The protests in the US are a pivotal moment and people of colour need active allyship writes Nicola Rollock in The Financial Times
A very privileged white man recently told me with an indulgent chuckle how much he enjoyed his privilege. I was not amused. For people of colour, white privilege and power shape our lives, restrict our success and, as we were starkly reminded in recent weeks, can even kill. No matter how well-crafted an organisation’s equality and diversity policy, the claims of “tolerance” or the apparent commitment to “embracing diversity”, whiteness can crush them all — and often does.
People of colour know this. We do not need the empirical evidence to tell us that black women are more likely to die in childbirth or that black boys are more likely to be excluded from school even when engaging in the same disruptive behaviour as their white counterparts. We did not need to wait for a study to tell us that people with “foreign sounding names” have to send 74 per cent more applications than their white counterparts before being called for an interview — even when the qualifications and experience are the same.
Or that young people of colour, in the UK, are more likely to be sentenced to custody than their white peers. We do not need more reviews to tell us we are not progressing in workplaces at the same rate as our white colleagues. We already know. Many of us spend an inordinate amount of time and energy trying to work out how to survive the rules that white people make and benefit from.
While many white people seem to have discovered the horrors of racism as a result of George Floyd’s murder, it would be a mistake to overlook the pervasive racism happening around us every day. For the truth is Floyd’s murder sits at the chilling end of a continuum of racism that many of us have been talking about, shouting and protesting about for decades.
Whiteness — specifically white power — sits at the heart of racism. This is why white people are described as privileged. Privilege does not simply refer to financial or socio-economic status. It means living without the consequences of racism. Stating this is to risk the ire of most white people. They tend to become defensive, angry or deny that racism is a problem, despite the fact they have not experienced an entire life subjected to it.
Then there are the liberal intellectuals who believe they have demonstrated sufficient markers of their anti-racist credentials because they have read a bit of Kimberlé Crenshaw — the academic who coined the term “intersectionality” to describe how different forms of oppression intersect. Or, as we have seen on Twitter, there are those who quote a few lines from Martin Luther King.
Liberal intellectuals will happily make decisions about race in the workplace, argue with people of colour about race, sit on boards or committees or even become race sponsors without doing any work to understand their whiteness and how it has an impact on their assumptions and treatment of racially minoritised groups.
There are, of course, white people who imagine themselves anti-racist while doing little if anything to impact positively on the experiences of people of colour. As the author Marlon James and others have stated, being anti-racist requires action: it is not a passive state of existence.
Becoming aware of whiteness and challenging passivity or denial is an essential component of becoming a white ally. Being an ally means being willing to become the antithesis of everything white people have learnt about being white. Being humble and learning to listen actively are crucial, as a useful short video from the National Union of Students points out. This, and other videos, are easily found on YouTube and are a very accessible way for individuals and teams to go about educating themselves about allyship.
White allies do not pretend the world is living in perfect harmony, nor do they ignore or trivialise race. If the only senior Asian woman is about to leave an organisation where Asian women are under-represented and she is good at her job, white allies will flag these points to senior management and be keen to check whether there is anything that can be done to keep her. White allies are not quiet bystanders to potential or actual racial injustice.
Allyship also means letting go of the assumption that white people get to determine what constitutes racism. This is highlighted by the black lesbian feminist writer and journalist Kesiena Boom, who has written a 100-point guide to how white people can make life less frustrating for people of colour. (Sample point: “Avoid phrases like “But I have a Black friend! I can’t be racist!” You know that’s BS, as well as we do.”)
Active allyship takes effort
Being an ally means seeing race and acknowledging that white people have a racial identity. In practical terms, it means when we talk about gender, acknowledging that white women’s experiences overlap with but are different to those of women of colour. White women may be disadvantaged because of their gender, but they are privileged because of their racial identity. When we talk about social mobility, employment, education, health, policing and even which news is reported and how, race plays a role. Usually it is white people who are shaping the discourse and white people who are making the decisions.
This is evident even when white people promise commitment to racial justice in the workplace. It is usually white people who make the decision about who to appoint, the resources they will be given, what they can say and do. In their book Acting white? Rethinking race in post-racial America, US scholars Devon W Carbado and Mitu Gulati argue that white institutions tend to favour and progress people of colour who are “racially palatable” and who will do little to disrupt organisational norms. Those who are more closely aligned to their racial identity are unlikely to be seen as a fit and are, consequently, less likely to succeed.
Being a white ally takes work. It is a constant process, not a static point one arrives at and can say the job is complete. It is why despite equalities legislation, there remains a need for organisations — many of them small charities operating on tight budgets — such as the Runnymede Trust, StopWatch, InQuest, Race on the Agenda, brap and Equally Ours. Their publications offer useful resources and information about racial justice in the workplace as well as in other sectors.
There is, of course, a dark perversity to white allyship that is not often mentioned in most debates about racial justice. White allyship means divesting from the very histories, structures, systems, assumptions and behaviours that keep white people in positions of power. And, generally, power is to be maintained, not relinquished.
Showing posts with label racism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label racism. Show all posts
Thursday 4 June 2020
Sunday 24 May 2020
Wednesday 9 October 2019
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
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.
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.
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.
Thursday 4 April 2019
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.
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.
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.”
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.
Thursday 21 February 2019
Shamima Begum has a right to British citizenship, whether you like it or not
Sajid Javid makes Britain look weak by refusing to take back a groomed teenager – nationality doesn’t depend on whim writes Gary Younge in The Guardian
When I was 16 I stopped off in Holland, during a camping holiday with a friend. We bought as much marijuana as we could and smoked it all in an afternoon. Sat behind a housing estate in the border town of Nijmegen, we giggled, rambled and lay around until the local police came. They took us back to the campsite (we found the fact that they spoke Dutch hilarious), where we were asked for our passports and train tickets. They already had our number: a couple of idiots out of their minds and out of their depth. They told us to get on the next train in the direction of the port. We’d stopped laughing by then. We went home.
Adolescents do stupid things. Often they know they are stupid at the time. But what’s stupid is often also exhilarating, particularly when the consequences are either not known or have not even been fully considered.
Shamima Begum, from Bethnal Green in London’s East End, did something extraordinarily stupid and extremely dangerous when she was 15. She, and two girl friends from school, told their parents they were going out for the day, and went to Turkey and joined Islamic State instead. Shamima lived in Raqqa, married a Dutch convert, had two children, both of whom died, and got pregnant with a third. She left Raqqa when it fell, saw her husband surrender to Syrian fighters and now sits in a refugee camp with her newborn son. Still only 19, Begum says she wants to come home to Britain. The home secretary, Sajid Javid, has revoked her citizenship. He has said she cannot come home because she is no longer British and that she should instead go to Bangladesh, where her parents are from. She has never been there; Bangladesh says it won’t take her.
A couple of weeks earlier Javid successfully deported several people to a country many did not know, according to David Lammy MP. A plane to Jamaica chartered by the Home Office left with 29 people on it. Of the more than 50 originally scheduled to go, 13 came to Britain as children, 11 had indefinite leave to remain and one had a British passport. Between them they would leave 36 children behind. Javid claims they had all committed serious crimes. One, who came to Britain when he was 14, had been convicted for dangerous driving. Among several to receive a last-minute reprieve was an ex-soldier; another had applied to remain under the Windrush scheme.
While the issue of Begum’s return, the Windrush scandal and the plight of these Jamaican deportees appear quite different, they in fact centre on the same two questions: what does it mean to be a citizen of this country? And how easily can the rights of citizenship be withheld? Evidently, the weight of the response and the burden of proof fall more heavily on those who are black and brown, whether we were born here or not.
Equal access to justice, regardless of race, has always been an issue when it comes to British citizens. But the right of British citizens to actually exist here, regardless of their race, has never felt more contingent. For those of us whose parents hail from elsewhere, our right to be here seems to depend on anything from what we think to whether and how we transgress. We must prove good character not to get here but to stay here.
Javid’s claim that allowing Begum to return might compromise public safety is not completely baseless. In August an 18-year-old woman was convicted of plotting to bomb the British Museum, along with her mum, sister and a friend.
Begum does not seem particularly remorseful. She said she knew what Isis did, including beheadings, and wasn’t troubled by it. “From what I heard, Islamically that is all allowed, so I was OK with it.”
In another interview she said: “When I saw my first severed head in a bin it didn’t faze me at all. It was from a captured fighter seized on the battlefield, an enemy of Islam.” It appears she doesn’t want to return because she now thinks joining Isis was wrong, but because Isis has, for now, been defeated and she wants her baby to survive. But the home secretary’s case is hardly watertight either. Begum has expressed regret. She said: “I was hoping Britain would understand I made a mistake, a very big mistake, because I was young and naive.” Of Isis-controlled Raqqa, she has remarked: “There was so much oppression and corruption that I don’t think they deserved victory.” We don’t know if she fought, but given that she had three children in four years it’s reasonable to guess she didn’t. She now says all she wants is a “quiet life with her baby”.
The risks are as much a test for us as they are for her. The notion that Britain could not handle her, could not show her a better future, could not try her, convict her, reorient her or support her, is worse than pathetic. Far from making Javid look strong, it manages to make Britain look both callous and weak. A government that thinks it can take on the world with Brexit can’t take back a bereaved teenaged mother with fundamentalist delusions.
Moreover, the risk does not obviate two crucial facts in this case. First and foremost, she is a citizen. That means something. Or at least it should. Citizenship is not about character. It is not about risk or regret. It is about rights and responsibilities. That’s as true for Stephen Lawrence’s killers as it is for Begum or the victims of the ongoing Windrush scandal. It applies to everyone who qualifies or it does not apply. It is not a status to be trifled with in cavalier fashion for the momentary advance of a political career. Whatever the prime minister feels about “citizens of the world”, the state should not be actively in the business of creating citizens of nowhere. A home secretary should know this, not least because last year his own department produced a report that presaged almost precisely Begum’s situation. Imagining the government response if a British woman flees Isis-held territory with a newborn baby, the Home Office report suggests “a police investigation”, assistance “reintegrating into society”, “sessions with a specially trained deradicalisation mentor” and “appropriate measures” to “safeguard the child’s welfare”. Nowhere does it mention stripping her of her citizenship.
