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America's 'untouchables': the silent power of the caste system

We cannot fully understand the current upheavals, or almost any turning point in American history, without accounting for the human pyramid that is encrypted into us all: the caste system. By Isabel Wilkerson in The Guardian 


In the winter of 1959, after leading the Montgomery bus boycott that arose from the arrest of Rosa Parks and before the trials and triumphs to come, Martin Luther King Jr and his wife, Coretta, landed in India, in the city then known as Bombay, to visit the land of Mahatma Gandhi, the father of nonviolent protest. They were covered in garlands upon arrival, and King told reporters: “To other countries, I may go as a tourist, but to India I come as a pilgrim.”

He had long dreamed of going to India, and they stayed an entire month. King wanted to see for himself the place whose fight for freedom from British rule had inspired his fight for justice in America. He wanted to see the so-called “untouchables”, the lowest caste in the ancient Indian caste system, whom he had read about and had sympathy for, but who had still been left behind after India gained its independence the decade before.

He discovered that people in India had been following the trials of his own oppressed people in the US, and knew of the bus boycott he had led. Wherever he went, the people on the streets of Bombay and Delhi crowded around him for an autograph. At one point in their trip, King and his wife journeyed to the southern tip of the country, to the city of Trivandrum in the state of Kerala, and visited with high-school students whose families had been untouchables. The principal made the introduction.

“Young people,” he said, “I would like to present to you a fellow untouchable from the United States of America.”

King was floored. He had not expected that term to be applied to him. He was, in fact, put off by it at first. He had flown in from another continent, and had dined with the prime minister. He did not see the connection, did not see what the Indian caste system had to do directly with him, did not immediately see why the lowest-caste people in India would view him, an American Negro and a distinguished visitor, as low-caste like themselves, see him as one of them. “For a moment,” he wrote, “I was a bit shocked and peeved that I would be referred to as an untouchable.”

Then he began to think about the reality of the lives of the people he was fighting for – 20 million people, consigned to the lowest rank in the US for centuries, “still smothering in an airtight cage of poverty,” quarantined in isolated ghettoes, exiled in their own country.

And he said to himself: “Yes, I am an untouchable, and every negro in the United States of America is an untouchable.” In that moment, he realised that the land of the free had imposed a caste system not unlike the caste system of India, and that he had lived under that system all of his life. It was what lay beneath the forces he was fighting in the US.

Martin Luther King Jr visiting India in 1959. Photograph: Rangaswamy Satakopan/AP

What Martin Luther King Jr, recognised about his country that day had begun long before the ancestors of our ancestors had taken their first breaths. More than a century and a half before the American Revolution, a human hierarchy had evolved on the contested soil of what would become the United States – a concept of birthright, the temptation of entitled expansion that would set in motion what has been called the world’s oldest democracy and, with it, a ranking of human value and usage.

It would twist the minds of men, as greed and self-reverence eclipsed human conscience and allowed the conquering men to take land and human bodies that they convinced themselves they had a right to. If they were to convert this wilderness and civilise it to their liking, they decided, they would need to conquer, enslave or remove the people already on it, and transport those they deemed lesser beings in order to tame and work the land to extract the wealth that lay in the rich soil and shorelines.

To justify their plans, they took pre-existing notions of their own centrality, reinforced by their self-interested interpretation of the Bible, and created a hierarchy of who could do what, who could own what, who was on top and who was on the bottom and who was in between. There emerged a ladder of humanity, global in nature, as the upper-rung people would descend from Europe, with rungs inside that designation – the English Protestants at the very top, as their guns and resources would ultimately prevail in the bloody fight for North America. Everyone else would rank in descending order, on the basis of their proximity to those deemed most superior. The ranking would continue downward until one arrived at the very bottom: African captives transported in order to build the New World and to serve the victors for all their days, one generation after the next, for 12 generations.

There developed a caste system, based upon what people looked like – an internalised ranking, unspoken, unnamed and unacknowledged by everyday citizens even as they go about their lives adhering to it and acting upon it subconsciously, to this day. Just as the studs and joists and beams that form the infrastructure of a building are not visible to those who live in it, so it is with caste. Its very invisibility is what gives it power and longevity. And though it may move in and out of consciousness, though it may flare and reassert itself in times of upheaval and recede in times of relative calm, it is an ever-present through-line in the country’s operation.

A caste system is an artificial construction, a fixed and embedded ranking of human value that sets the presumed supremacy of one group against the presumed inferiority of others, on the basis of ancestry and often of immutable traits – traits that would be neutral in the abstract, but are ascribed life-and-death meaning in a hierarchy favouring the dominant caste whose forebears designed it. A caste system uses rigid, often arbitrary boundaries to keep the ranked groupings apart, distinct from one another and in their assigned places.

Throughout human history, three caste systems have stood out. The tragically accelerated, chilling and officially vanquished caste system of Nazi Germany. The lingering, millennia-long caste system of India. And the shape-shifting, unspoken, race-based caste pyramid in the US. Each version relied on stigmatising those deemed inferior in order to justify the dehumanisation necessary to keep the lowest-ranked people at the bottom, and to rationalise the protocols of enforcement. A caste system endures because it is often justified as divine will, originating from a sacred text or the presumed laws of nature, reinforced throughout the culture and passed down through the generations.

As we go about our daily lives, caste is the wordless usher in a darkened theatre, the flashlight cast down the aisles, guiding us to our assigned seats for a performance. The hierarchy of caste is not about feelings or morality. It is about power: which groups have it and which do not. It is about resources: which caste is seen as worthy of them, and which are not; who gets to acquire and control them, and who does not. It is about respect, authority and assumptions of competence: who is accorded these, and who is not.

As a means of assigning value to entire swaths of humankind, caste guides each of us, often beyond the reaches of our awareness. It embeds into our bones an unconscious ranking of human characteristics, and sets forth the rules, expectations and stereotypes that have been used to justify brutalities against entire groups within our species. In the American caste system, the signal of rank is what we call race, the division of humans on the basis of their appearance. In the US, race is the primary tool and the visible decoy – the frontman – for caste.

Racial segregation at a bus station in North Carolina in 1940. Photograph: PhotoQuest/Getty Images

Race does the heavy lifting for a caste system that demands a means of human division. If we have been trained to see humans in the language of race, then caste is the underlying grammar that we encode as children, as when learning our mother tongue. Caste, like grammar, becomes an invisible guide not only to how we speak, but to how we process information – the autonomic calculations that figure into a sentence without our having to think about it. Many of us have never taken a class in grammar, yet we know in our bones that a transitive verb takes an object, that a subject needs a predicate, and we know without thinking the difference between third-person singular and third-person plural. We might mention “race”, referring to people as black or white or Latino or Asian or indigenous, when what lies beneath each label is centuries of history, and the assigning of assumptions and values to physical features in a structure of human hierarchy.

What people look like – or rather, the race they have been assigned, or are perceived to belong to – is the visible cue to their caste. It is the historic flashcard to the public, showing how people are to be treated, where they are expected to live, what kinds of positions they are expected to hold, whether they belong in this section of town or that seat in a boardroom, whether they should be expected to speak with authority on this or that subject, whether they will be administered pain relief in a hospital, whether their neighbourhood is likely to adjoin a toxic waste site or to have contaminated water flowing from their taps, whether they are more or less likely to survive childbirth in the most advanced nation in the world, whether they may be shot by authorities with impunity.

Caste and race are neither synonymous nor mutually exclusive. They can and do coexist in the same culture, and serve to reinforce each other. Caste is the bones, race the skin. Race is what we can see, the physical traits that have been given arbitrary meaning and become shorthand for who a person is. Caste is the powerful infrastructure that holds each group in its place.

Caste is fixed and rigid. Race is fluid and superficial, subject to periodic redefinition to meet the needs of the dominant caste in what is now the US. While the requirements to qualify as white have changed over the centuries, the fact of a dominant caste has remained constant from its inception – whoever fit the definition of white, at whatever point in history, was granted the legal rights and privileges of the dominant caste. Perhaps more critically and tragically, at the other end of the ladder, the subordinated caste, too, has been fixed from the beginning as the psychological floor beneath which all other castes cannot fall.

Caste is not a term often applied to the US. It is considered the language of India or feudal Europe. But some anthropologists and scholars of race in the US have made use of the term for decades. Before the modern era, one of the earliest Americans to take up the idea of caste was the antebellum abolitionist and US senator Charles Sumner, as he fought against segregation in the north. “The separation of children in the Public Schools of Boston, on account of color or race,” he wrote, “is in the nature of Caste, and on this account is a violation of Equality.” He quoted a fellow humanitarian: “Caste makes distinctions among creatures where God has made none.”

We cannot fully understand the current upheavals, or almost any turning point in American history, without accounting for the human pyramid that is encrypted into us all. The caste system, and the attempts to defend, uphold or abolish the hierarchy, underlay the American civil war and the civil rights movement a century later, and pervade the politics of the 21st-century US. Just as DNA is the code of instructions for cell development, caste has been the operating system for economic, political and social interaction in the US since the time of its gestation.

In 1944, the Swedish social economist Gunnar Myrdal and a team of the most talented researchers in the country produced a 2,800-page, two-volume work that is still considered perhaps the most comprehensive study of race in the US. It was titled An American Dilemma. Myrdal’s investigation into race led him to the realisation that the most accurate term to describe the workings of US society was not race, but caste – and that perhaps it was the only term that really addressed what seemed a stubbornly fixed ranking of human value.

The anthropologist Ashley Montagu was among the first to argue that race is a human invention – a social construct, not a biological one – and that in seeking to understand the divisions and disparities in the US, we have typically fallen into the quicksand and mythology of race. “When we speak of ‘the race problem in America’,” he wrote in 1942, “what we really mean is the caste system and the problems which that caste system creates in America.”

There was little confusion among some of the leading white supremacists of the previous century as to the connections between India’s caste system and that of the American south, where the purest legal caste system in the US existed. “A record of the desperate efforts of the conquering upper classes in India to preserve the purity of their blood persists to until this very day in their carefully regulated system of castes,” wrote Madison Grant, a popular eugenicist, in his 1916 bestseller, The Passing of the Great Race. “In our Southern States, Jim Crow cars and social discriminations have exactly the same purpose.”

In 1913, Bhimrao Ambedkar, a man born to the bottom of India’s caste system, born an untouchable in the central provinces, arrived in New York City from Bombay. He came to the US to study economics as a graduate student at Columbia, focused on the differences between race, caste and class. Living just blocks from Harlem, he would see first-hand the condition of his counterparts in the US. He completed his thesis just as the film The Birth of a Nation – the incendiary homage to the Confederate south – premiered in New York in 1915. He would study further in London and return to India to become the foremost leader of the untouchables, and a pre-eminent intellectual who would help draft a new Indian constitution. He would work to dispense with the demeaning term “untouchable”. He rejected the term Harijans, which had been applied to them by Gandhi, to their minds patronisingly. He renamed his people Dalits, meaning “broken people” – which, due to the caste system, they were.

