IN THE
UNION JACK
TEXT
PAUL GILROY
SUMMARY
THERE AIN’T NO BLACK
ISSUE 1
There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack ‘RACE’, CLASS AND AGENCY P1-40 JUNE 2020
Foreword
Paul Gilroy’s ‘There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack’ is a seminal critique of British politics and exploration of anti-black racism.
With the current climate, there is a lot of talk about required reading and self education on the topic of race. It is with that in mind that I present my notes from grappling with Gilroy’s book. It is important to recognise that it is common to feel alienated by academic texts, often resulting in abandoning the content all together. This summary will hopefully act as a companion to the original book in hopes of making the content more accessible for those who would otherwise not be able to read it.
Reasoning and possible applications: •
To provide a summary for those unable to read the book (for those with time constraints/ that struggle reading)
•
To add to a wealth of online content for self-education and offer a free, easily accessible place for Gilroy’s core ideas to be explored (for those with limited access to the original book)
•
My notes could act as a supplement to have on hand while tackling the book itself (for those currently reading)
•
This content could act as a resource to refer back to after reading the book to locate critical points quickly (to serve as a refresher to those that have read the content before)
Please note: The notes published are my attempt at a focussed reiteration of Gilroy’s core points. None of the text following includes any personal opinions, thoughts or critiques. This is a study of Gilroy’s material to share and encourage my friends and family to engage with his content, not an attempt to interpolate myself into the complex discussion of race. As a white woman, I recognise that it is not and will never be my place.
I have organised my notes into bullet points to separate ideas, with a thread of connected ideas being further indented. Where Gilroy is introducing ideas that are not his own, I have used grey text.
With that in mind, please enjoy issue 1- chapter 1 of Gilroy’s book.
Chapter 1 ‘Race’, class and agency
P2. •
The sociology writings of ‘race relations’ can be split into three categories- structures, meanings and culture. Thus, the sociology of ‘race’ fractures along these ‘fault lines’ (Craib, 1984).
•
These tensions are apparent in academic and political writings, but problems are especially apparent when writers don’t acknowledge that ‘race’ and class belong to separate spheres of existence.
•
Roy Bhaskar views society as a process and not a finished product, and proposes it may be useful to be more explicit about the different ways in which racism is both a property of structures present and a source of meanings.
•
This idea of ‘race’ and racism relies on the following prerequisite model.
P3.
Culture is a mediating space between agents and structures in which individuals dependency is created and secured, and not that culture is the intrinsic property of ethnic particularity. •
Previous studies of ‘race relations’ may be separated into three tendencies. o
One end of the spectrum defines ‘race’ as an ideological instance, which only intervenes ‘subsequently’ with economics in Britain. (Gabriel & Ben-Tovim, 1978)
o
The other end of the spectrum sought to reduce ‘race’ to a product of the effects of structures, ie. Production, markets. (Sivanandan, 1982. Rex, 1979)
o
In the middle, some try to define ‘race’ as a cultural phenomenon, (Lawrence, 1982). This is particularly problematic as it makes ‘race’ a synonym for ethnicity, and ends up amalgamating groups together with one collective identity.
P4. •
‘Culture’ can be explained as the life-world of subjects and structures created by human activity. This has crucial political deficiencies and tends towards absolutism.
•
Racial meanings are not looked at as an autonomous branch of ideology, but as a prominent feature of culture.
•
The concept of class, and its use in British politics and history of black British settlers, has been reductive and economistic- seeking to subordinate blacks to a ‘unified working class’, which is a myth.
•
The lense that Marx takes- just seeing class- is reductive.
P5.
P6.
•
Class analysis must be opened up to allow for different histories of subordination.
•
The narrow conception of class does not allow for the complex chemistry of class, ‘race’ and gender.
•
These groups cannot be empirically disentangled.
•
If class analysis is to be retained, it must be severely modernised.