Second, when Begum went to Syria she was a child. She must take personal responsibility for what she did. But our society understands that we have collective responsibility for children – it’s why we have child services and youth courts. We, as a society, should in some way be held accountable for how a 15-year-old girl went from watching Keeping Up With the Kardashians to joining a terrorist cult in a war zone. Begum was 15 when she did a reprehensible thing; Javid is 49. What’s his excuse?
When I was 16 I stopped off in Holland, during a camping holiday with a friend. We bought as much marijuana as we could and smoked it all in an afternoon. Sat behind a housing estate in the border town of Nijmegen, we giggled, rambled and lay around until the local police came. They took us back to the campsite (we found the fact that they spoke Dutch hilarious), where we were asked for our passports and train tickets. They already had our number: a couple of idiots out of their minds and out of their depth. They told us to get on the next train in the direction of the port. We’d stopped laughing by then. We went home.
Adolescents do stupid things. Often they know they are stupid at the time. But what’s stupid is often also exhilarating, particularly when the consequences are either not known or have not even been fully considered.
Shamima Begum, from Bethnal Green in London’s East End, did something extraordinarily stupid and extremely dangerous when she was 15. She, and two girl friends from school, told their parents they were going out for the day, and went to Turkey and joined Islamic State instead. Shamima lived in Raqqa, married a Dutch convert, had two children, both of whom died, and got pregnant with a third. She left Raqqa when it fell, saw her husband surrender to Syrian fighters and now sits in a refugee camp with her newborn son. Still only 19, Begum says she wants to come home to Britain. The home secretary, Sajid Javid, has revoked her citizenship. He has said she cannot come home because she is no longer British and that she should instead go to Bangladesh, where her parents are from. She has never been there; Bangladesh says it won’t take her.
A couple of weeks earlier Javid successfully deported several people to a country many did not know, according to David Lammy MP. A plane to Jamaica chartered by the Home Office left with 29 people on it. Of the more than 50 originally scheduled to go, 13 came to Britain as children, 11 had indefinite leave to remain and one had a British passport. Between them they would leave 36 children behind. Javid claims they had all committed serious crimes. One, who came to Britain when he was 14, had been convicted for dangerous driving. Among several to receive a last-minute reprieve was an ex-soldier; another had applied to remain under the Windrush scheme.
While the issue of Begum’s return, the Windrush scandal and the plight of these Jamaican deportees appear quite different, they in fact centre on the same two questions: what does it mean to be a citizen of this country? And how easily can the rights of citizenship be withheld? Evidently, the weight of the response and the burden of proof fall more heavily on those who are black and brown, whether we were born here or not.
Equal access to justice, regardless of race, has always been an issue when it comes to British citizens. But the right of British citizens to actually exist here, regardless of their race, has never felt more contingent. For those of us whose parents hail from elsewhere, our right to be here seems to depend on anything from what we think to whether and how we transgress. We must prove good character not to get here but to stay here.
Javid’s claim that allowing Begum to return might compromise public safety is not completely baseless. In August an 18-year-old woman was convicted of plotting to bomb the British Museum, along with her mum, sister and a friend.
Begum does not seem particularly remorseful. She said she knew what Isis did, including beheadings, and wasn’t troubled by it. “From what I heard, Islamically that is all allowed, so I was OK with it.”
In another interview she said: “When I saw my first severed head in a bin it didn’t faze me at all. It was from a captured fighter seized on the battlefield, an enemy of Islam.” It appears she doesn’t want to return because she now thinks joining Isis was wrong, but because Isis has, for now, been defeated and she wants her baby to survive. But the home secretary’s case is hardly watertight either. Begum has expressed regret. She said: “I was hoping Britain would understand I made a mistake, a very big mistake, because I was young and naive.” Of Isis-controlled Raqqa, she has remarked: “There was so much oppression and corruption that I don’t think they deserved victory.” We don’t know if she fought, but given that she had three children in four years it’s reasonable to guess she didn’t. She now says all she wants is a “quiet life with her baby”.
The risks are as much a test for us as they are for her. The notion that Britain could not handle her, could not show her a better future, could not try her, convict her, reorient her or support her, is worse than pathetic. Far from making Javid look strong, it manages to make Britain look both callous and weak. A government that thinks it can take on the world with Brexit can’t take back a bereaved teenaged mother with fundamentalist delusions.
Moreover, the risk does not obviate two crucial facts in this case. First and foremost, she is a citizen. That means something. Or at least it should. Citizenship is not about character. It is not about risk or regret. It is about rights and responsibilities. That’s as true for Stephen Lawrence’s killers as it is for Begum or the victims of the ongoing Windrush scandal. It applies to everyone who qualifies or it does not apply. It is not a status to be trifled with in cavalier fashion for the momentary advance of a political career. Whatever the prime minister feels about “citizens of the world”, the state should not be actively in the business of creating citizens of nowhere. A home secretary should know this, not least because last year his own department produced a report that presaged almost precisely Begum’s situation. Imagining the government response if a British woman flees Isis-held territory with a newborn baby, the Home Office report suggests “a police investigation”, assistance “reintegrating into society”, “sessions with a specially trained deradicalisation mentor” and “appropriate measures” to “safeguard the child’s welfare”. Nowhere does it mention stripping her of her citizenship.
Second, when Begum went to Syria she was a child. She must take personal responsibility for what she did. But our society understands that we have collective responsibility for children – it’s why we have child services and youth courts. We, as a society, should in some way be held accountable for how a 15-year-old girl went from watching Keeping Up With the Kardashians to joining a terrorist cult in a war zone. Begum was 15 when she did a reprehensible thing; Javid is 49. What’s his excuse?
Saturday 29 December 2018
Monday 3 December 2018
The Stark Evidence of Everyday Racial Bias in Britain
Poll commissioned to launch series on unconscious bias shows gulf in negative experiences by ethnicity
Robert Booth and Aamna Mohdin in The Guardian
Half of the respondents from a minority background said they believed people sometimes did not realise they were treating them differently because of their ethnicity, suggesting unconscious bias, as well as more explicit and deliberate racism, has a major influence on the way millions of people who were born in the UK or moved here are treated.
As well as demonstrating how much more likely ethnic minorities are to report negative experiences that did not feature an explicitly racist element, the poll found that one in eight had heard racist language directed at them in the month before they were surveyed.
It also found troubling levels of concern about bias in the workplace, with 57% of minorities saying they felt they had to work harder to succeed in Britain because of their ethnicity, and 40% saying they earned less or had worse employment prospects for the same reason.
The poll persistently found evidence that the gap in negative experiences was not confined to the past. For example, one in seven people from ethnic minorities said they had been treated as a potential shoplifter in the last month, against one in 25 white people.
The findings come a year after Theresa May published a race disparity audit that identified differences in living standards, housing, work, policing and health. The prime minister pledged to “confront these issues we have identified” but admitted: “We still have a way to go if we’re truly going to have a country that does work for everyone.”
In October the government said employers could be forced to reveal salary figures broken down by ethnicity, as they already do for gender, in a move that lawyers predicted could lead to a flood of employment tribunal cases. Black, Asian and minority ethnic unemployment stands at 6.3%, compared with 3.6% for white people.
Bangladeshi and Pakistani households had an average income of nearly £9,000 a year less than white British households between 2014 and 2016, and the gap between white and black Caribbean and black British families was £5,500.
One of the few positive findings was that just over half of those surveyed said they had either never experienced someone directing racist language at them, or had not done so for at least five years.
However, the results raise concerns over efforts to forge a multicultural British identity, with 41% saying someone had assumed they were not British at some point in the last year because of their ethnicity.
People from minorities are twice as likely as white people to have been mistaken for staff in a restaurant, bar or shop. One in five said they had felt the need to alter their voice and appearance in the last year because of their ethnicity.
The effects of bias are not the same for all ethnicities. Half of black and mixed-race people felt they had been unfairly overlooked for a promotion or job application, compared with 41% of people from Asian backgrounds. Black people were more likely to feel they had to work harder to succeed because of their ethnicity.
Muslims living in Britain – a large minority at around 2.8 million people – are more likely to have negative experiences than other religious groups. They are more likely than Christians, people with no religion and other smaller religions to be stopped by the police, left out of social functions at work or college and find that people seem not to want to sit next to them on public transport.
A government spokesperson said the prime minister was determined that people of different ethnicities were treated equally. The spokesperson said: “One year on from [the race disparity audit’s] launch, we are delivering on our commitment to explain or change ethnic disparities in all areas of society including a £90m programme to help tackle youth unemployment and a Race at Work charter to help create greater opportunities for ethnic minority employees at work. We have also launched a consultation on mandatory ethnicity pay reporting.”
Robert Booth and Aamna Mohdin in The Guardian
Half of black, Asian and minority ethnic respondents in the poll said they believed people sometimes did not realise they were treating them differently because of their ethnicity. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod for the Guardian
The extent of racial bias faced by black, Asian and minority ethnic citizens in 21st-century Britain has been laid bare in an unprecedented study showing a gulf in how people of different ethnicities are treated in their daily lives.
A survey for the Guardian of 1,000 people from minority ethnic backgrounds found they were consistently more likely to have faced negative everyday experiences – all frequently associated with racism – than white people in a comparison poll.
The extent of racial bias faced by black, Asian and minority ethnic citizens in 21st-century Britain has been laid bare in an unprecedented study showing a gulf in how people of different ethnicities are treated in their daily lives.
A survey for the Guardian of 1,000 people from minority ethnic backgrounds found they were consistently more likely to have faced negative everyday experiences – all frequently associated with racism – than white people in a comparison poll.
The survey found that 43% of those from a minority ethnic background had been overlooked for a work promotion in a way that felt unfair in the last five years – more than twice the proportion of white people (18%) who reported the same experience.