A statue of Bhimrao Ambedkar under a flyover in Amritsar, India. Photograph: Narinder Nanu/AFP/Getty Images

It is hard to know what effect his exposure to the American social order had on him personally. But over the years, he paid close attention, as did many Dalits, to the subordinate caste in the US. Indians had long been aware of the plight of enslaved Africans, and of their descendants in the US. Back in the 1870s, after the end of slavery and during the brief window of black advancement known as Reconstruction, an Indian social reformer named Jyotirao Phule found inspiration in the US abolitionists. He expressed hope “that my countrymen may take their example as their guide”.

Many decades later, in the summer of 1946, acting on news that black Americans were petitioning the United Nations for protection as minorities, Ambedkar reached out to the best-known African American intellectual of the day, WEB Du Bois. He told Du Bois that he had been a “student of the Negro problem” from across the oceans, and recognised their common fates.

“There is so much similarity between the position of the Untouchables in India and of the position of the Negroes in America,” Ambedkar wrote to Du Bois, “that the study of the latter is not only natural but necessary.”

Du Bois wrote back to Ambedkar to say that he was, indeed, familiar with him, and that he had “every sympathy with the Untouchables of India”. It had been Du Bois who seemed to have spoken for the marginalised in both countries as he identified the double consciousness of their existence. And it was Du Bois who, decades before, had invoked an Indian concept in channelling the “bitter cry” of his people in the US: “Why did God make me an outcast and a stranger in mine own house?”

I began investigating the American caste system after nearly two decades of examining the history of the Jim Crow south, the legal caste system that grew out of enslavement and lasted into the early 70s, within the lifespans of many present-day Americans. I discovered that I was not writing about geography and relocation, but about the American caste system – an artificial hierarchy in which most everything that you could and could not do was based upon what you looked like, and which manifested itself north and south. I had been writing about a stigmatised people – 6 million of them – who were seeking freedom from the caste system in the south, only to discover that the hierarchy followed them wherever they went, much in the way that the shadow of caste (as I would soon discover) follows Indians in their own global diaspora.

The American caste system began in the years after the arrival of the first Africans to the Colony of Virginia in the summer of 1619, as the colony sought to refine the distinctions of who could be enslaved for life and who could not. Over time, colonial laws granted English and Irish indentured servants greater privileges than the Africans who worked alongside them, and the Europeans were fused into a new identity – that of being categorised as white, the polar opposite of black. The historian Kenneth M Stampp called this assigning of race a “caste system, which divided those whose appearance enabled them to claim pure Caucasian ancestry from those whose appearance indicated that some or all of their forebears were Negroes”. Members of the Caucasian caste, as he called it, “believed in ‘white supremacy’, and maintained a high degree of caste solidarity to secure it”.

While I was in the midst of my research, word of my inquiries spread to some Indian scholars of caste based in the US. They invited me to speak at an inaugural conference on caste and race at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, the town where WEB Du Bois was born and where his papers are kept.

There, I told the audience that I had written a 600-page book about the Jim Crow era in the American south – the time of naked white supremacy – but that the word “racism” did not appear anywhere in the narrative. I told them that, after spending 15 years studying the topic and hearing the testimony of the survivors of the era, I had realised that the term was insufficient. “Caste” was the more accurate term, and I set out to them the reasons why. They were both stunned and heartened. The plates of Indian food kindly set before me at the reception thereafter sat cold due to the press of questions and the sharing that went on into the night.

At a closing ceremony, the hosts presented to me a bronze-coloured bust of the patron saint of the low-born of India, Bhimrao Ambedkar, the Dalit leader who had written to Du Bois all those decades before.

It felt like an initiation into a caste to which I had somehow always belonged. Over and over, they shared stories of what they had endured, and I responded in personal recognition, as if even to anticipate some particular turn or outcome. To their astonishment, I began to be able to tell who was high-born and who was low-born among the Indian people there, not from what they looked like, as one might in the US, but on the basis of the universal human response to hierarchy – in the case of an upper-caste person, an inescapable certitude in bearing, demeanour, behaviour and a visible expectation of centrality.

On the way home, I was snapped back into my own world when airport security flagged my suitcase for inspection. The TSA worker happened to be an African American who looked to be in his early 20s. He strapped on latex gloves to begin his work. He dug through my suitcase and excavated a small box, unwrapped the folds of paper and held in his palm the bust of Ambedkar that I had been given.

“This is what came up in the X-ray,” he said. It was heavy like a paperweight. He turned it upside down and inspected it from all sides, his gaze lingering at the bottom of it. He seemed concerned that something might be inside.

“I’ll have to swipe it,” he warned me. He came back after some time and declared it OK, and I could continue with it on my journey. He looked at the bespectacled face, with its receding hairline and steadfast expression, and seemed to wonder why I would be carrying what looked like a totem from another culture.

“So who is this?” he asked.

“Oh,” I said, “this is the Martin Luther King of India.”

“Pretty cool,” he said, satisfied now, and seeming a little proud.

He then wrapped Ambedkar back up as if he were King himself, and set him back gently into the suitcase.

We can't talk about racism without understanding whiteness

To dismantle racial hierarchy, we need to start by discussing the power it grants those on top writes Priyamvada Gopal in The Guardian
 

 

Manchester City and Burnley players - and the referee, Andre Marriner - take a knee before their match at the Etihad Stadium last month. Photograph: Michael Regan/NMC/EPA


When it comes to race and racism, we focus on those at the sharp end of discrimination – from black people routinely subjected to police brutality to people of colour missing from positions of influence. Progressive ideals invoke “inclusion” for ethnic minorities, or special bias training. These measures may be necessary, but they put the focus squarely on those subjected to victimisation – rather than the system that perpetuates racism.

What results is a form of benevolence whereby some people of colour get “included” as part of diversity measures, even as social hierarchies and habits of thought in white-majority societies remain largely unchanged.


There is no point in declaring that race doesn’t make a difference or that equality exists when it clearly doesn’t


The truth is that there is nothing pleasant about confronting the reality of an acute racial hierarchy. If the racial order is really to change – and there are those who don’t want it to – it is not just black lives or racial minorities that should be the topic of discussion, but the racial ideology that currently calls the shots in western societies.

This is what brings us to “whiteness” – which is not a biological category so much as a set of ideas and practices about race that has emerged from a bedrock of white supremacy, itself the legacy of empire and slavery. Confronting the idea of whiteness involves far more uncomfortable discussions than “inclusion”, especially for people deemed white, since it involves self-examination and acknowledging ugly truths, both historical and contemporary. It is simply easier to try to shut it out or down. 

I found this out to my cost last week when I tweeted a response to the racially inflammatory “White Lives Matter” banner flown over the Etihad Stadium after Manchester City and Burnley footballers had “taken the knee” to honour George Floyd. My tweet, deliberately playing with the wording of the banner by qualifying it, made the point that white lives cannot be deemed to matter because they are white, that it should not be whiteness that gives those lives value. In addition to the tsunami of racist sewage that immediately came my way, littered with N-words and P-words along with sexist slurs, rape fantasies, death threats and open declarations that “white lives matter more”, I was repeatedly asked why, if white lives did not matter as white lives, do black lives matter? Was that also not also racist?

No, it is not also racist. White lives already matter more than others so to keep proclaiming they matter is to add excess value to them, tilting us dangerously into white supremacy. This doesn’t mean that all white people in western societies are materially well-off or don’t experience hardship, but that they don’t do so by virtue of the fact that they are white. Black lives remain undervalued and in order for us to get to the desirable point where all lives (really do) matter, they must first achieve parity by mattering. It’s not really that hard to understand unless you choose not to.

Studies of “whiteness” are not new. Respected scholars, such as the late Noel Ignatiev, author of How the Irish Became White, and David Roediger, have studied the history and sociology of whiteness in great detail. Ignatiev, who was Jewish, wrote about the “abolition of whiteness”, not as a call to eliminate white people but a system of racial entitlement that necessarily relied on the exclusion of those deemed to be lesser. For Ignatiev, whiteness was not a biological fact so much as a kind of ideological club where “the members go through life accepting the benefits of membership, without thinking about the cost” to others.
Over time, people have been added to the club and aspire to membership of it, from the Irish and European Jews to many Asians today. One distinctive feature of whiteness as ideology is that it can make itself invisible and thereby make its operations more lethal and harder to challenge. Science and the humanities are largely in accord that “race” is not a biological category, but a way of creating power differentials, which have practical consequences. If that power differential in western societies is to be removed, then the ideology at the top – whiteness – must be abolished. Only then can the abolition of all other racial categories – and the post-racial world we so often claim to espouse – actually follow.

Although in Britain I am racialised as “non-white” or Asian, in my birth country of India I have some experience of what it is like to be a member of a powerful but invisible ruling category. As a Brahmin (the “highest-ranking” tier of the deeply hierarchical Hindu caste system), I belong to a social grouping that operates much like whiteness does. It rules the roost, is not disadvantaged by virtue of caste (though there are those who might suffer from poverty or misogyny), and it treats any challenge to its power as a form of victimisation or “reverse oppression”. For the record, there is no such thing: oppression only operates downwards. This is why, at the same time as I reinforced Ignatiev’s call for the abolition of “whiteness”, I repeated that Brahmin supremacy in India must also be abolished.

One of my less discourteous correspondents last week asked me, using only one expletive, why people “need a manual for race relations” when we could just respect each other. Unfortunately, until we get to a point where all lives really do matter, there is no point in declaring that race doesn’t make a difference or that equality exists, when it clearly doesn’t. “White lives matter” implicitly suggests whites matter more than others. “Black lives matter” is saying those lives need to matter more than they have, that society needs to give them more weight. Until we square up to the ugly realities of how whiteness operates – lethally, invisibly, powerfully – we are doomed to fighting a toxic and pointless culture war, where the only winners are those who want hatred to prevail.

Waking up to the realities of racism in the UK

Gary Younge in The FT 

Every now and then much of Britain discovers racism in much the same way that teenagers discover sex. The general awareness that it is out there collides with the urgent desire to find out where. People talk about it endlessly and carelessly, unsure of what to say or think or whether they are doing it right. They have lots of questions but, even if they did know whom to ask, they would be too crippled by embarrassment to reveal their ignorance. Everyone has an opinion but only a few have any experience. The interest never goes away, though its intensity wanes as they explore other things. 

The trouble is not everyone gets to move on. Black people, and other minorities, do not have the luxury of a passing interest in racism. It is their lived reality. A YouGov poll of black, Asian and minority ethnic Britons surveyed over the past two weeks reveals the extent to which prejudice and discrimination is embedded in society. 

It found that two-thirds of black Britons have had a racial slur directly used against them or had people make assumptions about their behaviour based on their race. Three-quarters have been asked where they’re “really from”. (When I once told a man I was born in Hitchin, he asked, “Well where were you from before then?”). 

More than half say their career development has been affected because of their race, or that they have had people make assumptions about their skills based on their race; 70 per cent believe the Metropolitan police is institutionally racist; and the proportion of black people who have been racially abused in the workplace (half) is almost the same proportion as those who have been abused in the street. 

Little wonder then that two-thirds of black people polled think there is still a “great deal” of racism nowadays. This is not a substantial difference from the three-quarters who say they think there was a great deal around 30 years ago.  