•
The Race Collective Today argued that the Health Service industrial action of 1982-3 cannot be understood without considering the unrelated urban summer protests of 1981.
•
They have common roots in the self-conscious community struggles against different manifestations of pauperisation.
•
The ‘English working class’ is not unified as one group, but is severely divided between those in and out of work, those in various sectors, men and women, old and young.
•
Conflicts around ‘race’ must be looked at in light of these divisions.
P7.
P8.
P9. Race for itself and class in itself •
The three categories that writers that try theorising the relationship of class and ‘race’ can be split into each has their own political stance and unique problematic.
•
The first operates around Marxist/Weberian tendencies-
o
It argues that economic relations have a primacy in ‘race relations’.
o
In the Weberian version, blacks ‘underclass’ (Rex and Tomlinson, 1979).
o
In the Marxist version, the term ‘sub-proletariat’ is used.
o
Weberians say that an underclass is formed from the ‘accumulated effect of losing struggles in the distributive sphere’ eg, fairing badly in housing, job and education markets.
o
Instead of identifying with working class culture, blacks self-organise into an effectively new separate groupthe underclass.
form
an
P10.
•
This idea centers the effect of production relations and thus reinforces the idea that racial structure is imposed by capital, and is reinforced by state industries that control black labor in the interest of capital.
•
The value of this argument is that racial divisions of class is real and not a side effect of capitalism.
•
The more sophisticated Marxian version was articulated by Sivanandan.
P11.
o
‘Capital requires racism not for racisms’ sake but for the sake of capital’ (Sivanandan, 1980)
o
In his analysis of post-war Britain, Sivanandan recognised that the struggle against racism was a priority to the struggle against capitalism.
•
The second tendency has been exemplified by Robert Miles. o
Miles’ position starts by observing how ‘races’ have no basis in the raw materials of human biology.
o
There is 1 human race, but this is mixed up with a critique of all attempts to use ‘race’ in either a description or analysis.
•
Miles writes as if he believes that banishing the concept of ‘race’ will abolish racism.
•
Miles reduces the complexities of the issue of ‘race’ being separate from class
P12.
o
He does this by saying the supposed dichotomy of ‘race’ and class are a mere ‘false construction’ (1984)
•
The totality of Black People in Britain cannot be examined outside of class.
•
Miles attacks black writers that discuss racism in Britain with a Marxist overtone as they use the term ‘race’, (in his opinion), in spite of its illusionary status.
•
Miles argues that racism is born from the struggle between capital and labor; specifically migrant labor.
P13.
o
Here, shared class position in the production process will provide a basis for anti-racism in the working class.
o
This theory is analogous to ‘Black and White Unite and Fight’
o
The idea that groups form off the back of racial discourse is rendered illegitimate by Miles, as its roots are in ideology
o
The group ‘working class’ is unified by production, and can therefore transcend racial particularity.
P14. •
Miles is dogmatic in discussing class relations inside black communities, and he does not cover how institutional racism has an effect in drawing black groups together in various histories.
•
Blacks are presented as ‘a population of significantly distinct historical origins, occupying different class positions’ (Miles, 1984) and not as a cohesive group.
•
This argument may be undermined with the recent blurring of class lines. o
Teachers, Journalists, Sociologists, Managers can be theorised into a class separate from ‘working class’, yet still take up the needs of the working class by joining its political institutions.
P15. •
Thus, the black petit bourgeois is not separate from the black working class as they may ‘switch sides’, which (Marx & Engles, 1973) previously denied.
•
It is reductive to view race relations as a product of production (work) alone, as it is not the only place where complex political relationships between black and white Britons are created.
•
‘Race’ is not only relevant to production, but consumption too.
•
Miles and his collaborators view the dissolving of race as a necessary and desirable step.
P16.
