Since the onset of the recession and the demise of the NCCRI, not to mention the budget cuts affecting the Equality Authority (EA) and the Irish Commission on Human Rights, no one has been speaking much about racism. Most Irish people feel they have other priorities as they try to make ends meet, get a bank loan, or secure their pensions.
But racism has not disappeared. Migrants, Travellers and members of other ethnic minorities are reporting a marked increase in racist incidents, though apart from CSO statistics on ‘racially motivated crimes’ (which don’t differentiate the experiences of the many racialised groups) there is little hard evidence.
It was therefore encouraging that the EA and the European Network Against Racism organised a discussion forum on tackling racism and the impact of racist stereotypes. But yet again, none of the speakers was a member of a migrant or minority group.
The keynote speaker was Anastasia Crickley, a long-time anti-racist campaigner for Traveller and minority rights, and chair of the EU Fundamental Rights Agency. She listed four reasons for addressing racism – charity, cohesion, economics and ethics – but she did not speak about the politics of anti-racism, or about the role of the State in perpetrating racism.
In the EA’s background document Living Together: European Citizenship Against Racism and Xenophobia, the best practices listed for Ireland mostly focused on cultural diversity, not anti-racism. Twelve years after the European Year Against Racism, the issue is still spoken about in terms of cultural diversity.
The famous anti-colonial fighter Frantz Fanon emphasised the lived experience of the black man. Yet the contemporary academic preoccupation with ‘culture’ and ‘identity’ as the sole positions of the struggle of racialised people leads to the conflation of ‘identity politics’ with anti-racism, and to the depoliticisation of the anti-racist struggle.
However, one of the most important questions asked in relation to anti-racism is: ‘Who speaks for whom, who says what and from where?’ Anti-racism can be either generalised – intending to raise awareness among the population and reach a post-racial ‘racelessness’ – or it can be self-representational, where the lived experience of the racialised informs the struggle.
Generalist anti-racism is anchored in universal values such as democracy, human rights, equality and tolerance. It reduces the importance of state racism and emphasises individual (or institutional) prejudice. In contrast, self-organising anti-racism stresses the role of the state, which focuses on notions of the race idea rooted in the political structure. The lived experience of the protagonists informs the struggle and names the state as the main culprit rather than stressing individual prejudice, a way of depoliticising racism and anti-racism.
Not privileging the experiences of the racialised means nothing much has changed. Anti-racism in Ireland continues to be solidaristic, performed by well-meaning white, settled, Christian Irish people, whose ‘best practices’ documents continue in the tradition of soft interculturalism and cultural diversity, while racism goes on.
Dr Ronit Lentin is head of the MPhil in Ethnic and Racial Studies at the Department of Sociology at Trinity College Dublin. Her column appears fortnightly in Metro Éireann