As the public gaze shifts from the Black Lives Matter protests, these experiences will endure. They may be tempered by greater sensitivity; but heightened consciousness alone will not fix what ails us. The roots are too deep, the institutions too inflexible, the opportunism too prevalent and the cynicism too ingrained to trust the changes we need to goodwill and greater understanding alone. 

I applaud the proliferation of reading lists around issues of race and the spike in sales for the work of black authors — people could and should be better informed. But we did not read our way into this and we won’t read our way out. The racism we are dealing with isn’t a question of a few bad apples but a contaminated barrel. It’s a systemic problem and will require a systemic solution. 

This is a crucial moment. The nature of the protests thus far has been primarily symbolic — targeting statues and embassies, taking a knee and raising a fist. That ought not to be dismissed. Symbols should not be disregarded as insubstantial. They denote social value and signify intent. But they should not be mistaken for substance either, lest this moment descend into a noxious cocktail of posturing and piety.  

Concrete demands do exist. All Black Lives UK, for example, has called for the scrapping of section 60, which gives the police the right to stop and search, and the abolition of the Met police’s gangs’ matrix, an intelligence tool that targets suspected gang members. It also wants measures to address health disparities, particularly relating to black women and mental health, and the implementation of reviews that already exist, including the Lammy Review (on racial disparities in the criminal justice system), the Timpson Review (on school exclusions), and the McGregor-Smith review (race in the workplace). 

But the only demand that has cut through has been the push for the education system to more accurately reflect our colonial past and diversity. The poll finds this has the support of 81 per cent of black people — the same percentage that approved of removing a statue of the slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol. (Far from wishing to “photo shop” our cultural landscape, as the prime minister claims, they want their kids to learn more about it. They just don’t want the villains put on a pedestal.) 

This is great, as far as it goes but, given the size of the constituency that has been galvanised in the past few weeks and the awareness that’s been raised, it doesn’t go nearly far enough.  

 The solemn declarations of intent and solidarity that flooded from corporations and governments will leave us drowned in a sea of racial-sensitivity training unless they are followed up by the kind of thoroughgoing change and investment that seeks to genuinely tackle inequalities in everything from housing and education to recruitment, retention and promotion. That costs money and takes guts; it means challenging power and redistributing resources; it requires reckoning with the past and taking on vested interests. 

“When people call for diversity and link it to justice and equality, that's fine,” the black radical Angela Davis once told me. “But there’s a model of diversity as the difference that makes no difference, the change that brings about no change.” 

The governing body of Oxford university’s Oriel College did not resolve to take down its statue of Cecil Rhodes because they suddenly realised that he was a colonial bigot. They did so because it had become more of a liability to keep it up than to take it down. Similarly, it was not new information about police killings that prompted the National Football League in America to change its position on taking a knee. They did that because the pressure was too great to resist. We have to keep that pressure up, albeit in different ways. 

 “If there is no struggle there is no progress,” argued the American abolitionist, Frederick Douglass. “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”  

‘Something is in the air’: Ben Okri on the fight against racism

Ben Okri in The FT

‘Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about the things that matter’ — Martin Luther King Jr 

My first conscious experience of race was when I was six years old. My father had come to collect me from school. As we made our way across the snow-covered fields in Peckham, south London, in the winter of 1965-66, I felt something crack my head. Then I heard the voices of boys shouting the N-word, making animal noises and throwing packed snowballs with stones in them. 

We fought back as best as we could, father and son, but in the end had to run. When we got home we were bloodied. 

“Why were they throwing stones at us?” I asked. 

Dad struggled for words. 

“It’s because we are black,” he said. 

 At the time, what he said made no sense to me. With time, other things said didn’t make sense either. “You will never amount to anything.” “There’s no future for you.” 

I think the 12 weeks of lockdown have purified our sense of justice. They have given us time to think. I was on a short walk the other day and found myself wondering how it must be for a child to feel that the world thinks evilly of them for reasons that don’t make sense. Imagine the additional effects of being insulted, picked on, ganged up against, constantly harassed by the police, wrongly accused, mocked on TV, excluded — in short, the whole catalogue of injustices that people of colour withstand daily?

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If anyone wants an explanation for the scale of protests following the killing of George Floyd, they need look no further than the buried accumulation of racial prejudices endured for years, for lifetimes, by black people. 

A people endure and endure and then one day an event becomes a living symbol of what is being done to them, a symbol that they are perceived as less than human. How long are people meant to suffer before they cry out? 

Racism is the perception that one race is superior to another, that the colour of their skin determines their place in the human hierarchy. Pernicious and pervasive, it is supported by a matrix of power and history. For racism to be real, there has to be power. It has to be a hard and incontestable power. It is this that gives racism its vicious quality. For every George Floyd and Sandra Bland in America, there is a Stephen Lawrence, a Julian Cole, a Nuno Cardoso in Britain. 

The real question is whether racism is inherently human. Every people, in the depth of their hearts, think themselves superior to others. They think themselves the centre of the world until another people overpower them. If a people have power over other people long enough, they think themselves intrinsically superior. Soon their mythology will reflect this. Racism is merely the mythology of power seeded into the culture of a people. But racism can also be a compensatory mythology. 

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Racism does not reflect reality. It only reflects the current reality of power relations. If the western economy were to collapse today and all the financial and military power move eastward, the mythology of race would move eastward too. Mythology is often the storytelling of those who have gained power. Strip people of their power and the justification of their racism vanishes. Watch a people acquire power, and the justification of their racism emerges. 

Racism is destructive. Racism is really war declared. It is war threatened at every moment. If you remove all the social niceties, this is what racism says: “Your life means nothing to me; my life is more important than yours.” A logical conclusion of racism is genocide. 

It is amazing to me that people don’t see that it is a few short steps from polite, concealed, social racism to Derek Chauvin of the Minneapolis Police Department applying a knee to the throat of George Floyd, also of Minneapolis, for eight and a half minutes. 

But a mentality that secretly thinks one race not quite of the same level of humanity, with a bit of power, and a sense of immunity, soon finds that very mentality justifying such state-sanctioned killing. If you doubt this, have a read through the nastier chapters of apartheid or colonial history and see the things that well-educated people who thought of themselves as perfectly civilised sanctioned in the name of race. 

The aspect that causes the greatest difficulty is how a person can reconcile their sense of personal decency with the possibility of harbouring, perhaps unknown to themselves, racist tendencies. I know many good decent people who do things to their friends of colour which, if said or done to them, would fill them with outrage. Let’s call these racism blind spots. 

The forms that racism takes are legion. They can be as seemingly innocuous as being given the tables near the toilet in a restaurant, or the most isolated places at dinner settings, or the silent insinuation of having someone clutch their handbag tighter when they see you. It could be as vicious as being set upon by the police, or having someone call the cops on you when you go birdwatching in a park. It could be as indeterminate as being the first person suspected if a mobile phone goes missing in a friend’s house that you are visiting, or taking an hour to get a taxi in the 1990s, while seeing them stop a short distance away for someone of a “less threatening” hue. It could be the terrible case of John Bunn, who was wrongly convicted of murder and spent 17 years in prison. 

Racism is one of the greatest wastes of human resources. It would be useful to have a cost analysis of what is lost to nations from the effects of systemic racism, the loss of manpower that could be put to work in the great enterprise of civilisation. 

All people who endure racial prejudice just want the normal rights of human beings. They want to get jobs, have nice working experiences, enjoy friendships, fall in love, raise their kids, and make their orderly procession through life just like everyone else. 

I think it is essential that every child be educated about race. An understanding of justice ought to be a basic part of their education. Our children carry forth the assumptions we make about the world. If we leave the moral education of our children to the schools, then they simply absorb the dominant views. A sense of justice can only really come from the home. The trouble is that so many parents have no idea of the injustices into which they are raising their children. People are not born hating, Nelson Mandela once said, they must learn. The parents needed to be educated first but weren’t. 

Children can be better educated on race, most importantly by being taught history more fully. They must be taught about the slave trade and that it was an evil. They should be taught about the empire and colonialism, but they must also learn about the legitimate voices against its cruelties and how people fought for their independence. They should be taught about the civil rights movement and apartheid. Every child should know that people are equal before God and their fellow human beings. It can only make them stronger and more in tune with the future, because they stand in truth with justice and their times. Every child should be raised with the fundamental assumption that all races, all colours, are valid and equal. This single thing alone would make the world a truly extraordinary place, rich with the possibilities of our commingled genius. 

The effect of racism on education is devastating. Not long ago, I visited a prison for a BBC programme. All of the black prisoners I spoke to fell out of the educational system because of how it made them feel. 

The issue of race is more than a moral problem. It is an existential one. The reason the issue of race keeps coming back is because people cannot face the truth about what they have done to one another. They cannot face the truth about the secret thinking that is behind the strangeness of their racial actions, or about the real reason why the ideology of race came into existence in the first place. 

The modern idea of race began with Europeans coming to Africa in search of gold. When the trade degenerated from gold to human beings, it was the ideology of racial hierarchy that was used to justify that monstrosity. 

The idea of race is not just black and white. A species of racism is there in the Bible, and in most sacred texts. It is there among the ancient Egyptians. It is there in the ancient Greeks towards the Persians, and with the Persians towards the Greeks. A casual reading of Caesar’s “Commentaries” shows that the Romans believed the British tribes to be a race of barbarians. 

Maybe all mythologies of origin are by implication racist. Tribalism is the microcosm of racism. It may well be that humans are inclined by nature to their own kind but over the course of years people learnt by trade, by the fact that no one can have all the blessings or resources, that it is better to have dealings with other peoples. They discovered in the process that the other is not so very different from them, or that their difference is not apocalyptic. Without this overcoming of prejudice to some degree, civilisation could never have happened. 

It seems that the idea of tribal or racial superiority belongs very much to the primitive stage of human development. Because, ultimately, thinking yourself superior to others is bad for business and fatal for progress. It causes possibilities to diminish around you. Those who respect others do better trade with others, and win their friendship and support. All the high-minded ideas of Rome’s superior destiny could not keep it from being torn apart by the concerted effort of the Goths. 

We have really misapplied the idea of civilisation. We think civilisation is Plato, the Acropolis and the classics. To my mind, civilisation is the unleashing of the noble impulses of the human spirit for the greater good of the human race and the beautification of the earth. The real civilisation begins when people realise that being human is one of the greatest miracles of the universe. 

Racial thinking is a toxic pathology, and at the heart of it there is a kind of madness. It is the madness of a denial of a reality which the inward mind knows to be true. The house of racial thinking is a divided, unstable house. It is unsustainable. And like the Berlin Wall, it will fall. Keep in mind the image of Chauvin with his knee on George Floyd’s neck. This is a police officer who should be protecting the citizens but who is in effect being an executioner. “It is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners,” wrote Camus. 

This is a clamorous age of freedom. The young, the old, women, LGBT people, the differently abled, all demand their full human rights. 