•
The third tendency has this same split between ‘race’ and class, but argues that racism inhabits an ideology in social formation and appears to be unrelated to class. o
(Gabriel & Ben-Tovim, 1979) say that the task of the ‘race’ ideologist is to critique official ‘race’ policy, and to produce ‘rational policy recommendations’.
o
The flaw of this theory relies on the positive idea that state institutions can act as an agent to eliminate racism.
o
This cannot be taken for granted at any level of government.
P18. •
If it is accepted that one of the definitive characteristics of contemporary racism is to first identify blacks in the problem/ or as victim, then expel them from history, then anti-racism must therefore respond by revealing and restoring black history in this country.
•
The first two approaches agree that the historical process emerges from economic antagonisms from either production or market relations.
•
The third approach breaks this, but then ‘race’ becomes a policy issue, and loses contact with history and class politics.
•
Racism is not-
P19
o
A natural phenomenon- An event stemming from psychological aberration
o
Neither is it an eternal phenomenon- some ahistorical hostility toward blacks which stems from the legacy if
the empire, and continues to saturate the minds of white Britons despite age, gender, income etc. •
It must be understood as a process.
•
Bringing blacks into history outside the categories of problem/ victim depends on the ability to comprehend political/ ideological/economic change.
•
Here it would benefit for a new concept of class to be introduced, stripped of 19th century content, and not immediately linked to means of production.
•
The 3 approaches seek to place ‘race’ within overarching class structures.
•
The path this book seeks looks less at ‘races’’ relation to class, or the status or ‘race’ as a social phenomena.
P20 Class formation •
(Wallerstein, 1979) has argued that class analysis loses its power of explanation when it moves away from logical, dynamic discussion and moves toward a formal, fixed model.
•
Traditional Marxist ideas of ‘race’- reduced to an effect of economic antagonisms- must be flipped. o
Class must be understood via the struggles articulated though ‘race’.
•
Clarifying class consciousness and struggle in contemporary Britain is difficult.
•
The growth of populist politics appeals to national sentiment rather than class and has distanced itself from the poor and their political representation eg. Unions.
P21 •
This shift is part of a crisis of representation of the working class in organisations and institutions.
•
It’s a multidimensional crisis that renders class to feel very complexo
For example, structural aspects- new technology and recession- restrict economic options to Britain
o
And demographic factors are associated with uneven development of national decline.*
•
*This has caused changes in regional bases of working class movement (G.Williams, 1982, Massey 1984; Massey & Miles 1984)
•
This crisis points to the limits of political strategy that tries to appeal to a homogenous (alike) and cohesive nation, like the politics of anti-racism.
•
The Left has acknowledged the lack of representation, but centers electoral issues- which is important but is a small fraction of the problematics it causes. o
For example, the discussion of the qualities of Thatcheristic conservatism that allowed conservatives to hold a ‘historic bloc’ during the debris of industrialisation (Hobsbawn, 1984; 1985) has been held.
P22 •
It is important to recognise that populist impulse in the recent pattern of racialisation is a response to the crisis of representation.
•
The Right has formulated a purposely ambiguous language of nation to gain populist power.
•
Meanwhile the white working classes political resources cap them from being able to offer any alternative. They can’t represent class as a class- outside of capitalist structures and means of ‘race’.
•
Gramsci’s commentary must be adapted with caution but his remarks capture the relationship between this crisis and the rise of nationalist political forces. o
‘At a certain point in their historical lives, social classes become detached from their traditional parties. In other words, the traditional parties in that particular organisational form, with the particular men who constitute, represent and lead them, as its expression. When such crises occur, the immediate situation becomes delicate and dangerous, because the field is open for violent situations, for the activities of unknown forces, represented by charismatic ‘men of destiny’’
P23 •
The positions of dominant and subordinate groups are ascribed by ‘race’. o
‘Race’ chooses and fixes individuals’ positions relative to others with respect to basic society structures.
•
Thus, racism plays an active role in articulating political, cultural and economic elements into a wider complex and contradictory unity.