The results show that ethnic minorities are three times as likely to have been thrown out of or denied entrance to a restaurant, bar or club in the last five years, and that more than two-thirds believe Britain has a problem with racism.
The ICM poll, commissioned to launch a week-long investigation into bias in Britain, focuses on everyday experiences of prejudice that could be a result of unconscious bias – quick decisions conditioned by our backgrounds, cultural environment and personal experiences.
It is believed to be the first major piece of UK public polling to focus on ethnic minorities’ experiences of unconscious bias, and comes amid wider concerns about a shortage of research capturing the views of minority groups.
The poll found comprehensive evidence to support concerns that unconscious bias has a negative effect on the lives of Britain’s 8.5 million people from minority backgrounds that is not revealed by typical data on racism. For example:
• 38% of people from ethnic minorities said they had been wrongly suspected of shoplifting in the last five years, compared with 14% of white people, with black people and women in particular more likely to be wrongly suspected.
• Minorities were more than twice as likely to have encountered abuse or rudeness from a stranger in the last week.
• 53% of people from a minority background believed they had been treated differently because of their hair, clothes or appearance, compared with 29% of white people.
The Runnymede Trust, a racial equality thinktank, described the findings as “stark” and said they illustrated “everyday micro-aggressions” that had profound effects on Britain’s social structure.
“Racism and discrimination for BAME people and minority faith groups isn’t restricted to one area of life,” said Zubaida Haque, the trust’s deputy director. “If you’re not welcome in a restaurant as a guest because of the colour of your skin, you’re unlikely to get a job in the restaurant for the same reason. Structural and institutional racism is difficult to identify or prove, but it has much more far-reaching effects on people’s life chances.”
David Lammy, the Labour MP for Tottenham, said the findings were upsetting. “Racial prejudice continues to weigh on the lives of black and ethnic minority people in the UK. While we all share the same hard-won rights, our lived experience and opportunity can vary,” he said.
Recalling being stopped and searched when he was 12, Lammy said: “Stereotyping is not just something that happens, stereotyping is something that is felt, and it feels like sheer terror, confusion and shame.”
The results show that ethnic minorities are three times as likely to have been thrown out of or denied entrance to a restaurant, bar or club in the last five years, and that more than two-thirds believe Britain has a problem with racism.
The ICM poll, commissioned to launch a week-long investigation into bias in Britain, focuses on everyday experiences of prejudice that could be a result of unconscious bias – quick decisions conditioned by our backgrounds, cultural environment and personal experiences.
It is believed to be the first major piece of UK public polling to focus on ethnic minorities’ experiences of unconscious bias, and comes amid wider concerns about a shortage of research capturing the views of minority groups.
The poll found comprehensive evidence to support concerns that unconscious bias has a negative effect on the lives of Britain’s 8.5 million people from minority backgrounds that is not revealed by typical data on racism. For example:
• 38% of people from ethnic minorities said they had been wrongly suspected of shoplifting in the last five years, compared with 14% of white people, with black people and women in particular more likely to be wrongly suspected.
• Minorities were more than twice as likely to have encountered abuse or rudeness from a stranger in the last week.
• 53% of people from a minority background believed they had been treated differently because of their hair, clothes or appearance, compared with 29% of white people.
The Runnymede Trust, a racial equality thinktank, described the findings as “stark” and said they illustrated “everyday micro-aggressions” that had profound effects on Britain’s social structure.
“Racism and discrimination for BAME people and minority faith groups isn’t restricted to one area of life,” said Zubaida Haque, the trust’s deputy director. “If you’re not welcome in a restaurant as a guest because of the colour of your skin, you’re unlikely to get a job in the restaurant for the same reason. Structural and institutional racism is difficult to identify or prove, but it has much more far-reaching effects on people’s life chances.”
David Lammy, the Labour MP for Tottenham, said the findings were upsetting. “Racial prejudice continues to weigh on the lives of black and ethnic minority people in the UK. While we all share the same hard-won rights, our lived experience and opportunity can vary,” he said.
Recalling being stopped and searched when he was 12, Lammy said: “Stereotyping is not just something that happens, stereotyping is something that is felt, and it feels like sheer terror, confusion and shame.”
Half of the respondents from a minority background said they believed people sometimes did not realise they were treating them differently because of their ethnicity, suggesting unconscious bias, as well as more explicit and deliberate racism, has a major influence on the way millions of people who were born in the UK or moved here are treated.
As well as demonstrating how much more likely ethnic minorities are to report negative experiences that did not feature an explicitly racist element, the poll found that one in eight had heard racist language directed at them in the month before they were surveyed.
It also found troubling levels of concern about bias in the workplace, with 57% of minorities saying they felt they had to work harder to succeed in Britain because of their ethnicity, and 40% saying they earned less or had worse employment prospects for the same reason.
The poll persistently found evidence that the gap in negative experiences was not confined to the past. For example, one in seven people from ethnic minorities said they had been treated as a potential shoplifter in the last month, against one in 25 white people.
The findings come a year after Theresa May published a race disparity audit that identified differences in living standards, housing, work, policing and health. The prime minister pledged to “confront these issues we have identified” but admitted: “We still have a way to go if we’re truly going to have a country that does work for everyone.”
In October the government said employers could be forced to reveal salary figures broken down by ethnicity, as they already do for gender, in a move that lawyers predicted could lead to a flood of employment tribunal cases. Black, Asian and minority ethnic unemployment stands at 6.3%, compared with 3.6% for white people.
Bangladeshi and Pakistani households had an average income of nearly £9,000 a year less than white British households between 2014 and 2016, and the gap between white and black Caribbean and black British families was £5,500.
One of the few positive findings was that just over half of those surveyed said they had either never experienced someone directing racist language at them, or had not done so for at least five years.
However, the results raise concerns over efforts to forge a multicultural British identity, with 41% saying someone had assumed they were not British at some point in the last year because of their ethnicity.
People from minorities are twice as likely as white people to have been mistaken for staff in a restaurant, bar or shop. One in five said they had felt the need to alter their voice and appearance in the last year because of their ethnicity.
The effects of bias are not the same for all ethnicities. Half of black and mixed-race people felt they had been unfairly overlooked for a promotion or job application, compared with 41% of people from Asian backgrounds. Black people were more likely to feel they had to work harder to succeed because of their ethnicity.
Muslims living in Britain – a large minority at around 2.8 million people – are more likely to have negative experiences than other religious groups. They are more likely than Christians, people with no religion and other smaller religions to be stopped by the police, left out of social functions at work or college and find that people seem not to want to sit next to them on public transport.
A government spokesperson said the prime minister was determined that people of different ethnicities were treated equally. The spokesperson said: “One year on from [the race disparity audit’s] launch, we are delivering on our commitment to explain or change ethnic disparities in all areas of society including a £90m programme to help tackle youth unemployment and a Race at Work charter to help create greater opportunities for ethnic minority employees at work. We have also launched a consultation on mandatory ethnicity pay reporting.”
Tuesday 20 November 2018
Why did Andrew Marr lose it with Shami Chakrabarti?
The establishment is throwing its toys out of the pram, with old-guard political broadcasters struggling to cope with change writes Faiza Shaheen in The Guardian
BBC viewers used to the genteel, unflappable Andrew Marr might have had a shock on Sunday morning when the veteran broadcaster suddenly snapped. His guest, Shami Chakrabarti, explaining how Labour would follow through the Brexit referendum result, said: “I don’t know about you, Andrew, but I’m a democrat.” To which he barked, jabbing his crib notes in her face: “Don’t try and patronise me – I’m as much a democrat as you are!”
Change is hard to deal with – especially, it seems, for old-guard political broadcasters. Right now the number of women and people of colour coming forward and challenging the establishment is growing and the establishment is not taking it at all well. Yes, we can read their behaviour as bullying and obviously unacceptable, but Marr’s retort to Chakrabarti is just another sign that they have their knickers in a twist.
As well as Marr’s aggression, in recent weeks we’ve had Andrew Neil tweeting an outrageous insult about the award-winning journalist Carole Cadwalladr, Adam Boulton retweeting people who chastise me for sounding like I’m from east London, and Piers Morgan telling people of colour they should leave the country if they don’t take more pride in Britain.
The more I find myself in prestigious TV green rooms, traditionally not the spaces for women of colour from a working-class background, the more I see how establishment biases play out both on and off screen.
The first time I went on the Andrew Marr Show I was struck by the “in-crowd” cosiness of it all. In the green room the guests’ conversation consisted of showing off about who’d most recently had dinner with David Davis. On another occasion a Tory grandee completely ignored me. He said hello and goodbye to everyone else (all older, middle-class and white) on the panel and just looked straight past me as if I were invisible. This was particularly weird given that I directly addressed him while we were on air.
It’s no coincidence that before before last year’s election Diane Abbott, a black woman, received more online hate than any other politician
Sometimes the bias is more subtle. The organisation I run, Class, is often introduced on air as a leftwing or trade-union-supported thinktank. This doesn’t bother me – we’re transparent about where we get our money from and our political stance. However, it does irk me that my counterparts on the right are almost never introduced with their political bias upfront – and they are rarely transparent about where their funding comes from, which means that their vested interests are never called out.
And let’s consider why Marr might have had so much latent anger towards Chakrabarti: could it be that he no longer understands the world around him? He probably never imagined the rise of Jeremy Corbyn, whose shadow cabinet includes more working-class people, women and ethnic minorities than any before.
We cannot let the media dinosaurs – people who should be taking a long hard look at their prejudices – make us feel we’re the ones in the wrong. And this has real-world consequences: it’s no coincidence that before last year’s election Diane Abbott, a black woman, received more online hate than any other politician.
Nowadays I’ve taken to drawing satisfaction when seeing outbursts such as Marr’s: it’s the privileged white-male equivalent of throwing toys out of the pram, and shouting: “It isn’t fair!” We need to fight their attitudes and demand fairer representation, but we should also take pride in the fact that they’re finally being forced to acknowledge us.