Something is in the air. In the past, the big clashes were around visible, measurable events: the Berlin Wall, apartheid. There is some of that going on now, the tearing down of the statues of the Bristol slave trader, the removal of the statues of King Leopold II in Belgium. Maybe these protests are about an idea that is long overdue, an idea that will tear through our societies and reinstate the place of true justice in all aspects of our lives. 

Maybe the human race is growing up at last, refusing the horrible shackles of racism, rejecting all of its injustices. Maybe the time of that primitive idea of racial superiority is finally over. Black people and white people are joining forces in their monumental protests to rip this evil from our societies, our institutions, our hearts. 

In which case, the real birth of modern moral civilisation began on May 25 2020, when, for eight minutes and 46 seconds, George Floyd said 16 times over that he could not breathe.

Britain is not America. But we too are disfigured by deep and pervasive racism

Yes, it would be foolish to see only parallels in the US and UK experience. But to downplay our own problems would be shameful writes David Olusoga in The Guardian


 

Demonstrator at a Black Lives Matter protest on 6 June 2020 in Cardiff. Photograph: Matthew Horwood/Getty Images


One of the more pertinent statements made during this past extraordinary week appeared in one of the last places I would have thought to look – in the pages of Vogue, not a publication I instinctively turn to at a moment of profound political tension.

“Racism is a global issue. Racism is a British issue. It is not one that is merely confined to the United States – it is everywhere, and it is systemic,” wrote Edward Enninful, the editor-in-chief of the magazine’s British edition. The ubiquity of racism has been brought to stark and sudden attention by the killing of George Floyd and by the unprecedented wave of protests, demonstrations and rioting that followed.

Filmed by many witnesses and now viewed millions of times, the killing of Floyd by a Minnesota policeman, a 21st-century lynching, is so sickening a crime that the revulsion it has induced has become a global phenomenon.

The demonstrators and activists who have taken to the streets have, however, been motivated by more than revulsion. They have also been stirred to action by acknowledging a fundamental truth – that the killing of Floyd has to be understood as a symptom of systemic racism. By building their campaign around that reality they have promoted radical and challenging conversations – in countries on both sides of the Atlantic – about the nature of racism and the actions that people of all races can take in eliminating it. These are conversations that we have needed for a very long time.

Led by young people, many of them inspired by Black Lives Matter, and involving people of all ethnicities, the protests have morphed into a worldwide anti-racist movement. No longer is this moment solely about police violence nor is it limited to America. Both online and on the streets it is calling out racism, wherever it exists and in whatever forms it is found. In both the US and in Europe, people are asking, tentatively, if this might be a defining moment of change.

FacebookTwitterPinterest The British actor John Boyega speaks to the crowd during a Black Lives Matter protest in Hyde Park on 3 June 2020 in London, England. Photograph: Justin Setterfield/Getty Images

Yet in the immediate aftermath of Floyd’s death there was little reason to imagine anything would be any different this time around. For African Americans, one of the most appalling aspects of Floyd’s murder was that they had seen it all before. The same story with the same outcome, all that changed was the name of the victim – Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, Sandra Bland, Tamir Rice, Philando Castile, Walter Scott.

For many black Britons, Floyd’s death stirred memories of another list of names, those of the members of their community killed or rendered disabled in similar circumstances at the hands of the British police or immigration officers. On Tuesday, the Black Cultural Archives in Brixton, south London – the closest thing we have in this country to a museum to the black British experience – tweeted the names and the photographs of some of them – Mark Duggan, Sheku Bayoh, Sean Rigg, Sarah Reed, Cherry Groce, Leon Briggs, Christopher Alder, Brian Douglas.

Yet almost instantly a predictable chorus of voices, emanating from predictable corners of British public life, rose up to dismiss the whole thing as an irrelevance. Using a familiar playbook, they accused those black Britons who see reflections of their own situation in the experiences of African Americans of making false comparisons.

The US situation is unique in both its depth and ferocity, they say, so that no parallels can be drawn with the situation in Britain. The smoke-and-mirrors aspect of this argument is that it attempts to focus attention solely on police violence, rather than the racism that inspired it. Those who make it usually point to the ubiquity of firearms in US law enforcement, as proof that the US reality is beyond meaningful comparison. But firearms had nothing to do with the killing of George Floyd. Neither were they a factor in the death of Freddie Gray or the sidewalk killing of Eric Garner, who, like Floyd, pleaded for his life, saying 11 times to the officers who pinned him down: “I can’t breathe”, the same words Floyd used in his final moments. Nor were guns involved in many of the cases when black people have died in custody or during arrest in Britain.


Excusing or downplaying British racism with comparisons to the US is a bad habit with a long history

When black Britons draw parallels between their experiences and those of African Americans, they are not suggesting that those experiences are identical. Few people would deny that in many respects life is better for non-white people in the UK than in the US. The problem is that it is not as “better” as some like to believe. Black men are stopped and searched at nine times the rate of white men. Black people make up 3% of the population of England and Wales but account for 12% of the prison population and not since 1971 have British police officers been prosecuted for the killing of a black man, and even then they were charged with the lesser crime of manslaughter and that charge was later dropped.

To say that the racism that infects parts of our police force and criminal justice system is less virulent than that which poisons the lives of 40 million African Americans is not much of a boast. Is that really the extent of our ambition – to be a somewhat less racist nation than one led by a man who describes white nationalists and members of the Ku Klux Klan as “very fine people”? Surely we who dwell in what the actor Laurence Fox recently assured us is “the most tolerant, lovely country in Europe” have higher hopes?

Excusing or downplaying British racism with comparisons to the US is a bad habit with a long history. It began in 1807, with the abolition of the slave trade and picked up steam three decades later with the end of British slavery, twin events that marked the beginning of 200 years of moral posturing and historical amnesia. The Victorian readers who rightly wept over Uncle Tom’s Cabin, for example, conveniently forgot which nation had carried his ancestors into slavery and didn’t dwell on the fact that most of the cotton produced by American slaves like him was shipped to Liverpool.

For two centuries, we have deployed American racism as a distraction. It’s as if we find it easier to recognise American forms of racism than we do our own home-grown varieties. Convenient, as pointing fingers is always more comforting than looking in the mirror.

Genetics is not why more BAME people die of coronavirus: structural racism is

Yes, more people of black, Latin and south Asian origin are dying, but there is no genetic ‘susceptibility’ behind it writes Winston Morgan in The Guardian 

 

A TfL worker sprays antiviral solution inside a tube train. Photograph: Kirsty O’Connor/PA


From the start of the coronavirus pandemic, there has been an attempt to use science to explain the disproportionate impact of Covid-19 on different groups through the prism of race. Data from the UK and the US suggests that people categorised as black, Hispanic (Latino) and south Asian are more likely to die from the disease.

The way this issue is often discussed, but also the response of some scientists, would suggest that there might be some biological reason for the higher death rates based on genetic differences between these groups and their white counterparts. But the reality is there is no evidence that the genes used to divide people into races are linked to how our immune system responds to viral infections.

There are certain genetic mutations that can be found among specific ethnic groups that can play a role in the body’s immune response. But because of the loose definition of race (primarily based on genes for skin colour) and recent population movements, these should be seen as unreliable indicators when it comes to susceptibility to viral infections. 

Indeed, race is a social construct with no scientific basis. However, there are clear links between people’s racial groups, their socioeconomic status, what happens to them once they are infected, and the outcome of their infection. And focusing on the idea of a genetic link merely serves to distract from this.

You only have to look at how the statistics are gathered to understand how these issues are confused. Data from the UK’s Office for National Statistics that has been used to highlight the disparate death rates separates Indians from Pakistanis and Bangladeshis, and yet groups together all Africans (including black Caribbeans). This makes no sense in terms of race, ethnicity or genetics.

The data shows that those males categorised as black are more than 4.6 times more likely to die than their white counterparts from the virus. They are followed by Pakistanis/Bangladeshis (just over four times more likely to die), and then Chinese and Indians (just over 2.5 times).

Most genome-wide association studies group all south Asians. Yet, at least in the UK, Covid-19 can apparently separate Indians and Pakistanis, suggesting genetics have little to do with it. The categories used to collect government data for the pandemic are far more suited to social outcomes such as employment or education.

This problem arises even with a recent analysis that purportedly shows people from ethnic minorities are no more likely to die, once you take into account the effects of other illnesses and deprivation. The main analysis only compares whites to everybody else, masking the data for specific groups, while the headline of the newspaper article about the study refers only to black people.

Meanwhile, in the US the groups most disproportionately affected are African Americans and Hispanics/Latinos. All these groups come from very different population groups. We’ve also seen high death rates in Brazil, China and Italy, all of which have very different populations using the classical definition of race.

The idea that Covid-19 discriminates along traditional racial lines is created by these statistics and fails to adequately portray what’s really going on. These kinds of assumptions ignore the fact that there is as much genetic variation within racialised groups as there is between the whole human population.
There are some medical conditions with a higher prevalence in some racialised groups, such as sickle cell anaemia, and differences in how some groups respond to certain drugs. But these are traits linked to single genes and all transcend the traditional definitions of race. Such “monogenic” traits affect a very small subset of many populations, such as some southern Europeans and south Asians who also have a predisposition to sickle cell anaemia.

Death from Covid-19 is also linked to pre-existing conditions that appear in higher levels in black and south Asian groups, such as diabetes. The argument that this may provide a genetic underpinning is only partly supported by the limited evidence that links genetics to diabetes.

However, the ONS figures confirm that genes predisposing people to diabetes cannot be the same as those that predispose to Covid-19. Otherwise, Indians would be affected as much as Pakistanis and Bangladeshis, who belong to the same genome-wide association group.

Any genetic differences that may predispose you to diabetes are heavily influenced by environmental factors. There isn’t a “diabetes gene” linking the varying groups that are affected by Covid-19. But the prevalence of these so-called “lifestyle” diseases in racialised groups is strongly linked to social factors.

Another target that has come in for speculation is vitamin D deficiency. People with darker skin who do not get enough exposure to direct sunlight may produce less vitamin D, which is essential for many bodily functions, including the immune system. In terms of a link to susceptibility to Covid-19, this has not been proven. But very little work on this has been done and the pandemic should prompt more research on the medical consequences of vitamin D deficiency generally.

Other evidence suggests higher death rates from Covid-19 including among racialised groups might be linked to higher levels of a cell surface receptor molecule known as ACE2. But this can result from taking drugs for diabetes and hypertension, which takes us back to the point about the social causes of such diseases.

In the absence of any genetic link between racial groups and susceptibility to the virus, we are left with the reality, which seems more difficult to accept: that these groups are suffering more from how our societies are organised. There is no clear evidence that higher levels of conditions such as type-2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease and weakened immune systems in disadvantaged communities are because of inherent genetic predispositions.

But there is evidence they are the result of structural racism. All these underlying problems can be directly connected to the food and exercise you have access to, the level of education, employment, housing, healthcare, economic and political power within these communities.

The evidence suggests that this coronavirus does not discriminate, but highlights existing discriminations. The continued prevalence of ideas about race today – despite the lack of any scientific basis – shows how these ideas can mutate to provide justification for the power structures that have ordered our society since the 18th century.