•
Racism ensures that ‘race’ is the modality in which class is lived. (Hall, 1980) o
In contemporary Britain, viewing ‘race’ this day highlights the chance nature of class formation
•
(Adam Prezwoski, 1977) has developed an idea that class struggle should be broadly defined. He draws an important distinction between: o
Objective conditions- political, ideological, economic.
o
And the determination of struggles by social relations.
P24 •
Objective conditions structure the range of possibilities, while precise outcomes come directly from struggle.
•
Prezworski concludes that, if viewed as effects of (and in turn, having effects on) class formation, all conflicts can be understood in historical terms.
•
This is clarified further by (Katznelson, 1981)
•
P25
o
Class society exists even if it not signified.
o
The study of class formation is looking at how, why and when it is signified.
This expanded view of class formation can contribute to an alternate view of the ‘race’/class relationship in many ways. o
One way is that it suggests that class formation analysis renders the connection between struggle and history intelligible.
o
Another way is when issues of dis/organising class formation are being discussed, the possibility of determining ‘race’ from class politics can be identified.
o
Thirdly, a class formation problematic permits the effects of racism to be located in relation to the conflict between capital and labor.
•
The determination between ‘race’ and class has created Cedric Robson’s ‘racial capitalism’. o
Without entering debates about the extent that racial differentiation has been integral to capitalist development (Wolf, 1982),
o
It is important to recognise the tendency to ‘exaggerate regional, sub cultural and dialectical differences into racial ones’ (Robson, 1982).
P26 •
Class analysis cannot be confined to those in immediate processes of production if it is to be useful
•
The mismatch of labor available/labor required for capitalist production has created structured unemployment- creating a surplus population.
•
Riots of 1981 and 1985 are remembered as ‘racial’ events, yet only 29-33% of arrests were non-white. o
•
Thus, it is essential to ask- how has this memory been constructed?
The ‘mini riots’ between the 1981/85 riots highlight the importance of the surplus population o
With the representation of national decline.
o
And the combining of workers and non-workers alike into a class/urban social movement.
P27 •
The notion of an articulated group of social relations is proposed by (Hall, 1980), as a basic concept in the analysis of racially segmented societies.
o
•
These include ‘sectoral’ struggles of gender, sexuality, generation, consumption and distribution of state services, regional conflicts, as well as ‘race’.
Some move beyond the particularity in which they originate o
For example, the organisation of women in the coal strike of 1984-5 transferred the meaning of class in the dispute.
o
It made social forces in support act politically as a group - whether or not it was feminist (Loach, 1985)- and new kinds of solidarity were made.
o
Similarly, miner’s dependents claiming state welfare were involved though not immediately via production .
•
The class element can be found in the group’s commitment to engaging social structure of production, yet is not limited by this aim.
•
Struggle around urban policing following the 1981 riots is the most recent case where ‘sectoral’ struggle (eg. ‘race’) has been brought into the mainstream of working class politics.
•
These conflicts highlight contradiction between local and national governments.
•
Class formation organisation is viewed as a theoretical problem-
P28
o
On one level, the working class must remain a symbolic unity (Laclau & Mouffe, 1985),
o
On another, radical movements negotiate with each other, regardless of sectarian origins, and may even coordinate action.
•
The state plays a role in potentially unifying components of the surplus population (Piven & Cloward, 1977). o
Institutional life both disperses and collects people together.
o
It molds group identities and shapes the collectivity in which protest can erupt.
P29 •
State structures determine the form of political struggles ie. Where state institutions impose racial categories, racial struggle will be a fight against the state.
•
This unification comes with political language labeling all those who challenge dominant order as the ‘enemy’. o
For example, miners and blacks discover they are both labeled as ‘the enemy within’.
•
This is not just a complex way of saying the opressed tend to resonate with eachother.
•
These struggles encompass class and are moving beyond the production that defines class politics.
•
New types of class relations can be found in the UK’s new economic conditions
•
At present, class-based political action has to compete with a range of populist politics eg. The ‘new racism’.
