism to reform and reassert itself.  Their detailed, scholarly examination of the topic, which they describe as ‘a critical mapping of developments, discourses and racializing assemblages’ (p. 8), attempts not so much to enter into the debate that is their subject, but rather to ‘examine the conjunctural importance of multiculturalism in providing a site in which the politics of race can be legitimised and laundered.’ (p. 24) 

For Lentin and Titley, ritualistic denunciations of multiculturalism need to be understood in the context of a (supposedly) ‘post-racial’, neoliberal environment, where our understanding of race and racism has been unhinged from notions of structural inequality, historical experiences and anti-racist struggles.  This hollowed out, depoliticised landscape disguises the enduring reality of racism and disadvantage. 

On the right, a crucial step towards this ‘post-racial’ landscape in the UK was Enoch Powell’s infamous 1968 ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech.  It identified immigrants not as racially inferior, but as a threat to British culture and the cause of legitimate concern amongst ‘decent, ordinary’ whites.  In this (now familiar) formulation, Martin Barker noted in his classic text The New Racism, it is simply natural to want to ‘defend our way of life, traditions and customs against outsiders – not because they are inferior, but because they are part of different cultures.’[1]  Lentin and Titley note that, ‘This reformulation of racist discourse strips it of its very racism by purposefully refusing any proposition of racial hierarchy that would characterize immigrants as the members of “inferior races”.’ (p. 74)

The shift in focus away from racism and anti-racism towards a denigration – or equally a celebration – of cultural difference, allows for ‘the marking out of culturalism on a terrain stripped of power’. (p. 86)  Liberal anti-racism, and its insistence that race is nothing but a fiction, and skin colour doesn’t matter, has similarly decoupled discussion of race from any notion of racial hierarchy, and shifted the focus onto culture: 

What the concept of culture as a replacement for race now provides is the opportunity to speak out against multiculturalism whilst avoiding the charge of racism.  The persistence of racism in the lives of millions is denigrated through a reading of the plastic and broadly gratifying rhetorics of cultural celebration and appreciation as the empirical proof of substantive change. (p. 76)

Neoliberalism, Lentin and Titley argue, is ‘deeply invested’ in this post-racialism, since, ‘In the individualising logic of neoliberalism, history, politics and the state are increasingly written out of any analysis of disadvantage generally, and racialized disadvantage particularly.’ (p. 168)  Thus race is ‘essentially privatized, in the sense of being silenced or made invisible.’ (p. 169)  With race reduced simply to notions of individual prejudices, Lentin and Titley note, ‘racialised’ groups and individuals are deprived of the right to challenge discrimination, since to do so risks the accusation of ‘injecting victimology into otherwise neutral proceedings for their own individual or communal gain.’ (76)  Whilst disadvantaged groups are thus disempowered by the supposedly post-racial landscape, political elites are meanwhile better able to pursue punitive policies: 

Presenting [multiculturalism] as a ‘failed experiment’ … allows anxieties concerning migration, globalisation and the socio-political transformations wrought by neoliberal governance to be ordered and explained.  Lamenting it as a benevolent if somewhat naïve attempt to manage the problem of difference allows for securitized migration regimes, assimilative integrationism and neo-nationalist politics to be presented as nothing more than rehabilitative action. (3)

Lentin and Titley also describe how muscular liberals ‘mark themselves out as transcending’ the culturalist ‘terrain’ and ‘restoring universal certainties in the face of particularist excess.’ (p. 86)  The new champions of the Enlightenment, the ‘negative intellectuals’, then define themselves in opposition, not to a subordinated or racially inferior group, but to relativism and evil.  In this context, their moralistic discourse, even when it relies implicitly on Islamophobic stereotypes, is no longer conceived of as racist at all.  Muslims thus become ‘a partner in many anxious binaries,’ and, Lentin and Titley note, ‘there is almost no end, if you forget hard enough, to what can be reanimated in contradistinction to their difference.’ (p. 122) 