BBC viewers used to the genteel, unflappable Andrew Marr might have had a shock on Sunday morning when the veteran broadcaster suddenly snapped. His guest, Shami Chakrabarti, explaining how Labour would follow through the Brexit referendum result, said: “I don’t know about you, Andrew, but I’m a democrat.” To which he barked, jabbing his crib notes in her face: “Don’t try and patronise me – I’m as much a democrat as you are!”
Change is hard to deal with – especially, it seems, for old-guard political broadcasters. Right now the number of women and people of colour coming forward and challenging the establishment is growing and the establishment is not taking it at all well. Yes, we can read their behaviour as bullying and obviously unacceptable, but Marr’s retort to Chakrabarti is just another sign that they have their knickers in a twist.
As well as Marr’s aggression, in recent weeks we’ve had Andrew Neil tweeting an outrageous insult about the award-winning journalist Carole Cadwalladr, Adam Boulton retweeting people who chastise me for sounding like I’m from east London, and Piers Morgan telling people of colour they should leave the country if they don’t take more pride in Britain.
The more I find myself in prestigious TV green rooms, traditionally not the spaces for women of colour from a working-class background, the more I see how establishment biases play out both on and off screen.
The first time I went on the Andrew Marr Show I was struck by the “in-crowd” cosiness of it all. In the green room the guests’ conversation consisted of showing off about who’d most recently had dinner with David Davis. On another occasion a Tory grandee completely ignored me. He said hello and goodbye to everyone else (all older, middle-class and white) on the panel and just looked straight past me as if I were invisible. This was particularly weird given that I directly addressed him while we were on air.
It’s no coincidence that before before last year’s election Diane Abbott, a black woman, received more online hate than any other politician
Sometimes the bias is more subtle. The organisation I run, Class, is often introduced on air as a leftwing or trade-union-supported thinktank. This doesn’t bother me – we’re transparent about where we get our money from and our political stance. However, it does irk me that my counterparts on the right are almost never introduced with their political bias upfront – and they are rarely transparent about where their funding comes from, which means that their vested interests are never called out.
And let’s consider why Marr might have had so much latent anger towards Chakrabarti: could it be that he no longer understands the world around him? He probably never imagined the rise of Jeremy Corbyn, whose shadow cabinet includes more working-class people, women and ethnic minorities than any before.
We cannot let the media dinosaurs – people who should be taking a long hard look at their prejudices – make us feel we’re the ones in the wrong. And this has real-world consequences: it’s no coincidence that before last year’s election Diane Abbott, a black woman, received more online hate than any other politician.
Nowadays I’ve taken to drawing satisfaction when seeing outbursts such as Marr’s: it’s the privileged white-male equivalent of throwing toys out of the pram, and shouting: “It isn’t fair!” We need to fight their attitudes and demand fairer representation, but we should also take pride in the fact that they’re finally being forced to acknowledge us.
Saturday 11 November 2017
How colonial violence came home: the ugly truth of the first world war
Pankaj Mishra in The Guardian
Today on the Western Front,” the German sociologist Max Weber wrote in September 1917, there “stands a dross of African and Asiatic savages and all the world’s rabble of thieves and lumpens.” Weber was referring to the millions of Indian, African, Arab, Chinese and Vietnamese soldiers and labourers, who were then fighting with British and French forces in Europe, as well as in several ancillary theatres of the first world war.
Faced with manpower shortages, British imperialists had recruited up to 1.4 million Indian soldiers. France enlisted nearly 500,000 troops from its colonies in Africa and Indochina. Nearly 400,000 African Americans were also inducted into US forces. The first world war’s truly unknown soldiers are these non-white combatants.
Ho Chi Minh, who spent much of the war in Europe, denounced what he saw as the press-ganging of subordinate peoples. Before the start of the Great War, Ho wrote, they were seen as “nothing but dirty Negroes … good for no more than pulling rickshaws”. But when Europe’s slaughter machines needed “human fodder”, they were called into service. Other anti-imperialists, such as Mohandas Gandhi and WEB Du Bois, vigorously supported the war aims of their white overlords, hoping to secure dignity for their compatriots in the aftermath. But they did not realise what Weber’s remarks revealed: that Europeans had quickly come to fear and hate physical proximity to their non-white subjects – their “new-caught sullen peoples”, as Kipling called colonised Asians and Africans in his 1899 poem The White Man’s Burden.
These colonial subjects remain marginal in popular histories of the war. They also go largely uncommemorated by the hallowed rituals of Remembrance Day. The ceremonial walk to the Cenotaph at Whitehall by all major British dignitaries, the two minutes of silence broken by the Last Post, the laying of poppy wreaths and the singing of the national anthem – all of these uphold the first world war as Europe’s stupendous act of self-harm. For the past century, the war has been remembered as a great rupture in modern western civilisation, an inexplicable catastrophe that highly civilised European powers sleepwalked into after the “long peace” of the 19th century – a catastrophe whose unresolved issues provoked yet another calamitous conflict between liberal democracy and authoritarianism, in which the former finally triumphed, returning Europe to its proper equilibrium.
With more than eight million dead and more than 21 million wounded, the war was the bloodiest in European history until that second conflagration on the continent ended in 1945. War memorials in Europe’s remotest villages, as well as the cemeteries of Verdun, the Marne, Passchendaele, and the Somme enshrine a heartbreakingly extensive experience of bereavement. In many books and films, the prewar years appear as an age of prosperity and contentment in Europe, with the summer of 1913 featuring as the last golden summer.
But today, as racism and xenophobia return to the centre of western politics, it is time to remember that the background to the first world war was decades of racist imperialism whose consequences still endure. It is something that is not remembered much, if at all, on Remembrance Day.
At the time of the first world war, all western powers upheld a racial hierarchy built around a shared project of territorial expansion. In 1917, the US president, Woodrow Wilson, baldly stated his intention, “to keep the white race strong against the yellow” and to preserve “white civilisation and its domination of the planet”. Eugenicist ideas of racial selection were everywhere in the mainstream, and the anxiety expressed in papers like the Daily Mail, which worried about white women coming into contact with “natives who are worse than brutes when their passions are aroused”, was widely shared across the west. Anti-miscegenation laws existed in most US states. In the years leading up to 1914, prohibitions on sexual relations between European women and black men (though not between European men and African women) were enforced across European colonies in Africa. The presence of the “dirty Negroes” in Europe after 1914 seemed to be violating a firm taboo.
Injured Indian soldiers being cared for by the Red Cross in England in March 1915. Photograph: De Agostini Picture Library/Biblioteca Ambrosiana
Senegalese soldiers serving in the French army on the western front in June 1917. Photograph: Galerie Bilderwelt/Getty Images
In the early 20th century, the popularity of social Darwinism had created a consensus that nations should be seen similarly to biological organisms, which risked extinction or decay if they failed to expel alien bodies and achieve “living space” for their own citizens. Pseudo-scientific theories of biological difference between races posited a world in which all races were engaged in an international struggle for wealth and power. Whiteness became “the new religion”, as Du Bois witnessed, offering security amid disorienting economic and technological shifts, and a promise of power and authority over a majority of the human population.
The resurgence of these supremacist views today in the west – alongside the far more widespread stigmatisation of entire populations as culturally incompatible with white western peoples – should suggest that the first world war was not, in fact, a profound rupture with Europe’s own history. Rather it was, as Liang Qichao, China’s foremost modern intellectual, was already insisting in 1918, a “mediating passage that connects the past and the future”.
The liturgies of Remembrance Day, and evocations of the beautiful long summer of 1913, deny both the grim reality that preceded the war and the way it has persisted into the 21st century. Our complex task during the war’s centenary is to identify the ways in which that past has infiltrated our present, and how it threatens to shape the future: how the terminal weakening of white civilisation’s domination, and the assertiveness of previously sullen peoples, has released some very old tendencies and traits in the west.
Nearly a century after first world war ended, the experiences and perspectives of its non-European actors and observers remain largely obscure. Most accounts of the war uphold it as an essentially European affair: one in which the continent’s long peace is shattered by four years of carnage, and a long tradition of western rationalism is perverted.
Relatively little is known about how the war accelerated political struggles across Asia and Africa; how Arab and Turkish nationalists, Indian and Vietnamese anti-colonial activists found new opportunities in it; or how, while destroying old empires in Europe, the war turned Japan into a menacing imperialist power in Asia.
A broad account of the war that is attentive to political conflicts outside Europe can clarify the hyper-nationalism today of many Asian and African ruling elites, most conspicuously the Chinese regime, which presents itself as avengers of China’s century-long humiliation by the west.
Recent commemorations have made greater space for the non-European soldiers and battlefields of the first world war: altogether more than four million non-white men were mobilised into European and American armies, and fighting happened in places very remote from Europe – from Siberia and east Asia to the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa, and even the South Pacific islands. In Mesopotamia, Indian soldiers formed a majority of Allied manpower throughout the war. Neither Britain’s occupation of Mesopotamia nor its successful campaign in Palestine would have occurred without Indian assistance. Sikh soldiers even helped the Japanese to evict Germans from their Chinese colony of Qingdao.
Scholars have started to pay more attention to the nearly 140,000 Chinese and Vietnamese contract labourers hired by the British and French governments to maintain the war’s infrastructure, mostly digging trenches. We know more about how interwar Europe became host to a multitude of anticolonial movements; the east Asian expatriate community in Paris at one point included Zhou Enlai, later the premier of China, as well as Ho Chi Minh. Cruel mistreatment, in the form of segregation and slave labour, was the fate of many of these Asians and Africans in Europe. Deng Xiaoping, who arrived in France just after the war, later recalled “the humiliations” inflicted upon fellow Chinese by “the running dogs of capitalists”.
But in order to grasp the current homecoming of white supremacism in the west, we need an even deeper history – one that shows how whiteness became in the late 19th century the assurance of individual identity and dignity, as well as the basis of military and diplomatic alliances.