•
The rise of new racism can be pinpointed in the lack of political representation of the working class (Steadman Jones, 1983)
•
The notion of class struggle must be redefined unless class analysis remains limited to the rare occasion that a self-conscious class may articulate itself.
P30
•
Prezworski suggests that struggles may be included in class formation, however, to label any political struggle as a class struggle would be a mistake as it universalizes the issue of emancipation.
•
Social movements centered on the experience of subordination can include- but are not reducible to- class.
•
The most recent change to class relations has been the introduction of a professional and managerial class, and the expansion of surplus labor (Carter, 1985).
P31
o
This is presented in society in a range of contradictory forms- ‘housewives’, ‘black youth’, ‘trainees’, ‘middle class’, ‘claimants’.
•
This surplus population must be studied as a potential class in itself.
•
Many new social movements rely on mass mobilisation rather than mass membership.
•
This tactic stems from the strategies of the women’s peace and liberation movement in Britain, and from black America’s civil rights movement.
•
Struggles that are apparently unrelated to class must be questioned-
•
-How and why did the groups first become organsied? What are the limits? What effects will they bring?
•
It is not just struggles around ‘race’ that reveal connections to class and politics- the historical, cultural and ‘kinship’ ties that give ‘race’ its meaning also provide basis for collective action.
P32
o
Because it provides basis for collective action, this too must be evaluated.
o
How does the race consciousness that these ties creates compare with the collective association based on work, wages and exploitation?
o
They may overlap with the experience of black workers, but if they cannot be put into mutually exclusive categories, they must be separately defined.
•
(Craig Calhoun, 1982) looked at the complexity of class in context of popular radicalism during the first industrial revolution.
•
He distinguished workers who struggled ono
The basis of strong community foundations against larger forces of economic change,
o
And those who ‘fought on a weaker basis but within the emerging systems’.
•
These groups can be separated in their place relative to industrialization, just as groups looked at here may be similarly separated in their place relative to de-industrialization.
•
Calhoun identifies the roots of radicalism in the development of organisations that could mobilise workers for national action.
•
His differentiation of class and radicalism can help to highlight some of the ways in which radical politics fragments today’s working class.
•
(Gilroy,1981) has previously pointed out how black settlers have used notions of community in self organisation.
P33
o
•
Looking at this is also a means to connect the spatial and territorial dimensions of class formation with political struggles (Katznelson, 1981).
It raises the specificity of urban politics- which is important because the o
National economic crisis,
o
And the crisis of representation of the working class,
Show patterns of uneven territorial development. •
Therefore it may be hard to distinguish the subjectivity of ‘race’ from feelings of neighbourhood/region/locality
•
Black settlers in a concentrated area of a city, and a white racistfor whom a black neighbour becomes a symbol of urban degeneration- will experience these connections differently.
•
The ties and traditions made in imperial development and anticolonial struggle remain a resource in Britain’s political practice.
•
These legacies are shaped around particular oppression which has arisen in post-war Britain.
•
They have appeared in struggles around work (Beetham, 1970), along with in the reproduction of classes and ‘races’ which become youth subculture.
•
The institutions they create- temples, churches, cafes, clubs, blues dances- can mix up the eurocentric idea of where the dividing line between politics and culture should fall.
P34
o
Traditional solidarity changes institutions of British politics- challenging anyone seeking to confine them within a concept of ethnicity.
•
The political consciousness of black settlers draws upon histories and memories beyond the British borders. And they are combined with the insertion into industrial order and the experience of banishment from production disproportionately along lines marked by ‘race’. o
•
This history is expressed, for example, in the links between the 1981 riots and the Health Service strike that followed.
The economic dimensions are beyond the scope of this book but some cultural manifestations include: o
The movement was created out of poverty, exploitation and racial subordination
o
Thus it is separate- ideologically and organisationallyform political practice born from trade unions and labor movements.
o
For example, low paid black or female workers are not best served from the current organisation- ie. union membership connects them to a bureaucracy based on the need for a coordinated national action.