Donald Trump and the spectre of a race-based US election

Edward Luce in The Financial Times 

The novelist William Faulkner said: “The past is not dead. It is not even past.” The past 72 hours of burning US cities triggered parallels with 1968 — a year of urban white flight that ended with the election of Richard Nixon. He won on a law-and-order platform that appealed implicitly to white anxiety. Donald Trump does not deal in implicit language. In response to protests in Minneapolis after the police suffocation last week of George Floyd, a 46-year-old black man, Mr Trump tweeted: “When the looting starts, the shooting starts”. The line was used by George Wallace, the segregationist third-party candidate in 1968. Republicans launched the “southern strategy” to win over resentful white Democrats after the civil rights revolution. Mr Trump’s 2016 campaign was the apotheosis of that approach. 

But history offers little clue as to whether a sitting president can profit from the same manipulation. The stark brutality of Floyd’s killing — and the fact that his eight-minute suffocation was captured on video — has curbed Mr Trump’s ability to portray the police as victims. He has veered between threats of deploying the military to quell the protests and appeals for calm. Mr Trump’s record suggests he will not be able to resist the temptation to incite. It worked for him once. America’s Black Lives Matter movement took off in Barack Obama’s second term just as Mr Trump was weighing up his presidential bid. “White lives matter” and “Blue lives matter” banners festooned his rallies. 

But can he pull off the same feat from the White House? That will depend on how America defines the protests. Wildly different narratives can be built from the harrowing range of video clips over the past few days. Some show white police officers brutally attacking peaceful black and white marchers. Others show cops marching in solidarity with them. Then there are the scenes of looting and burning. Mr Trump claims that most of the Minneapolis protesters are far-left radicals. Anti-Semitic memes claiming that financier George Soros is funding an army of Antifa (anti-fascist) militants have spread. Russian bots have helped disseminate the conspiracy theory. The Trump administration has picked up that thread. In a televised statement Bill Barr, the US attorney-general, said the protests were “planned, organised and driven by anarchic and far-left extremist groups using Antifa-like tactics”. Without evidence, Mr Trump said 80 per cent of the Minneapolis protesters were from out of state. On Sunday, he tweeted that he would designate Antifa as a “terrorist organisation”. 

America now faces the spectre of a long summer of unrest, with a president stoking the polarisation. It comes amid a pandemic that has disproportionately claimed minority lives in the most densely populated areas of urban America. Floyd’s dying words — “I can’t breathe” — serve as a metaphor for a society choking on its increasingly toxic politics. The alternative narrative advanced by Joe Biden, Mr Trump’s opponent, is that America is crying out to be healed. Mr Biden promises to “restore America’s soul”. If recent polls are any guide, Mr Biden’s message is hitting home. A Washington Post/ABC poll gave him a 53 per cent to 43 per cent lead over Mr Trump. 

 But that snapshot was taken mostly before the protests had spread to other cities. Harking back to America’s better angels, as invoked by Abraham Lincoln, Mr Biden’s message has historic appeal. But nations do not possess souls. They have competing ideas of themselves. Mr Biden wants to restore the US to where it was before Mr Trump was elected — a multicultural society with its first non-white president. Mr Trump makes little disguise of conjuring a pre-civil rights America where white males held uncontested sway. He will blame Mr Obama, China, radical leftists and “thugs” for America’s unhappy condition — anybody, in other words, but himself. It is hard to imagine a more dystopian backdrop for the world’s most powerful democracy to settle on its future.

If we can’t call racism by its name, diversity will remain a meaningless buzzword

As Naga Munchetty’s experience at the BBC shows, challenging inflammatory language can be hazardous writes Priyamvada Gopal in The Guardian 

Brexit opponents clash. ‘Inflammatory language is increasingly the norm, yet the word racism remains muffled under a curious omerta.’ Photograph: Teri Pengilley/Guardian


Politicians accuse each other of being cowardly collaborators who surrender, betray and capitulate. Commentators on television warn of riots. Inflammatory language is increasingly the norm in public life, yet one word remains muffled under a curious omertà. The BBC presenter Naga Munchetty was only the latest to discover that describing something as racist, even in a measured way, can get you into a lot of trouble.

For many people of colour in largely white institutions, this is a familiar prohibition that works to shut down much-needed discussion and create a repressive and demoralising silence.

Racism is that strange phenomenon, apparent everywhere and apparently nowhere. People believe that not “seeing” race, or being “colourblind”, is progressive, when it is merely evasive. What might happen if we took it as given that after six centuries of European imperial rule it would be astounding if most of us – including people of colour – were not shaped by the racial hierarchies put in place? The term white supremacy may invoke images of hooded Klansmen burning crosses, but it actually refers to an entrenched system of racial domination that once justified colonisation and slavery, the legacies of which still shape economic, political and social orders, particularly in the west.

Racism is emphatically not a matter of subjective “experience”. It has objective structural force that can be identified not just in discriminatory practices but in differing entitlements and unequal access to resources, representation and opportunities. “Go back to where you came from” is not just a wounding phrase that almost all people of colour and migrants have heard. Its material consequences include actual expulsions such as those of the “Windrush children” and, of course, discriminatory travel, migration and citizenship policies.

Another way of deflecting engagement with race is to personalise matters. As the sociologist Robin DiAngelo notes, insisting that there was no “intent” to be racist or asking, “how can you say I’m racist, you don’t know me”, are manifestations of “white fragility”. In this scheme, only exceptionally “bad” people can be racist, and therefore the mere suggestion of racism is often treated as more serious and hurtful than racism itself. DiAngelo makes the important point that discussions about race are bound to be uncomfortable for members of dominant communities who have to come to terms with their own entanglement in an unfair system.

To avoid such discomfort and difficulty is to refuse change. I know this from personal experience as an upper-caste woman from India who has also benefited from a deeply iniquitous system. I too have felt defensive, but there’s no way to change things without admitting to the existence of caste or race supremacy, and dealing with the fact of inevitable complicity and the inherited privilege that disadvantages others.

At the same time, “whataboutery” leads nowhere. Whenever I speak of race and empire in the British media, I receive emails asking: “What about caste” and inviting me to “go back” to India to address the caste system instead. People not normally known for a deep interest in class matters will also suddenly ask “what about the working classes?”. A now retired female manager once told me that, although sexism was still an issue at Cambridge University, racism was not. There’s no need to pit race, class, caste, gender, ability or sexuality against each other: there are no free passes in an inequitable world where each brutality shapes the others. 

There are also no “race cards”. People who raise issues of racial exclusion or abuse are not demanding special treatment; on the contrary, they are arguing against the special privileges bestowed on the majority or dominant group. Most of us who raise issues of racism do so with hesitation, feeling vulnerable as we do so and fearing inevitable social and institutional reprisals. Meet a race whistleblower and you meet a deemed “troublemaker”, a position with unpleasant institutional consequences.

Discussion of race is often derailed by bogeys such as “reverse racism”. Of course it’s possible for people of colour to display hostile or denigrating attitudes towards other races, Asian anti-blackness being one example. “Racism towards white people” is not, however, systemic and does not have policy consequences. Certificates from “best friends” of colour declaring a person to be “not racist” are also void. Just as having a mother does not make men free of sexism in a patriarchal world, having a black best friend, spouse or even child cannot absolve individuals from complicity in racist language and actions. Indeed, ethnic minority politicians may themselves be used to justify such things as blackface or xenophobia.

No one is claiming that victims of racism are pure or noble. People are never purely victims and everyone has to ask tough questions of themselves. It is perfectly possible, for example, to be at once homophobic yourself and a victim of racism. Both must be tackled.

Far from “wallowing in victimhood”, people who challenge racism are acting as responsible agents of change. At a time when the forces of violent racism are globally in the ascendant once again, we can help them along by refusing to name it as such.

Alternatively, we can do the right thing: actively acknowledge racism’s existence and try to rein in its power. If we don’t choose to have difficult and urgent discussions openly, then “diversity” will remain a meaningless buzzword where people’s bodies are included in institutions but their voices are silenced.

Fifty shades of white: the long fight against racism in romance novels

For decades, the world of romantic fiction has been divided by a heated debate about racism and diversity. Is there any hope of a happy ending? By Lois Beckett in The Guardian
 

Last year, the Strand Bookstore in New York convened an all-star panel titled Let’s Woman-Splain Romance! The line to get in the door stretched down the block, and the room was thrumming with glee even before the panel started. This was not an audience that needed to be told that smart women read romance novels, or that the genre could be feminist. The authors speaking that night were all big names, including Beverly Jenkins, an iconic author of African American historical romance – who blew a kiss to the audience as she was introduced to whoops of delight – and two breakout stars of the previous year, Alisha Rai and Alyssa Cole.

The subtext of the event was clear: it was not just a celebration of romance novels, but a celebration of diversity within an industry that has long been marked by pervasive racism. For decades, publishers had confined many black romance authors to all-black lines, marketed only to black readers. Some booksellers continued to shelve black romances separately from white romances, on special African American shelves. Accepted industry wisdom told black authors that putting black couples on their covers could hurt sales, and that they should replace them with images of jewellery, or lawn chairs, or flowers. Other authors of colour had struggled to get representation within the genre at all.

Jenkins and Cole, who are black, and Rai, who is south Asian, had been fighting against these barriers for years. Their success – as authors of critically acclaimed love stories sold in Walmarts and drug stores across the country – had not made them any less vocal.

The panel moderator turned the “diversity” question to Rai first. Her latest series was, he began, “very multicultural and [with] a broad spectrum of sexual identity in it. There’s a lot going on in the sweeping saga that has hot romance at the centre of it.” He paused.

“I’m sorry, is that a question?” Rai asked, very calmly. In her day job, she was a lawyer.

The moderator started referring to a previous time when romances had been less diverse, but Rai cut him off.

“We’re still not at mission accomplished,” she said. And the issue was not really diversity. “It’s about reality.”

  Romance novelist Alisha Rai

“Can I say nipples in here?” Rai continued. The audience giggled. “Many, many years ago, when I first started writing, someone said to me: ‘Oh, this is the first book where the heroine had brown nipples, like on the page,’ and I was like: ‘What? That’s crazy!’ She was a long-time romance reader. I thought about it. I’m pretty sure nipples come in all shades, but they’re always, like, pink on the page, or berries, or some kind of pink fruit.”

By this point, the audience was guffawing and Jenkins was bent over with laughter. “What happens is, it goes into one book, it goes into 10 books, people read those books and write their own books, and suddenly, everybody’s got pink nipples,” Rai said. “And they forget about the fact that that’s not reality.”

Jenkins straightened up. “I always had brown nipples in my books,” she said. “That’s one of the things readers said early on: ‘No offence – we’re tired of reading about pink nipples.’”

The conversation shifted to other implausible but time-honoured turns of phrase: looking daggers, panther-like grace. Everyone laughed, and there were cupcakes, and at that moment in the bookshop, in front of this multiracial panel of bestselling writers, it might have been easy to think that the future of diverse romance had already arrived. Except, the authors kept warning, it had not.