Such a history would show that the global racial order in the century preceding 1914 was one in which it was entirely natural for “uncivilised” peoples to be exterminated, terrorised, imprisoned, ostracised or radically re-engineered. Moreover, this entrenched system was not something incidental to the first world war, with no connections to the vicious way it was fought or to the brutalisation that made possible the horrors of the Holocaust. Rather, the extreme, lawless and often gratuitous violence of modern imperialism eventually boomeranged on its originators.
In this new history, Europe’s long peace is revealed as a time of unlimited wars in Asia, Africa and the Americas. These colonies emerge as the crucible where the sinister tactics of Europe’s brutal 20th-century wars – racial extermination, forced population transfers, contempt for civilian lives – were first forged. Contemporary historians of German colonialism (an expanding field of study) try to trace the Holocaust back to the mini-genocides Germans committed in their African colonies in the 1900s, where some key ideologies, such as Lebensraum, were also nurtured. But it is too easy to conclude, especially from an Anglo-American perspective, that Germany broke from the norms of civilisation to set a new standard of barbarity, strong-arming the rest of the world into an age of extremes. For there were deep continuities in the imperialist practices and racial assumptions of European and American powers.
Indeed, the mentalities of the western powers converged to a remarkable degree during the high noon of “whiteness” – what Du Bois, answering his own question about this highly desirable condition, memorably defined as “the ownership of the Earth for ever and ever”. For example, the German colonisation of south-west Africa, which was meant to solve the problem of overpopulation, was often assisted by the British, and all major western powers amicably sliced and shared the Chinese melon in the late 19th century. Any tensions that arose between those dividing the booty of Asia and Africa were defused largely peacefully, if at the expense of Asians and Africans.
Campaigners calling for the removal of a statue of British imperialist Cecil Rhodes (upper right) at Oriel College in Oxford. Photograph: Martin Godwin for the Guardian
This is because colonies had, by the late 19th century, come to be widely seen as indispensable relief-valves for domestic socio-economic pressures. Cecil Rhodes put the case for them with exemplary clarity in 1895 after an encounter with angry unemployed men in London’s East End. Imperialism, he declared, was a “solution for the social problem, ie in order to save the 40 million inhabitants of the United Kingdom from a bloody civil war, we colonial statesmen must acquire new lands to settle the surplus population, to provide new markets for the goods produced in the factories and mines”. In Rhodes’ view, “if you want to avoid civil war, you must become imperialists”.
Rhodes’ scramble for Africa’s gold fields helped trigger the second Boer war, during which the British, interning Afrikaner women and children, brought the term “concentration camp” into ordinary parlance. By the end of the war in 1902, it had become a “commonplace of history”, JA Hobson wrote, that “governments use national animosities, foreign wars and the glamour of empire-making in order to bemuse the popular mind and divert rising resentment against domestic abuses”.
With imperialism opening up a “panorama of vulgar pride and crude sensationalism”, ruling classes everywhere tried harder to “imperialise the nation”, as Arendt wrote. This project to “organise the nation for the looting of foreign territories and the permanent degradation of alien peoples” was quickly advanced through the newly established tabloid press. The Daily Mail, right from its inception in 1896, stoked vulgar pride in being white, British and superior to the brutish natives – just as it does today.
At the end of the war, Germany was stripped of its colonies and accused by the victorious imperial powers, entirely without irony, of ill-treating its natives in Africa. But such judgments, still made today to distinguish a “benign” British and American imperialism from the German, French, Dutch and Belgian versions, try to suppress the vigorous synergies of racist imperialism. Marlow, the narrator of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899), is clear-sighted about them: “All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz,” he says. And to the new-fangled modes of exterminating the brutes, he might have added.
In 1920, a year after condemning Germany for its crimes against Africans, the British devised aerial bombing as routine policy in their new Iraqi possession – the forerunner to today’s decade-long bombing and drone campaigns in west and south Asia. “The Arab and Kurd now know what real bombing means,” a 1924 report by a Royal Air Force officer put it. “They now know that within 45 minutes a full-sized village … can be practically wiped out and a third of its inhabitants killed or injured.” This officer was Arthur “Bomber” Harris, who in the second world war unleashed the firestorms of Hamburg and Dresden, and whose pioneering efforts in Iraq helped German theorising in the 1930s about der totale krieg (the total war).
It is often proposed that Europeans were indifferent to or absent-minded about their remote imperial possessions, and that only a few dyed-in-the-wool imperialists like Rhodes, Kipling and Lord Curzon cared enough about them. This makes racism seem like a minor problem that was aggravated by the arrival of Asian and African immigrants in post-1945 Europe. But the frenzy of jingoism with which Europe plunged into a bloodbath in 1914 speaks of a belligerent culture of imperial domination, a macho language of racial superiority, that had come to bolster national and individual self-esteem.
Italy actually joined Britain and France on the Allied side in 1915 in a fit of popular empire-mania (and promptly plunged into fascism after its imperialist cravings went unslaked). Italian writers and journalists, as well as politicians and businessmen, had lusted after imperial power and glory since the late 19th century. Italy had fervently scrambled for Africa, only to be ignominiously routed by Ethiopia in 1896. (Mussolini would avenge that in 1935 by dousing Ethiopians with poison gas.) In 1911, it saw an opportunity to detach Libya from the Ottoman empire. Coming after previous setbacks, its assault on the country, greenlighted by both Britain and France, was vicious and loudly cheered at home. News of the Italians’ atrocities, which included the first bombing from air in history, radicalised many Muslims across Asia and Africa. But public opinion in Italy remained implacably behind the imperial gamble.
Germany’s own militarism, commonly blamed for causing Europe’s death spiral between 1914 and 1918, seems less extraordinary when we consider that from the 1880s, many Germans in politics, business and academia, and such powerful lobby groups as the Pan-German League (Max Weber was briefly a member), had exhorted their rulers to achieve the imperial status of Britain and France. Furthermore, all Germany’s military engagements from 1871 to 1914 occurred outside Europe. These included punitive expeditions in the African colonies and one ambitious foray in 1900 in China, where Germany joined seven other European powers in a retaliatory expedition against young Chinese who had rebelled against western domination of the Middle Kingdom.
Troops under German command in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania (then part of German East Africa), circa 1914. Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Dispatching German troops to Asia, the Kaiser presented their mission as racial vengeance: “Give no pardon and take no prisoners,” he said, urging the soldiers to make sure that “no Chinese will ever again even dare to look askance at a German”. The crushing of the “Yellow Peril” (a phrase coined in the 1890s) was more or less complete by the time the Germans arrived. Nevertheless, between October 1900 and spring 1901 the Germans launched dozens of raids in the Chinese countryside that became notorious for their intense brutality.
One of the volunteers for the disciplinary force was Lt Gen Lothar von Trotha, who had made his reputation in Africa by slaughtering natives and incinerating villages. He called his policy “terrorism”, adding that it “can only help” to subdue the natives. In China, he despoiled Ming graves and presided over a few killings, but his real work lay ahead, in German South-West Africa (contemporary Namibia) where an anti-colonial uprising broke out in January 1904. In October of that year, Von Trotha ordered that members of the Herero community, including women and children, who had already been defeated militarily, were to be shot on sight and those escaping death were to be driven into the Omaheke Desert, where they would be left to die from exposure. An estimated 60,000-70,000 Herero people, out of a total of approximately 80,000, were eventually killed, and many more died in the desert from starvation. A second revolt against German rule in south-west Africa by the Nama people led to the demise, by 1908, of roughly half of their population.
Such proto-genocides became routine during the last years of European peace. Running the Congo Free State as his personal fief from 1885 to 1908, King Leopold II of Belgium reduced the local population by half, sending as many as eight million Africans to an early death. The American conquest of the Philippines between 1898 and 1902, to which Kipling dedicated The White Man’s Burden, took the lives of more than 200,000 civilians. The death toll perhaps seems less startling when one considers that 26 of the 30 US generals in the Philippines had fought in wars of annihilation against Native Americans at home. One of them, Brigadier General Jacob H Smith, explicitly stated in his order to the troops that “I want no prisoners. I wish you to kill and burn. The more you kill and burn the better it will please me”. In a Senate hearing on the atrocities in the Philippines, General Arthur MacArthur (father of Douglas) referred to the “magnificent Aryan peoples” he belonged to and the “unity of the race” he felt compelled to uphold.
The modern history of violence shows that ostensibly staunch foes have never been reluctant to borrow murderous ideas from one another. To take only one instance, the American elite’s ruthlessness with blacks and Native Americans greatly impressed the earliest generation of German liberal imperialists, decades before Hitler also came to admire the US’s unequivocally racist policies of nationality and immigration. The Nazis sought inspiration from Jim Crow legislation in the US south, which makes Charlottesville, Virginia, a fitting recent venue for the unfurling of swastika banners and chants of “blood and soil”.
In light of this shared history of racial violence, it seems odd that we continue to portray the first world war as a battle between democracy and authoritarianism, as a seminal and unexpected calamity. The Indian writer Aurobindo Ghose was one among many anticolonial thinkers who predicted, even before the outbreak of war, that “vaunting, aggressive, dominant Europe” was already under “a sentence of death”, awaiting “annihilation” – much as Liang Qichao could see, in 1918, that the war would prove to be a bridge connecting Europe’s past of imperial violence to its future of merciless fratricide.
These shrewd assessments were not Oriental wisdom or African clairvoyance. Many subordinate peoples simply realised, well before Arendt published The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951, that peace in the metropolitan west depended too much on outsourcing war to the colonies.
The experience of mass death and destruction, suffered by most Europeans only after 1914, was first widely known in Asia and Africa, where land and resources were forcefully usurped, economic and cultural infrastructure systematically destroyed, and entire populations eliminated with the help of up-to-date bureaucracies and technologies. Europe’s equilibrium was parasitic for too long on disequilibrium elsewhere.
In the end, Asia and Africa could not remain a safely remote venue for Europe’s wars of aggrandisement in the late 19th and 20th century. Populations in Europe eventually suffered the great violence that had long been inflicted on Asians and Africans. As Arendt warned, violence administered for the sake of power “turns into a destructive principle that will not stop until there is nothing left to violate”.