The geographical scope of the study is impressive, showing how widespread the problems of racism and Islamophobia have become and perhaps how deeply the racialist dynamics it describes are embedded in European culture.  It is, however, a difficult read, especially so for a reader unfamiliar with the substantial body of work referenced throughout the text.  Some of the book’s complexity is probably necessitated by the subject matter.  Race is after all a social construction, meaning that studies of race and racism must in some ways depart from objective truths when considering how and why groups are ‘racialised’.  The Crisis of Multiculturalism is made all the more obscure by the fact that its subject matter is a depoliticised discourse, detached from social and historical realities, and in engaging with its slippery subject matter the book naturally loses some lucidity.  This problem however is not helped by the authors’ tendency to mystify the topic further with a dense and occasionally impenetrable writing style.

A far more accessible response to the ‘laundered racism’ of the last decade is Defending Multiculturalism, a collection of articles, essays and artistic contributions edited by Hassan Mahamdallie and published by Bookmarks.  Whilst the authors of The Crisis of Multiculturalism seek to avoid adopting a ‘pedagogical mode’ vis-à-vis anti-racists (p. 8), Defending Multiculturalism explicitly pitches itself as ‘A Guide For the Movement’.  It is conceived as a ‘direct response’ to ‘David Cameron and his coalition government’ and their ‘war on the multicultural way of life that all of us, black and white, of faith and no faith, have struggled so hard to build, nurture and strengthen.’ (p. 15)  The book is a collaboration by more than 20 artists, activists, politicians, trade unionists and academics writing in defence of multiculturalism. 

The book’s editor Hassan Mahamdalli provides an interesting outline of the history of working class British Muslims, from the Somali and Yemeni seamen of the nineteenth century to the Bradford 12.  Another interesting historical sketch is provided by Edie Friedman, who describes the history of anti-semitism in Britain, and the anti-racist response, revealing striking parallels with the current climate of Islamophobia. 

Many tirelessly recited myths of multiculturalism are throroughly debunked.  The social geographer, Danny Dorling, through his analysis of population trends, shows that Muslims have not in fact been ‘self-segregating’ as the right would have everyone believe; whilst Colin Wilson in his essay on imperialism and homophobia notes crucially that: 

As with any group, some Muslims are homophobic – but most are not.  Stonewall research has repeatedly found that religious people are no more likely to be homophobic than anyone else – and the group most likely to be prejudiced is not Muslims or people from ethnic minorities, but older, white British men. (p. 149) 

The former Mayor of London Ken Livingstone, who for all his faults has remained a committed anti-racist, contributes a chapter entitled, ‘In praise of multicultural London’, and does a good job of debunking the many myths about immigration, as well as critiquing the xenophobic politics of Blue Labour.  Only occassionally does Livingstone’s hymn to multicultural London lose its harmony.  Unsuprisingly given that he is a former Mayor of London, his essay is peppered with a rather sanguine reading of globalisation and London’s status as ‘a world centre of global trade, finance and commerce’. 

Unlike The Crisis of Multiculturalism, which is admirably international in its scope, Defending Multiculturalism is for the most part UK focused, though Liz Fekete of the Institute of Race Relations does a good job of outlining multiculturalism and its discontents in other European states.  Another stand out contribution in the book is Hassan Mahamdallie’s interview with Salma Yaqoob, who discusses the politics of race in Britain and the impact of the ‘War on Terror’ with great clarity and insight. 

Some of the essays and articles have previously been published elsewhere and many are extremely short.  Indeed even some of its more engaging chapters remain unsatisfyingly brief and underdeveloped.  But given the haste with which the collection was most likely compiled and the voluntary nature of the project, criticism on these grounds seems ungracious and though the book is somewhat uneven, there are certainly enough interesting and impassioned contributions to make it a worthwhile read. 

Tom Mills is a freelance investigative researcher based in London, a PhD candidate at the University of Bath and an editor of the New Left project.

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