Romance readers compound the sin of liking happy, sexy stories with the sin of not caring much about the opinions of serious people, which is to say, men. They are openly scornful of the outsiders who occasionally parachute in to report on them. In late 2017, Robert Gottlieb – the former editor of the New Yorker and unsurpassable embodiment of the concept “august literary man” – wrote a jocular roundup of that season’s best romances in the New York Times Book Review. He opined that romance was a “healthy genre” and that its effect was “harmless, I would imagine. Why shouldn’t women dream?” The furious public response from romance readers – “patriarchal ass” was among the more charitable comments – prompted a defensive editor’s note from the NYT, which later announced it was hiring a dedicated romance columnist, who happened to be both a woman and a long-time fan of the genre.

Coverage of the romance industry often dwells on the contrast between the nubile young heroines of the novels and the women who actually write the books: ordinary women with ordinary bodies, dressed for their own comfort. Reporting on the first annual conference of the Romance Writers of America (RWA) – the major trade association for romance authors – in 1981, the Los Angeles Times wrote that the 500 authors who attended were “not the stuff of which romance heroines are made – at mostly 40 and 50, they were less coquette and more mother-of-the-bride”. That observation – combining creeping horror at the idea that middle-aged women might be interested in sex, with indifference to the fact that male authors are rarely judged for failing to resemble James Bond – is typical.

Part of the intense scorn romance authors face is the result of their rare victory. They have built an industry that caters almost completely to women, in which writers can succeed on the basis of their skill, not their age or perceived attractiveness. Romance writing is one of few careers where it is possible for a woman to break into the industry, self-taught, at 40 or 50, alongside or after raising her children, and achieve the highest levels of professional success. Not only possible; typical. Nor is romance is some marginal part of the book industry – in 2016, it represented 23% of the overall US fiction market, and has been estimated to be worth more than $1bn a year in the US alone. There is something threatening about all this, says Pamela Regis, the director of Nora Roberts Center for American Romance at McDaniel College – hence all the “sneering and leering”.

Romance novels follow a strict formula: they must be love stories, and by the end the protagonist must achieve their “happily-ever-after”, often referred to as the “HEA”. (Less traditional authors now sometimes end with the HFN, or “happy for now”.) The genre’s guarantee to readers is that its heroines’ labour of love will never go unpaid. As the RWA puts it: “In a romance, the lovers who risk and struggle for each other and their relationship are rewarded with emotional justice.” Justice, in this context, means “unconditional love”.

Outsiders often associate romance novels with historical “bodice-rippers”, but the genre is a vast continent with many ecosystems. There are chaste Christian romances set among the Amish, where the hero and heroine’s closest contact is the exchange of steaming hot baked goods; erotic romances featuring sex clubs and orgies; novels set in the medieval Scottish highlands or among cowboys in the American west; series romances that tell the individual love stories of each player on fictional football or hockey teams.

For all this diversity of genre, the romance industry itself has remained overwhelming white, as have the industry’s most prestigious awards ceremony, the Ritas, which are presented each year by the RWA. Just like the Oscars in film, a Rita award is the highest honour a romance author can receive, and winning can mean not only higher sales, but also lasting recognition from peers. And just like the Oscars, the Ritas have become the centre of controversy over unacknowledged racism and bias in the judging process.

  An Extraordinary Union by Alyssa Cole

Last year, however, many observers felt that this was sure to change. One of the standout novels of 2017 had been Alyssa Cole’s An Extraordinary Union, an interracial romance set during the civil war. The book had already won a number of awards and made multiple best-of-the-year lists.

When the Rita awards finalists were announced in March 2018, An Extraordinary Union was nowhere to be seen. A novel rated exceptional by critics had been not even been deemed as noteworthy by an anonymous judging panel of Cole’s fellow romance writers. The books that had beat Cole as finalists in the best short historical romance category were all by white women, all but one set in 19th-century Britain, featuring white women who fall in love with aristocrats. The heroes were, respectively, one “rogue”, two dukes, two lords and an earl.

What followed, on Twitter, was an outpouring of grief and frustration from black authors and other authors of colour, describing the racism they had faced again and again in the romance industry. They talked about white editors assuming black writers were aspiring authors, even after they had published dozens of books; about white authors getting up from a table at the annual conference when a black author came to sit down; about constant questions from editors and agents about whether black or Asian or Spanish-speaking characters could really be “relatable” enough.

Then, of course, there were the readers. “People say: ‘Well, I can’t relate,’” Jenkins told NPR a few years ago, after watching white readers simply walk past her table at a book signing. “You can relate to shapeshifters, you can relate to vampires, you can relate to werewolves, but you can’t relate to a story written by and about black Americans?”

In response to the outcry over the Ritas, the RWA went back over the past 18 years of Rita award finalists and winners. During that time, the RWA acknowledged in a statement posted on its website, books by black authors had accounted for less than 0.5% of the total number of Rita finalists. “It is impossible to deny that this is a serious issue and that it needs to be addressed,” the statement from the RWA board noted. According to the current president of the Romance Writers of America, a black woman has never actually won a Rita.

The romance novel industry found itself facing a similar crisis over racism and representation as Hollywood, or the news industry, or the Democratic party. But one thing that sets it apart is that it is facing this challenge as an industry dominated by women – specifically, white women. Would anti-racist activism, and the backlash against it, play out differently in an industry run by women – and, in particular, by women who were writers and readers, who by definition loved stories of joy and reconciliation?

The backbone of the US romance community is the nearly 100 local chapters of the RWA, which provide mentorship and peer support for women embarking on the long and lonely work of novel-writing. On a Saturday afternoon last spring, I attended a meeting of the Heart of Carolina Romance Writers. A few dozen white women gathered in a classroom at a small for-profit college outside of Raleigh, North Carolina, and the meeting began, as it always does, with the good news.

“I did a presentation at the Wake County library with other historical fiction authors, and we dressed up like our time period: we had Victorian and Edwardian and World War II,” one author announced, to murmurs of approval. Another author, who had just released a new book, said: “It’s the best launch I’ve ever had, and it was an independent, so I thank y’all because I’m sure you guys are the ones who bought it.” The women followed each update, big or small, with a round of applause.

The most exciting update had been saved for last. One of the chapter’s most senior members was Hannah Meredith, a 74-year-old with dyed auburn hair, a brisk demeanour and the deep, throaty voice of a woman who had been a smoker for nearly six decades. “I have good news. I have a new cover – ” Meredith began, before pausing dramatically – “for a book that is nominated for a Rita!”

There was applause and cheers. Meredith’s novel, Song of the Nightpiper, a fantasy romance, had been named as one of eight finalists in the paranormal romance category. Nancy Lee Badger, the chapter president at the time, seemed as excited as Meredith. A Rita finalist in their chapter! At age 74! With Meredith’s triumph duly celebrated, the group moved on to the main focus of the session, a breezy presentation on writing more “dynamic dialogue”, from author Allie Pleiter, who had sold more than 1.4m books.

At the end of the meeting, with a few minutes left, I asked the members what they made of the Rita controversy. Many of them, it turned out, had been following the debate closely, and their reactions were divided. “I was really surprised,” said Meredith. “You look around and you go: ‘This isn’t a very diverse group.’” But, she added, “it has been, and people have moved away and taken other jobs, that were of colour. But I don’t think any of them ever felt like they weren’t appreciated.”

A younger woman in a gingham shirt pushed back at this. “That’s the point. As white women we can’t see it. We’re coming from a privileged place where we’re not even aware of it.”

A woman in a polo shirt noted that when All About Romance, an independent romance review site, had released its list of best books of the year, there had been no black authors on it. The site had subsequently tried to correct this, but in their correction, they confused the names of two of the most famous black romance authors, Brenda Jackson and Beverly Jenkins. “Basically, my impression as an old white woman, is that we need to listen more to people,” she said.

Some of the white authors were less convinced that the lack of black Rita finalists and winners was proof of any racism in the judging process. It was hard for anyone to win a Rita, they argued. They themselves had entered, they had not won and they were not complaining.

Badger did not say much during the meeting, but she had talked to me earlier on the phone. She acknowledged that only about three of her 50 local members were black and that those numbers were “poor”, given the diversity of North Carolina. But, she noted, there were already plenty of rules to encourage an inclusive environment. “How do I make sure that women of colour, Asian, etc, are able to reap the benefits of being part of this organisation?” she said. “I can’t force them to come to a meeting.”

A few minutes into the conversation, Badger spontaneously began talking about recent efforts to remove Raleigh’s monuments to Confederate soldiers. Badger was not a southerner – she grew up in New York – but she had been disturbed by efforts to get rid of the statutes. I asked what connection she saw between the debate over the Rita awards and the effort to take down confederate monuments, which had sparked conflict in cities across the US.

In both situations, Badger said, only a small group of people were objecting, but in response everyone would be forced to change. “It’s one group of people that is not happy with the monuments because they’re saying they’re monuments to slavery, but I don’t think so,” said Badger. “It’s just too bad, that it upsets somebody at 200 – however many, 150 years later.” In the romance world, the small group getting the attention were “women of colour” and nobody seemed to be talking about Asians, or senior citizens, or “including all these other people, that aren’t making a fuss”.

 Kianna Alexander

While her own feelings were conflicted, Badger did believe the controversy was important enough to set aside time for her chapter to talk it over with a journalist, and some of the members felt that the anger over the lack of diversity within romance was fully justified. “I think there’s a problem,” the woman in the polo shirt had concluded. “And I think that women of colour need to be in the lead. But of course, in our group, we’re all white.”

This was a point that many of the women kept returning to – the fact that everyone in the room that day was white. There was no consensus on what this fact demonstrated – one of the group’s past presidents was black, several people pointed out – but it was a fact that demanded explanation, that left even the women most adamant that there was no problem a little unsettled.

A long-time chapter member mentioned that one of these former black members, a writer named Kianna Alexander, had been part of the chapter for three or four years. There was a clear reason why Alexander was no longer coming to their meetings, the woman said, and it was purely logistical. “She has a very complicated family situation, so it’s difficult for her to make the drive here.”

It was about an hour-and-a-half drive south from where the romance writers group met to the small North Carolina town where Alexander lived with her family. I drove the route in the darkness that night. Alexander had promised to meet me in the morning for breakfast.

Romance novels – the realm of women’s fantasies – have always been political. When the Berlin Wall fell, the British romance publisher Mills & Boon, which is owned by Harlequin, made a point of handing out more than 700,000 copies of their romance novels to East German women. “Sex! Capitalism! Individual choice!” the books seemed to announce. Within three years, Mills & Boon was selling millions of books across the former eastern bloc.

Because romance novels follow a strict formula, the genre is often seen as “peculiarly hollow”, says Jayashree Kamblé, the vice-president of the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance, and an English professor at New York’s LaGuardia Community College. In fact, she argues, the rigid conventions of the genre, with its familiar plot arcs and predetermined happy ending, make it a revealing space for tracking women’s desires and fears at different moments in history.

Through the 1960s, many romance novels had stayed relatively prim, with the sex mostly implied. Authors experimenting with more sensual stories still had to negotiate with editors determined to uphold what they saw as moral standards. But the widespread adoption of the pill, and changing attitudes to women’s sexuality, would finally open up new literary possibilities. Scholars date the emergence of the sexual revolution in romance fiction to 1972, with the publication of Kathleen Woodiwiss’s The Flame and The Flower, a bodice-ripping historical romance featuring explicit sex scenes.