In our own time, nothing better demonstrates this ruinous logic of lawless violence, which corrupts both public and private morality, than the heavily racialised war on terror. It presumes a sub-human enemy who must be “smoked out” at home and abroad – and it has licensed the use of torture and extrajudicial execution, even against western citizens.
But, as Arendt predicted, its failures have only produced an even greater dependence on violence, a proliferation of undeclared wars and new battlefields, a relentless assault on civil rights at home – and an exacerbated psychology of domination, presently manifest in Donald Trump’s threats to trash the nuclear deal with Iran and unleash on North Korea “fire and fury like the world has never seen”.
It was always an illusion to suppose that “civilised” peoples could remain immune, at home, to the destruction of morality and law in their wars against barbarians abroad. But that illusion, long cherished by the self-styled defenders of western civilisation, has now been shattered, with racist movements ascendant in Europe and the US, often applauded by the white supremacist in the White House, who is making sure there is nothing left to violate.
The white nationalists have junked the old rhetoric of liberal internationalism, the preferred language of the western political and media establishment for decades. Instead of claiming to make the world safe for democracy, they nakedly assert the cultural unity of the white race against an existential threat posed by swarthy foreigners, whether these are citizens, immigrants, refugees, asylum-seekers or terrorists.
But the global racial order that for centuries bestowed power, identity, security and status on its beneficiaries has finally begun to break down. Not even war with China, or ethnic cleansing in the west, will restore to whiteness its ownership of the Earth for ever and ever. Regaining imperial power and glory has already proven to be a treacherous escapist fantasy – devastating the Middle East and parts of Asia and Africa while bringing terrorism back to the streets of Europe and America – not to mention ushering Britain towards Brexit.
No rousing quasi-imperialist ventures abroad can mask the chasms of class and education, or divert the masses, at home. Consequently, the social problem appears insoluble; acrimoniously polarised societies seem to verge on the civil war that Rhodes feared; and, as Brexit and Trump show, the capacity for self-harm has grown ominously.
This is also why whiteness, first turned into a religion during the economic and social uncertainty that preceded the violence of 1914, is the world’s most dangerous cult today. Racial supremacy has been historically exercised through colonialism, slavery, segregation, ghettoisation, militarised border controls and mass incarceration. It has now entered its last and most desperate phase with Trump in power.
We can no longer discount the “terrible probability” James Baldwin once described: that the winners of history, “struggling to hold on to what they have stolen from their captives, and unable to look into their mirror, will precipitate a chaos throughout the world which, if it does not bring life on this planet to an end, will bring about a racial war such as the world has never seen”. Sane thinking would require, at the very least, an examination of the history – and stubborn persistence – of racist imperialism: a reckoning that Germany alone among western powers has attempted.
Certainly the risk of not confronting our true history has never been as clear as on this Remembrance Day. If we continue to evade it, historians a century from now may once again wonder why the west sleepwalked, after a long peace, into its biggest calamity yet.
Today on the Western Front,” the German sociologist Max Weber wrote in September 1917, there “stands a dross of African and Asiatic savages and all the world’s rabble of thieves and lumpens.” Weber was referring to the millions of Indian, African, Arab, Chinese and Vietnamese soldiers and labourers, who were then fighting with British and French forces in Europe, as well as in several ancillary theatres of the first world war.
Faced with manpower shortages, British imperialists had recruited up to 1.4 million Indian soldiers. France enlisted nearly 500,000 troops from its colonies in Africa and Indochina. Nearly 400,000 African Americans were also inducted into US forces. The first world war’s truly unknown soldiers are these non-white combatants.
Ho Chi Minh, who spent much of the war in Europe, denounced what he saw as the press-ganging of subordinate peoples. Before the start of the Great War, Ho wrote, they were seen as “nothing but dirty Negroes … good for no more than pulling rickshaws”. But when Europe’s slaughter machines needed “human fodder”, they were called into service. Other anti-imperialists, such as Mohandas Gandhi and WEB Du Bois, vigorously supported the war aims of their white overlords, hoping to secure dignity for their compatriots in the aftermath. But they did not realise what Weber’s remarks revealed: that Europeans had quickly come to fear and hate physical proximity to their non-white subjects – their “new-caught sullen peoples”, as Kipling called colonised Asians and Africans in his 1899 poem The White Man’s Burden.
These colonial subjects remain marginal in popular histories of the war. They also go largely uncommemorated by the hallowed rituals of Remembrance Day. The ceremonial walk to the Cenotaph at Whitehall by all major British dignitaries, the two minutes of silence broken by the Last Post, the laying of poppy wreaths and the singing of the national anthem – all of these uphold the first world war as Europe’s stupendous act of self-harm. For the past century, the war has been remembered as a great rupture in modern western civilisation, an inexplicable catastrophe that highly civilised European powers sleepwalked into after the “long peace” of the 19th century – a catastrophe whose unresolved issues provoked yet another calamitous conflict between liberal democracy and authoritarianism, in which the former finally triumphed, returning Europe to its proper equilibrium.
With more than eight million dead and more than 21 million wounded, the war was the bloodiest in European history until that second conflagration on the continent ended in 1945. War memorials in Europe’s remotest villages, as well as the cemeteries of Verdun, the Marne, Passchendaele, and the Somme enshrine a heartbreakingly extensive experience of bereavement. In many books and films, the prewar years appear as an age of prosperity and contentment in Europe, with the summer of 1913 featuring as the last golden summer.
But today, as racism and xenophobia return to the centre of western politics, it is time to remember that the background to the first world war was decades of racist imperialism whose consequences still endure. It is something that is not remembered much, if at all, on Remembrance Day.
At the time of the first world war, all western powers upheld a racial hierarchy built around a shared project of territorial expansion. In 1917, the US president, Woodrow Wilson, baldly stated his intention, “to keep the white race strong against the yellow” and to preserve “white civilisation and its domination of the planet”. Eugenicist ideas of racial selection were everywhere in the mainstream, and the anxiety expressed in papers like the Daily Mail, which worried about white women coming into contact with “natives who are worse than brutes when their passions are aroused”, was widely shared across the west. Anti-miscegenation laws existed in most US states. In the years leading up to 1914, prohibitions on sexual relations between European women and black men (though not between European men and African women) were enforced across European colonies in Africa. The presence of the “dirty Negroes” in Europe after 1914 seemed to be violating a firm taboo.
Injured Indian soldiers being cared for by the Red Cross in England in March 1915. Photograph: De Agostini Picture Library/Biblioteca Ambrosiana
In May 1915, a scandal erupted when the Daily Mail printed a photograph of a British nurse standing behind a wounded Indian soldier. Army officials tried to withdraw white nurses from hospitals treating Indians, and disbarred the latter from leaving the hospital premises without a white male companion. The outrage when France deployed soldiers from Africa (a majority of them from the Maghreb) in its postwar occupation of Germany was particularly intense and more widespread. Germany had also fielded thousands of African soldiers while trying to hold on to its colonies in east Africa, but it had not used them in Europe, or indulged in what the German foreign minister (and former governor of Samoa), Wilhelm Solf, called “racially shameful use of coloureds”.
“These savages are a terrible danger,” a joint declaration of the German national assembly warned in 1920, to “German women”. Writing Mein Kampf in the 1920s, Adolf Hitler would describe African soldiers on German soil as a Jewish conspiracy aimed to topple white people “from their cultural and political heights”. The Nazis, who were inspired by American innovations in racial hygiene, would in 1937 forcibly sterilise hundreds of children fathered by African soldiers. Fear and hatred of armed “niggers” (as Weber called them) on German soil was not confined to Germany, or the political right. The pope protested against their presence, and an editorial in the Daily Herald, a British socialist newspaper, in 1920 was titled “Black Scourge in Europe”.
This was the prevailing global racial order, built around an exclusionary notion of whiteness and buttressed by imperialism, pseudo-science and the ideology of social Darwinism. In our own time, the steady erosion of the inherited privileges of race has destabilised western identities and institutions – and it has unveiled racism as an enduringly potent political force, empowering volatile demagogues in the heart of the modern west.
Today, as white supremacists feverishly build transnational alliances, it becomes imperative to ask, as Du Bois did in 1910: “What is whiteness that one should so desire it?” As we remember the first global war, it must be remembered against the background of a project of western global domination – one that was shared by all of the war’s major antagonists. The first world war, in fact, marked the moment when the violent legacies of imperialism in Asia and Africa returned home, exploding into self-destructive carnage in Europe. And it seems ominously significant on this particular Remembrance Day: the potential for large-scale mayhem in the west today is greater than at any other time in its long peace since 1945.
When historians discuss the origins of the Great War, they usually focus on rigid alliances, military timetables, imperialist rivalries, arms races and German militarism. The war, they repeatedly tell us, was the seminal calamity of the 20th century – Europe’s original sin, which enabled even bigger eruptions of savagery such as the second world war and the Holocaust. An extensive literature on the war, literally tens of thousands of books and scholarly articles, largely dwells on the western front and the impact of the mutual butchery on Britain, France, and Germany – and significantly, on the metropolitan cores of these imperial powers rather than their peripheries. In this orthodox narrative, which is punctuated by the Russian Revolution and the Balfour declaration in 1917, the war begins with the “guns of August” in 1914, and exultantly patriotic crowds across Europe send soldiers off to a bloody stalemate in the trenches. Peace arrives with the Armistice of 11 November 1918, only to be tragically compromised by the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, which sets the stage for another world war.
In one predominant but highly ideological version of European history – popularised since the cold war – the world wars, together with fascism and communism, are simply monstrous aberrations in the universal advance of liberal democracy and freedom. In many ways, however, it is the decades after 1945 – when Europe, deprived of its colonies, emerged from the ruins of two cataclysmic wars – that increasingly seem exceptional. Amid a general exhaustion with militant and collectivist ideologies in western Europe, the virtues of democracy – above all, the respect for individual liberties – seemed clear. The practical advantages of a reworked social contract, and a welfare state, were also obvious. But neither these decades of relative stability, nor the collapse of communist regimes in 1989, were a reason to assume that human rights and democracy were rooted in European soil.