P35 •
Therefore, the traditional politics of black communities must be claimed back from this superstructure.
P35 Race formation •
The forms of economic coercion in plantation slavery, migrant labor and apartheid are all reminders of how ‘race’ can be a distinctive feature at the level of economic development.
•
Accepting this, this book tries to demonstrate the positives of defining ‘race’ as a political category that cano
Have various meanings,
o
All determined by struggle.
•
This does not suggest that the difference between ‘races’ can have an objective basis.
•
It is important to compare and evaluate different historical situations in which ‘race’ has been particularly relevant.
•
This project does not lead to an idealist theory ‘race relation situations’, it can be used to introduce the idea of race formation.
•
Race formation refers to: o
How phenotypical variation is translated across into concrete systems of ‘race’ and colour,
o
And to the false biological theory which has been a feature in the history of ‘races’.
o
Race formation also includes how ‘races’ are organised into politics.
P36 •
If race formation is seen like a continuous process- like class formation- race formation can also refer to political forces that organise around the idea of ‘race’.
•
This concept supports the idea that the meaning of ‘race’ may be changed and struggled over. o
Thus, racism cannot be spoken about in the singular, analysists should discuss racisms in the plural
•
In this approach of race formation, biology cannot be wholly dismissed.
•
Accepting that skin ‘colour’ opens up the possibility of engaging with theories, allows us to highlight the elasticity and emptiness of racial signifiers in the first place. (Even though we know it to be meaningless and having a strict basis in biology).
•
This perspective defines ‘race’ as an open political struggle- as it is struggle, and not visual signifiers, that determines which definition of ‘race’ will prevail.
•
The naming of ‘races’ has recently shifted. It has moved fromo
The political definition of black based on Afro-Asian unity,
o
To a more restricted formulation which confines blackness to people of African descent.
o
This shift occurred despite the racist activity towards both Africans and Asians alike.
P37 •
This shift has origins in understanding ‘race’ as obstacles to political accommodation between groups by culture and ethnicity.
•
Its idea of culture as a fixed- almost biological- property is similar to the theory of ‘racial’ differences put forward by the radical right.
•
The change has been cemented by policy changes and state provision for ‘ethnic minorities’* that continues to fracture the inclusive definition of black. o
*In every case defined to coincide with the old idea of biological ‘races’.
•
The movement towards this understanding of ‘race’ dates back to shortly after the 1981 riots and is bound up with the government’s response.
•
The campaign to secure parliamentary places, and for the ‘black sections’ in the Labour party has been one f the very few voices holding onto the idea of Afro-Asian unity.
P38
o
Though the basis for this alliance remains vague (Proffitt, undated)
•
The processes of ‘race’ and class formation are not identical even if they are entangled.
•
The emptiness of racial signifiers and the feeling that ‘race’ is meaningless contains a warning that its political volatility may increase as the ideologies that compromise it become less stable.
•
Racism has evolved from vulgar to cultural forms (Fanon, 1967)
•
Today’s British racism is anchored in national decline and not imperial expansion overseas. o
Thus, it is not necessarily apparent via superiority and inferiority, it is more subtle and elusive than that.
•
Recognizing this helps us to understand how radical, conservative, socialist and openly racist theories of ‘race’ have been able to converge.
•
This coming together is a characteristic feature of ‘race’ politics in Britain.
Images sourced https://ccrs.ku.dk/calendar/2019/welcome-to-zhang-xihua-and-paulgilroy/ https://ninedotsprize.org/board_members/professor-paul-gilroy/
“Hostility towards complexity, education, patience and the life of the mind are fundamental but often overlooked parts of the appeal of hyperindividualistic neo-liberal thinking. They also helped to weaken anti-racism and to consolidate a view of it as a disreputable and immature commitment.� -Paul Gilroy
Elicia Agar 2020