 

The Flame and the Flower by Kathleen Woodiwiss

In the 80s, as Reagan and Thatcher dismantled the welfare state, romance heroines found themselves drawn to domineering corporate heroes. “The hero is often the head of a large corporation. He’s buying out a small company,” Kamblé said. “The heroine represents the little person who’s losing that fight.” After 9/11, there was a sudden boom in “sheikh novels” set in the Middle East, in which white western heroines fell in love with Arab potentates. (These novels might have been “produced with the best intentions”, the cultural historian Hsu-Ming Teo told me via email, but they were often set in made-up countries whose imagined culture was an Orientalist mashup of “exoticism, sensuality, wealth, a mostly benevolent and superficial Islam”.)

Today’s romance novels are certainly not all feminist texts, but Kamblé believes that the genre tends to move in a progressive direction. Above all, it focuses on women’s emotions, their internal lives and their quest for satisfaction, in a way that no other genre has yet matched. But these innovations in the genre are taking place within an industry that is still overwhelmingly white. The result, Kamblé said, is that most romance novels simply erase people of colour, resulting in all-white fantasy worlds that include only stereotyped supporting characters, or simply no people of colour at all.

Kianna Alexander lives in a modest home south of Raleigh, North Carolina. Across the street, her neighbours have a set of Confederate flags on display, and when she walks around her rural neighborhood, Alexander tries to remember always to bring her ID, to prove, if anyone questions her, that she actually lives there.

Alexander told me that she had once been very involved with the Heart of Carolina Romance Writers group but, during the 2016 election campaign, that had changed. While she was feeling “frustrated, angry, frightened” by Trump, her fellow members had a different reaction. “The mood there was just like: ‘Politics is no big deal,’” she told me. There had been logistical reasons for dropping out, too, but she said that wasn’t the main reason, and now she couldn’t imagine going back. “They were too silent,” Alexander said. “It was almost as if they knew that whatever happened was not going to have much of an effect on their lives.”

A decade into her career as a published author, Alexander has worked her way from smaller independent presses to contracts with major publishers, including Harlequin, the most famous name in romance publishing, and she is an unabashed champion of the genre. “Romance is the only place that I know you’re going to go and get a happily ever after every time,” she said. “There are a lot of good books in every genre, and I understand the value of literary fiction,” she told me. “But what makes suffering so appealing?”

Despite her success, Alexander knows all about the barriers that make it more difficult for authors of colour to succeed. On the morning we met, we visited her local Walmart to look at the book section. Her latest Harlequin romance was on display, but it was not placed with the other romance novels. Instead, it was on a separate shelf marked with a neat label: African American. Alongside Alexander’s romance were assorted books with black people on the cover: a “spiritual guidebook” by film-maker Tyler Perry, the rapper Gucci Mane’s autobiography and “street lit” novels about black protagonists struggling to succeed in tough urban environments.

The African American section is not an issue specific to Walmart, or to North Carolina. Many black romance novelists told me they had found bookstores and large retailers stocking their work in a special black section, far away from shelves that the majority of romance readers will be browsing. On a previous visit to her North Carolina Walmart, Alexander had asked a manager why the books were arranged that way. He said it was for the convenience of readers, who liked being able to easily locate the books they wanted. “But I don’t know if it’s the African American reader who likes it, or the white reader who likes that everything else is separated out,” Alexander told me, as we walked out of the store. “Then, they don’t, like, make a mistake and buy one. ‘Oh no! Didn’t mean to do that!’”

In response to questions about Walmart’s African American sections, a company spokeswoman said: “We carry books in every store from authors of all backgrounds, and in certain stores where we know many customers gravitate to specific authors of different backgrounds, we highlight those authors with a broader offering. In no way is our intention to discourage all shoppers from perusing all titles available to them, but to highlight authors from all backgrounds and provide better opportunity for sales.”

 This Tender Melody by Kianna Alexander

It wasn’t just booksellers that were segregating Alexander’s love stories. The process started with the publisher. Harlequin, which merged decades ago with the British romance publisher Mills & Boon, was acquired in 2014 by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp and is now a division of HarperCollins, has sold more than 6.7bn books, and currently publishes 110 titles a month, with romance series designed to suit every taste. Novels are grouped by genre or “heat” levels, from sweet and chaste to steamy and explicit. But the Harlequin line that Alexander wrote for, Kimani, was grouped by only one thing: race. The heroes in Kimani books can be any race or ethnicity, Alexander said, but Kimani heroines, like their authors, are black.

Alexander and many of her fellow black authors have long had mixed feelings about Kimani. The series had a dedicated readership, and Alexander’s Kimani books sold better than anything else she has published. Some black authors told me they believed that for some readers a dedicated black romance series really was a quick way to locate what they wanted to read.

But, like being shelved in the black section, black authors also believed that being part of a segregated line limited their sales, cutting them off from readers of other races who might also enjoy their work. Some former Harlequin authors even alleged that Kimani had been given separate and unequal treatment by the publisher: less marketing, fewer chances for authors to promote their books.

In May 2017, Harlequin had announced that it would be gradually phasing out five lines, including Kimani, for financial reasons. If the publisher had quickly integrated black authors into its other Harlequin lines, this decision could have garnered broad support. Instead, nearly a year later, in the spring of 2018, Alexander and other Kimani authors were still in limbo, unsure if they had a future with the brand, or if the closure of Harlequin’s segregated black line would simply mean fewer opportunities for black authors overall.

A spokeswoman for the publishing giant HarperCollins, Harlequin’s parent company, declined to respond to specific questions about Harlequin’s past and present editorial choices regarding romances by black authors and featuring black characters. “We value the discussion about diversity that is taking place in publishing and are working to increase representation and inclusion in our stories, as well as in our author base,” she wrote.

Harlequin’s dedicated black romance line is relatively new, having launched in 2006 after being acquired from another publisher. For almost 100 years before that, the company had rarely published romances with black heroes and heroines at all.

That changed in the early 1980s, when Harlequin recruited Vivian Stephens, a charismatic black editor and one of the founders of the RWA, who championed what was then referred to as “ethnic” romance. In 1984, when Harlequin published its first black romance by a black American author, many readers got their books through a subscription sent directly to their homes. Before publication, Stephens told the book’s author, Sandra Kitt, that Harlequin executives in Canada “were really concerned that their subscribers would be up in arms about, quote unquote ‘this black book’,” Kitt recalled. When the novel, Adam and Eva, did eventually come out, the company received only four letters of complaint. It ended up selling respectably and became one of Harlequin’s frequently reissued classics.

But after working at Harlequin for about two years, Stephens was fired. She told me she was never given any explanation for why she was forced out. After Stephens left, Harlequin continued to publish novels by Sandra Kitt – but only the ones she wrote about white characters. It would take another decade, until the blockbuster success of Terry McMillan’s 1992 novel Waiting to Exhale, which detailed the romantic travails of four professional black women, for the US publishing industry to begin to realise what a lucrative market black women readers might be. Beverly Jenkins told me that in 1996, when she published her breakthrough novel, Indigo, which featured a dark-skinned black woman as the heroine, she was often approached by readers who were moved to tears at seeing themselves represented in a romance novel. Seeing their reactions, she cried, too.

Marketing black love stories to black women was one thing, but publishers remained sceptical about the idea that white readers would read those same stories. In the late 1990s, Suzanne Brockmann, a white author writing a sequence of Harlequin romances about sexy Navy Seals, decided that she wanted to make a black character the hero of her next book. It was, she admits now, something of a “white saviour” move. Brockmann’s thinking, she told me, was that Harlequin simply didn’t realise the commercial opportunity it was missing by not printing more black romances.

Sandra Kitt

Harlequin published Brockmann’s book in 1998, but she was shocked by the way the company dealt with its publication. She recalled her publisher saying: “You will make half the money because we will print half the copies. We cannot send it to our subscription list.” It was the same argument Harlequin had made 14 years earlier: “We’ll get angry letters.” It wasn’t just black characters that Harlequin rejected, according to Brockmann. She said she was also told they would not publish a novel with an Asian American as the central character. (Brockmann later moved on to another publisher.)

The experience of authors who wrote early Harlequin novels with black characters suggests that white readers might be more willing to embrace black stories than white publishers and editors have traditionally assumed. At the same time, it seems likely that white readers’ racism has played a role in the industry’s persistent exclusion of black stories. Several black authors described meeting white women at book signings who would ask to get a book signed, but emphasise that they were buying the books for a black friend, or a black colleague, certainly not for themselves. Others had seen or heard comments from white readers that they found happy stories about black women unrealistic.

A particularly infuriating comment, some black authors said, is when white women describe taking a chance on a romance with a black heroine, and then express surprise at how easily they were able to identify with the story. Shirley Hailstock, a black novelist and past president of RWA, told me about a fan letter she once received from a white romance author. She sent me a photograph of the letter, with the signature concealed.

“Dear Shirley,” the white author had written, in a neat cursive hand, “I’m writing to let you know how much I enjoyed Whispers of Love. It’s my first African American romance. I guess I might sound bigoted, but I never knew that black folks fall in love like white folks. I thought it was just all sex or jungle fever I think “they” call it. Silly of me. Love is love no matter what colour or religion or nationality, as sex is sex. I guess the media has a lot to do with it.”

The letter, dated 3 June 1999, was signed, “Sincerely, a fan”.

In 2015, the year Donald Trump launched his campaign for the White House, the RWA began a serious effort to address racism and diversity within its membership. For years, black authors had talked about feeling unwelcome in the organisation, and having to find refuge in what they called the “Second RWA”, where they advised each other as they negotiated the microaggressions and outright bigotry of the larger organisation.

Now the RWA, spurred on by board member Courtney Milan – a former law professor, bestselling author and prominent advocate of diversity within romance – began to take a more proactive approach, from ensuring more authors of colour joined the board, to publicly calling out a publisher for excluding black authors.

The efforts have sparked a backlash from some of the RWA’s 10,000 members, more than 80% of whom are white. (By contrast, about 61% of the US population as a whole is non-Hispanic white.) HelenKay Dimon, the group’s current president, who is white, told me she regularly receives letters from white members expressing concern that “now nobody wants books by white Christian women” or criticising the romance association’s sudden “political correctness”. Dimon acknowledged the difficulties that all romance writers were facing – traditional publishers buying fewer books, an increasingly crowded ebook market – but, she continued, there is “a group of people who are white and who are privileged, who have always had 90% of everything available, and now all of a sudden, they have 80%. Instead of saying: ‘Ooh, look, I have 80%,’ they say: ‘Oh, I lost 10! Who do I blame for losing 10?’”

One of the public flashpoints over the board’s diversity efforts came in the summer of 2017, when Linda Howard, a bestselling white author who had been among RWA’s first members, wrote in a private RWA author forum that the board’s focus on “social issues” was driving some members away. “Diversity for the sake of diversity is discrimination,” Howard wrote, arguing that the group’s resources should not be focused “on one (or more) group to the exclusion of others”.