Instead of remembering the first world war in a way that flatters our contemporary prejudices, we should recall what Hannah Arendt pointed out in The Origins of Totalitarianism – one of the west’s first major reckonings with Europe’s grievous 20th-century experience of wars, racism and genocide. Arendt observes that it was Europeans who initially reordered “humanity into master and slave races” during their conquest and exploitation of much of Asia, Africa and America. This debasing hierarchy of races was established because the promise of equality and liberty at home required imperial expansion abroad in order to be even partially fulfilled. We tend to forget that imperialism, with its promise of land, food and raw materials, was widely seen in the late 19th century as crucial to national progress and prosperity. Racism was – and is – more than an ugly prejudice, something to be eradicated through legal and social proscription. It involved real attempts to solve, through exclusion and degradation, the problems of establishing political order, and pacifying the disaffected, in societies roiled by rapid social and economic change.
“These savages are a terrible danger,” a joint declaration of the German national assembly warned in 1920, to “German women”. Writing Mein Kampf in the 1920s, Adolf Hitler would describe African soldiers on German soil as a Jewish conspiracy aimed to topple white people “from their cultural and political heights”. The Nazis, who were inspired by American innovations in racial hygiene, would in 1937 forcibly sterilise hundreds of children fathered by African soldiers. Fear and hatred of armed “niggers” (as Weber called them) on German soil was not confined to Germany, or the political right. The pope protested against their presence, and an editorial in the Daily Herald, a British socialist newspaper, in 1920 was titled “Black Scourge in Europe”.
This was the prevailing global racial order, built around an exclusionary notion of whiteness and buttressed by imperialism, pseudo-science and the ideology of social Darwinism. In our own time, the steady erosion of the inherited privileges of race has destabilised western identities and institutions – and it has unveiled racism as an enduringly potent political force, empowering volatile demagogues in the heart of the modern west.
Today, as white supremacists feverishly build transnational alliances, it becomes imperative to ask, as Du Bois did in 1910: “What is whiteness that one should so desire it?” As we remember the first global war, it must be remembered against the background of a project of western global domination – one that was shared by all of the war’s major antagonists. The first world war, in fact, marked the moment when the violent legacies of imperialism in Asia and Africa returned home, exploding into self-destructive carnage in Europe. And it seems ominously significant on this particular Remembrance Day: the potential for large-scale mayhem in the west today is greater than at any other time in its long peace since 1945.
When historians discuss the origins of the Great War, they usually focus on rigid alliances, military timetables, imperialist rivalries, arms races and German militarism. The war, they repeatedly tell us, was the seminal calamity of the 20th century – Europe’s original sin, which enabled even bigger eruptions of savagery such as the second world war and the Holocaust. An extensive literature on the war, literally tens of thousands of books and scholarly articles, largely dwells on the western front and the impact of the mutual butchery on Britain, France, and Germany – and significantly, on the metropolitan cores of these imperial powers rather than their peripheries. In this orthodox narrative, which is punctuated by the Russian Revolution and the Balfour declaration in 1917, the war begins with the “guns of August” in 1914, and exultantly patriotic crowds across Europe send soldiers off to a bloody stalemate in the trenches. Peace arrives with the Armistice of 11 November 1918, only to be tragically compromised by the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, which sets the stage for another world war.
In one predominant but highly ideological version of European history – popularised since the cold war – the world wars, together with fascism and communism, are simply monstrous aberrations in the universal advance of liberal democracy and freedom. In many ways, however, it is the decades after 1945 – when Europe, deprived of its colonies, emerged from the ruins of two cataclysmic wars – that increasingly seem exceptional. Amid a general exhaustion with militant and collectivist ideologies in western Europe, the virtues of democracy – above all, the respect for individual liberties – seemed clear. The practical advantages of a reworked social contract, and a welfare state, were also obvious. But neither these decades of relative stability, nor the collapse of communist regimes in 1989, were a reason to assume that human rights and democracy were rooted in European soil.
Instead of remembering the first world war in a way that flatters our contemporary prejudices, we should recall what Hannah Arendt pointed out in The Origins of Totalitarianism – one of the west’s first major reckonings with Europe’s grievous 20th-century experience of wars, racism and genocide. Arendt observes that it was Europeans who initially reordered “humanity into master and slave races” during their conquest and exploitation of much of Asia, Africa and America. This debasing hierarchy of races was established because the promise of equality and liberty at home required imperial expansion abroad in order to be even partially fulfilled. We tend to forget that imperialism, with its promise of land, food and raw materials, was widely seen in the late 19th century as crucial to national progress and prosperity. Racism was – and is – more than an ugly prejudice, something to be eradicated through legal and social proscription. It involved real attempts to solve, through exclusion and degradation, the problems of establishing political order, and pacifying the disaffected, in societies roiled by rapid social and economic change.
Senegalese soldiers serving in the French army on the western front in June 1917. Photograph: Galerie Bilderwelt/Getty ImagesIn the early 20th century, the popularity of social Darwinism had created a consensus that nations should be seen similarly to biological organisms, which risked extinction or decay if they failed to expel alien bodies and achieve “living space” for their own citizens. Pseudo-scientific theories of biological difference between races posited a world in which all races were engaged in an international struggle for wealth and power. Whiteness became “the new religion”, as Du Bois witnessed, offering security amid disorienting economic and technological shifts, and a promise of power and authority over a majority of the human population.
The resurgence of these supremacist views today in the west – alongside the far more widespread stigmatisation of entire populations as culturally incompatible with white western peoples – should suggest that the first world war was not, in fact, a profound rupture with Europe’s own history. Rather it was, as Liang Qichao, China’s foremost modern intellectual, was already insisting in 1918, a “mediating passage that connects the past and the future”.
The liturgies of Remembrance Day, and evocations of the beautiful long summer of 1913, deny both the grim reality that preceded the war and the way it has persisted into the 21st century. Our complex task during the war’s centenary is to identify the ways in which that past has infiltrated our present, and how it threatens to shape the future: how the terminal weakening of white civilisation’s domination, and the assertiveness of previously sullen peoples, has released some very old tendencies and traits in the west.
Nearly a century after first world war ended, the experiences and perspectives of its non-European actors and observers remain largely obscure. Most accounts of the war uphold it as an essentially European affair: one in which the continent’s long peace is shattered by four years of carnage, and a long tradition of western rationalism is perverted.
Relatively little is known about how the war accelerated political struggles across Asia and Africa; how Arab and Turkish nationalists, Indian and Vietnamese anti-colonial activists found new opportunities in it; or how, while destroying old empires in Europe, the war turned Japan into a menacing imperialist power in Asia.
A broad account of the war that is attentive to political conflicts outside Europe can clarify the hyper-nationalism today of many Asian and African ruling elites, most conspicuously the Chinese regime, which presents itself as avengers of China’s century-long humiliation by the west.
Recent commemorations have made greater space for the non-European soldiers and battlefields of the first world war: altogether more than four million non-white men were mobilised into European and American armies, and fighting happened in places very remote from Europe – from Siberia and east Asia to the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa, and even the South Pacific islands. In Mesopotamia, Indian soldiers formed a majority of Allied manpower throughout the war. Neither Britain’s occupation of Mesopotamia nor its successful campaign in Palestine would have occurred without Indian assistance. Sikh soldiers even helped the Japanese to evict Germans from their Chinese colony of Qingdao.
Scholars have started to pay more attention to the nearly 140,000 Chinese and Vietnamese contract labourers hired by the British and French governments to maintain the war’s infrastructure, mostly digging trenches. We know more about how interwar Europe became host to a multitude of anticolonial movements; the east Asian expatriate community in Paris at one point included Zhou Enlai, later the premier of China, as well as Ho Chi Minh. Cruel mistreatment, in the form of segregation and slave labour, was the fate of many of these Asians and Africans in Europe. Deng Xiaoping, who arrived in France just after the war, later recalled “the humiliations” inflicted upon fellow Chinese by “the running dogs of capitalists”.
But in order to grasp the current homecoming of white supremacism in the west, we need an even deeper history – one that shows how whiteness became in the late 19th century the assurance of individual identity and dignity, as well as the basis of military and diplomatic alliances.
Such a history would show that the global racial order in the century preceding 1914 was one in which it was entirely natural for “uncivilised” peoples to be exterminated, terrorised, imprisoned, ostracised or radically re-engineered. Moreover, this entrenched system was not something incidental to the first world war, with no connections to the vicious way it was fought or to the brutalisation that made possible the horrors of the Holocaust. Rather, the extreme, lawless and often gratuitous violence of modern imperialism eventually boomeranged on its originators.
In this new history, Europe’s long peace is revealed as a time of unlimited wars in Asia, Africa and the Americas. These colonies emerge as the crucible where the sinister tactics of Europe’s brutal 20th-century wars – racial extermination, forced population transfers, contempt for civilian lives – were first forged. Contemporary historians of German colonialism (an expanding field of study) try to trace the Holocaust back to the mini-genocides Germans committed in their African colonies in the 1900s, where some key ideologies, such as Lebensraum, were also nurtured. But it is too easy to conclude, especially from an Anglo-American perspective, that Germany broke from the norms of civilisation to set a new standard of barbarity, strong-arming the rest of the world into an age of extremes. For there were deep continuities in the imperialist practices and racial assumptions of European and American powers.
Indeed, the mentalities of the western powers converged to a remarkable degree during the high noon of “whiteness” – what Du Bois, answering his own question about this highly desirable condition, memorably defined as “the ownership of the Earth for ever and ever”. For example, the German colonisation of south-west Africa, which was meant to solve the problem of overpopulation, was often assisted by the British, and all major western powers amicably sliced and shared the Chinese melon in the late 19th century. Any tensions that arose between those dividing the booty of Asia and Africa were defused largely peacefully, if at the expense of Asians and Africans.