Howard, who left RWA over the furious response to her comments, told me that she was not eager to rehash the incident. “I wasn’t against diversity. I was against the way the board was handling it,” Howard said, when we spoke recently. “I thought it could have been handled better and gotten better results.” She said she understood that the “big pool of anger” around the diversity debate came from a lifetime of people being treated as if they weren’t as good as everyone else.

I asked her what had stuck with her, more than a year later, out of the many angry responses that she received. “Social media has a lot to answer for,” she said. “Social media makes it possible for people to attack en masse, and not deal with the human aspect.”

While Howard felt that if people had been speaking face-to-face, the conversation would have been more constructive, others disagree. Many activists argue that Twitter has been a powerful tool for amplifying conversations – and demands for accountability – that might otherwise have been stifled or ignored. But in response to this new dynamic, a counter-narrative has emerged where people calling for change are criticised for being uncivil or even dangerous. Alisha Rai and Alyssa Cole – who, along with Milan, are among the most prominent voices in the Twitter debate – told me they had been labelled “mean girls” or “diversity bullies” for talking about racism in a way that was not “nice”.

“‘Niceness’ is going on Twitter and Facebook and saying how you were bullied by the people talking about diversity,” Cole said. “We would always be described as screaming, harassing. All of these weird terms … ”

“Censorship,” Rai added. “Policing.”

Rai continued: “They tell us niceness means you sit down and you shut up and you take what you’re given. And you don’t complain, because if you’re given anything, you should be grateful, right?”

It has become commonplace for pundits to lament that social media has undermined civilised debate and to suggest that angry Twitter mobs may be harmful to democracy. But when I spoke to Dee Davis, who ended her term as RWA president last year, she saw a utility in the kind of combative approach some romance authors of colour had taken on Twitter. To make real change, she said, “You need the fighters. You need the gladiators.”

If you were on Twitter, you should know what you had signed up for, she told me. “You don’t go into a hockey arena if you’re not ready to play hockey.” And, she added, if the board’s commitment to diversity meant that the RWA lost members, that would just be the way it was. “Any change is always going to make somebody go: ‘Well, this isn’t for me any longer,” and I think that’s OK,” Davis said.

Davis agreed that the conversation we were having about RWA seemed similar to the debates going on within the Democratic party, about what to do about “diversity”, about whether the more radical or moderate wing of the party would hold sway, who might be alienated by the choices the leadership was making. The root of the conflict in RWA, as in the Democratic party, Davis believed, was that her own generation, the baby boomers, were hanging on to power too long. They were used to get their own way, used to being influential, and it was time for them to let go and they would not.

For Cole and Rai, it wasn’t just the pushback to calls for diversity that worried them. They were also concerned that publishers might treat diverse romances as a passing trend, and that white authors might be best positioned to profit from writing “diverse” stories. In 2016, on a conference call presided over by Harlequin executives, “diversity” was listed among the themes that the publisher wanted to see more often, according to one author who was on the call. On the list were “more marriages of convenience, more sheiks, more baby themes, more alpha heroes, more diversity”. To the author on the call, it sounded as if Harlequin was treating diversity “more like a marketing opportunity.”

The annual awards gala of the Romance Writers of America is a very pleasant event. There is no dinner, only dessert and wine, and there are virtually no men present. The ceremony is the culmination of a frenetic five-day industry networking conference, which has a strikingly different atmosphere from most publishing industry events. Instead of the usual tote bag or briefcase, the savviest attendees carry a foldable rolling plastic crate from Walmart, which they fill with dozens of free novels. The 2018 conference took place at a Sheraton hotel in Denver, Colorado, in July, and the schedule included educational seminars such as History Undressed, an expert’s guide to underwear through the centuries, and a session on firefighting led by one bestselling author’s firefighter husband, which involved him hoisting up participants and carrying them around the room.

The dress code for the Rita award ceremony itself, appropriately for an industry focused on women’s happiness, is: whatever makes you feel festive. Some authors get their hair done and wear floor-length sequinned dresses, chandelier earrings, corsages. Others choose loose pants and tunic tops and sensible shoes. At the 2018 ceremony, an award-winning author paired a red satin dress with sequinned Converse sneakers, and another wore a high-low ballgown with hiking sandals, proving that it is possible, now and then, to have it all.

The golden Rita statuette is awarded in 13 categories, from best erotic romance to best paranormal romance. On the night, as the winners, often choking up, read their acceptance speeches off their phones, they talked about the women who had helped them get here. They talked about the constant likelihood of failure, about writing love stories as a second or third job, about learning how to close the door to their children and partners in order to write. “Thank you for the great sex,” Kristan Higgins, the bestselling author married to the firefighter, blurted out to him as she accepted the award for best mainstream fiction novel with a central romance. “My children are not watching tonight,” she added, after a moment.

Kianna Alexander, the young black author from North Carolina, was seated in the center of the ballroom, at the same table as Hannah Meredith, the 74-year-old Rita finalist from the Heart of Carolina Romance Writers, the local chapter Alexander had left after 2016. The conference, like the local chapter, was overwhelmingly white, but there were a scattering of authors of colour in the room for the award ceremony. Alexander clapped politely, her face very still, as one white woman after another stood up, cried, and accepted her award.

The culmination of the ceremony was the lifetime achievement award, which was being presented to Suzanne Brockmann, the white author who had written a black Harlequin romance in the late 90s. As she took to the stage to give her keynote speech, the mood shifted. Brockmann’s son, who is gay, presented the award to his mother, and she started by talking about him. Brockmann told the audience that at the 2008 conference, she had wanted to give a speech celebrating California’s decision to legalise gay marriage. “I was told that the issue was divisive and some RWA members would be offended,” Brockmann said. “I regret not walking out. I should’ve rocked the living fuck out of that boat. Instead, I was nice. Instead I went along.”

 Alyssa Cole

This was just the warmup. Now, she turned to her main point. “RWA, I’ve been watching you grapple as you attempt to deal with the homophobic, racist white supremacy on which our nation and the publishing industry is based. It’s long past time for that to change. But hear me, writers, when I say: it doesn’t happen if we’re too fucking nice.”

Brockmann had considered the possibility that she would have to keep talking through icy silence. Instead, many of the thousands of women in the room were already rising to give her a standing ovation. At Alexander’s table, she and Meredith both stayed seated. Meredith was sitting, arms folded, leaning in to tell her sister, who was sitting next to her, that she did not approve of the speech. Alexander was intensely aware of how visible she would be if she stood at that moment, with white women sitting all around her. She thought Brockmann’s speech was headed in the right direction, but she wasn’t sure.

“Here comes the part of my speech where I get ‘political,’” Brockmann continued. “When you write what you see and what you know and what you have been told to believe, like books set in a town where absolutely no people of colour or gay people live … ? You are perpetuating exclusion, and the cravenness and fear that’s at its ancient foundation. Yeah, I’m talking to you, white, able, straight, cis, allegedly Christian women. And don’t @ me with ‘Not all white women’. Because 53% of us plunged us into our current living hell,” she said, referring to exit polls that the majority of white women voted for Trump in the 2016 election.

By the end of her speech, the vast majority of the white women in the room were giving Brockmann a standing ovation. And Alexander had stood, too, and lifted one fist into the air.

At the dance party after the award ceremony, on a small wooden dance floor set atop the vast, brightly lit expanse of hotel lobby carpet, dozens of women danced barefoot to Talk Dirty to Me, or swayed gently, wine glasses in hand. Piles of glittering heels lay abandoned at the side of the dance floor. Alexander, who had done a Facebook livestream from the party for her fans, was examining the Twitter reaction to Brockmann’s speech. Some authors of colour were sharing approving reaction gifs. Others said later it had made them emotional to hear the exclusion they had faced addressed so publicly.

But not everyone was enthusiastic. According to Damon Suede, a well-known RWA board member, angry emails poured into his inbox during the speech, including from some people he had previously regarded as friends, complaining that the awards should not have permitted a speech “bashing” conservatives.

Hannah Meredith had not stood up to applaud Brockmann’s speech. But she had not walked out either. After the ceremony, as she smoked outside the hotel, she explained why the speech made her uncomfortable. She had not voted for Donald Trump, she said, so she didn’t take the remarks about his supporters personally. But, she said: “I will be honest, when it became very political, when it became sending [people] to go out and vote, I’m not sure it belonged.”

“I’m inundated with politics,” Meredith continued. “I want a space where I’m not. That doesn’t mean you can’t talk about being inclusive. Love is love, and I agree with that.” Meredith said she wanted RWA to address diversity without being overtly political. “Maybe it’s old age, but I feel like everyone is trying to push everyone apart. My gang is the good gang. If we’re all divisive, divisive, divisive, we’re screwed.”

What Meredith said about wanting a space without politics echoed what Kianna Alexander had told me about why she had left the Heart of Carolina Romance Writers group: the sense that some people saw politics as distant or optional, rather than something that directly shaped their lives. For Alexander, Trump’s mockery of a disabled reporter during the campaign, his open racism, were personal threats to her, her husband and her son. There was no space where she could avoid politics.

Eight months after the denunciation of white supremacy at the romance industry’s annual conference, the RWA announced the latest Rita award finalists. The group’s president had been optimistic that more black authors and authors of colour would finally be represented. The board had announced it would track scores given by individual judges and be on the lookout for any hint of bias. Anecdotally, at least, it seemed that more authors of colour had decided to enter their books, hopeful that the judging would be more fair.

Instead, what the results of the peer-judged contest seemed to reveal was a quiet, continued resistance. The 2019 finalist list featured almost 80 authors in total – and only three of them were authors of colour. This time, Alyssa Cole had submitted a book that had been named one of the New York Times’ 100 notable books of the year, a rare honour for any romance novel. As with her critically acclaimed entry the year before, it had not been rated highly enough to final in the Ritas.

“I don’t know how they could take the message any other way than: ‘We don’t feel like we’re wanted here,’” Dimon, RWA’s current president, said of the group’s members of colour. The responses from some white authors – including the prominent author who tweeted: “I agree 100% that this must change, but can’t we wait five minutes for the finalists to enjoy their day?” – only made writers of colour more frustrated and angry. One tweeted that the debate inside RWA’s private message board had grown so acrimonious that a white author had sent her an email threatening to sue her. More than one writer suggested that the Rita awards, in their current form, were illegitimate.

Alexander had watched the Rita results come in, and it had ruined her morning. But, she told me, there was no question that she was going to stay a member and keep fighting. She had begun to see signs of real progress, even if they were still too rare. The long work of pitching and revising was paying off: in recent months, she had heard one black author after another announce book deals. In February, Alexander had signed a contract with Harlequin’s Desire line, which features dramatic romances set against a backdrop of luxury and glamour. Alexander said she knew of at least five other black authors who had transitioned from Kimani, the black line that was being phased out, to a different Harlequin line. And, for the first time, Alexander saw an ad for a black Harlequin author in one of the women’s magazines sold at grocery store checkout lines. The magazine wasn’t Essence or Ebony: it was a black Harlequin author being marketed to everyone.