Campaigners calling for the removal of a statue of British imperialist Cecil Rhodes (upper right) at Oriel College in Oxford. Photograph: Martin Godwin for the GuardianThis is because colonies had, by the late 19th century, come to be widely seen as indispensable relief-valves for domestic socio-economic pressures. Cecil Rhodes put the case for them with exemplary clarity in 1895 after an encounter with angry unemployed men in London’s East End. Imperialism, he declared, was a “solution for the social problem, ie in order to save the 40 million inhabitants of the United Kingdom from a bloody civil war, we colonial statesmen must acquire new lands to settle the surplus population, to provide new markets for the goods produced in the factories and mines”. In Rhodes’ view, “if you want to avoid civil war, you must become imperialists”.
Rhodes’ scramble for Africa’s gold fields helped trigger the second Boer war, during which the British, interning Afrikaner women and children, brought the term “concentration camp” into ordinary parlance. By the end of the war in 1902, it had become a “commonplace of history”, JA Hobson wrote, that “governments use national animosities, foreign wars and the glamour of empire-making in order to bemuse the popular mind and divert rising resentment against domestic abuses”.
With imperialism opening up a “panorama of vulgar pride and crude sensationalism”, ruling classes everywhere tried harder to “imperialise the nation”, as Arendt wrote. This project to “organise the nation for the looting of foreign territories and the permanent degradation of alien peoples” was quickly advanced through the newly established tabloid press. The Daily Mail, right from its inception in 1896, stoked vulgar pride in being white, British and superior to the brutish natives – just as it does today.
At the end of the war, Germany was stripped of its colonies and accused by the victorious imperial powers, entirely without irony, of ill-treating its natives in Africa. But such judgments, still made today to distinguish a “benign” British and American imperialism from the German, French, Dutch and Belgian versions, try to suppress the vigorous synergies of racist imperialism. Marlow, the narrator of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899), is clear-sighted about them: “All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz,” he says. And to the new-fangled modes of exterminating the brutes, he might have added.
In 1920, a year after condemning Germany for its crimes against Africans, the British devised aerial bombing as routine policy in their new Iraqi possession – the forerunner to today’s decade-long bombing and drone campaigns in west and south Asia. “The Arab and Kurd now know what real bombing means,” a 1924 report by a Royal Air Force officer put it. “They now know that within 45 minutes a full-sized village … can be practically wiped out and a third of its inhabitants killed or injured.” This officer was Arthur “Bomber” Harris, who in the second world war unleashed the firestorms of Hamburg and Dresden, and whose pioneering efforts in Iraq helped German theorising in the 1930s about der totale krieg (the total war).
It is often proposed that Europeans were indifferent to or absent-minded about their remote imperial possessions, and that only a few dyed-in-the-wool imperialists like Rhodes, Kipling and Lord Curzon cared enough about them. This makes racism seem like a minor problem that was aggravated by the arrival of Asian and African immigrants in post-1945 Europe. But the frenzy of jingoism with which Europe plunged into a bloodbath in 1914 speaks of a belligerent culture of imperial domination, a macho language of racial superiority, that had come to bolster national and individual self-esteem.
Italy actually joined Britain and France on the Allied side in 1915 in a fit of popular empire-mania (and promptly plunged into fascism after its imperialist cravings went unslaked). Italian writers and journalists, as well as politicians and businessmen, had lusted after imperial power and glory since the late 19th century. Italy had fervently scrambled for Africa, only to be ignominiously routed by Ethiopia in 1896. (Mussolini would avenge that in 1935 by dousing Ethiopians with poison gas.) In 1911, it saw an opportunity to detach Libya from the Ottoman empire. Coming after previous setbacks, its assault on the country, greenlighted by both Britain and France, was vicious and loudly cheered at home. News of the Italians’ atrocities, which included the first bombing from air in history, radicalised many Muslims across Asia and Africa. But public opinion in Italy remained implacably behind the imperial gamble.
Germany’s own militarism, commonly blamed for causing Europe’s death spiral between 1914 and 1918, seems less extraordinary when we consider that from the 1880s, many Germans in politics, business and academia, and such powerful lobby groups as the Pan-German League (Max Weber was briefly a member), had exhorted their rulers to achieve the imperial status of Britain and France. Furthermore, all Germany’s military engagements from 1871 to 1914 occurred outside Europe. These included punitive expeditions in the African colonies and one ambitious foray in 1900 in China, where Germany joined seven other European powers in a retaliatory expedition against young Chinese who had rebelled against western domination of the Middle Kingdom.
Troops under German command in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania (then part of German East Africa), circa 1914. Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty ImagesDispatching German troops to Asia, the Kaiser presented their mission as racial vengeance: “Give no pardon and take no prisoners,” he said, urging the soldiers to make sure that “no Chinese will ever again even dare to look askance at a German”. The crushing of the “Yellow Peril” (a phrase coined in the 1890s) was more or less complete by the time the Germans arrived. Nevertheless, between October 1900 and spring 1901 the Germans launched dozens of raids in the Chinese countryside that became notorious for their intense brutality.
One of the volunteers for the disciplinary force was Lt Gen Lothar von Trotha, who had made his reputation in Africa by slaughtering natives and incinerating villages. He called his policy “terrorism”, adding that it “can only help” to subdue the natives. In China, he despoiled Ming graves and presided over a few killings, but his real work lay ahead, in German South-West Africa (contemporary Namibia) where an anti-colonial uprising broke out in January 1904. In October of that year, Von Trotha ordered that members of the Herero community, including women and children, who had already been defeated militarily, were to be shot on sight and those escaping death were to be driven into the Omaheke Desert, where they would be left to die from exposure. An estimated 60,000-70,000 Herero people, out of a total of approximately 80,000, were eventually killed, and many more died in the desert from starvation. A second revolt against German rule in south-west Africa by the Nama people led to the demise, by 1908, of roughly half of their population.
Such proto-genocides became routine during the last years of European peace. Running the Congo Free State as his personal fief from 1885 to 1908, King Leopold II of Belgium reduced the local population by half, sending as many as eight million Africans to an early death. The American conquest of the Philippines between 1898 and 1902, to which Kipling dedicated The White Man’s Burden, took the lives of more than 200,000 civilians. The death toll perhaps seems less startling when one considers that 26 of the 30 US generals in the Philippines had fought in wars of annihilation against Native Americans at home. One of them, Brigadier General Jacob H Smith, explicitly stated in his order to the troops that “I want no prisoners. I wish you to kill and burn. The more you kill and burn the better it will please me”. In a Senate hearing on the atrocities in the Philippines, General Arthur MacArthur (father of Douglas) referred to the “magnificent Aryan peoples” he belonged to and the “unity of the race” he felt compelled to uphold.
The modern history of violence shows that ostensibly staunch foes have never been reluctant to borrow murderous ideas from one another. To take only one instance, the American elite’s ruthlessness with blacks and Native Americans greatly impressed the earliest generation of German liberal imperialists, decades before Hitler also came to admire the US’s unequivocally racist policies of nationality and immigration. The Nazis sought inspiration from Jim Crow legislation in the US south, which makes Charlottesville, Virginia, a fitting recent venue for the unfurling of swastika banners and chants of “blood and soil”.
In light of this shared history of racial violence, it seems odd that we continue to portray the first world war as a battle between democracy and authoritarianism, as a seminal and unexpected calamity. The Indian writer Aurobindo Ghose was one among many anticolonial thinkers who predicted, even before the outbreak of war, that “vaunting, aggressive, dominant Europe” was already under “a sentence of death”, awaiting “annihilation” – much as Liang Qichao could see, in 1918, that the war would prove to be a bridge connecting Europe’s past of imperial violence to its future of merciless fratricide.
These shrewd assessments were not Oriental wisdom or African clairvoyance. Many subordinate peoples simply realised, well before Arendt published The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951, that peace in the metropolitan west depended too much on outsourcing war to the colonies.
The experience of mass death and destruction, suffered by most Europeans only after 1914, was first widely known in Asia and Africa, where land and resources were forcefully usurped, economic and cultural infrastructure systematically destroyed, and entire populations eliminated with the help of up-to-date bureaucracies and technologies. Europe’s equilibrium was parasitic for too long on disequilibrium elsewhere.
In the end, Asia and Africa could not remain a safely remote venue for Europe’s wars of aggrandisement in the late 19th and 20th century. Populations in Europe eventually suffered the great violence that had long been inflicted on Asians and Africans. As Arendt warned, violence administered for the sake of power “turns into a destructive principle that will not stop until there is nothing left to violate”.
In our own time, nothing better demonstrates this ruinous logic of lawless violence, which corrupts both public and private morality, than the heavily racialised war on terror. It presumes a sub-human enemy who must be “smoked out” at home and abroad – and it has licensed the use of torture and extrajudicial execution, even against western citizens.
But, as Arendt predicted, its failures have only produced an even greater dependence on violence, a proliferation of undeclared wars and new battlefields, a relentless assault on civil rights at home – and an exacerbated psychology of domination, presently manifest in Donald Trump’s threats to trash the nuclear deal with Iran and unleash on North Korea “fire and fury like the world has never seen”.
It was always an illusion to suppose that “civilised” peoples could remain immune, at home, to the destruction of morality and law in their wars against barbarians abroad. But that illusion, long cherished by the self-styled defenders of western civilisation, has now been shattered, with racist movements ascendant in Europe and the US, often applauded by the white supremacist in the White House, who is making sure there is nothing left to violate.
The white nationalists have junked the old rhetoric of liberal internationalism, the preferred language of the western political and media establishment for decades. Instead of claiming to make the world safe for democracy, they nakedly assert the cultural unity of the white race against an existential threat posed by swarthy foreigners, whether these are citizens, immigrants, refugees, asylum-seekers or terrorists.
But the global racial order that for centuries bestowed power, identity, security and status on its beneficiaries has finally begun to break down. Not even war with China, or ethnic cleansing in the west, will restore to whiteness its ownership of the Earth for ever and ever. Regaining imperial power and glory has already proven to be a treacherous escapist fantasy – devastating the Middle East and parts of Asia and Africa while bringing terrorism back to the streets of Europe and America – not to mention ushering Britain towards Brexit.
No rousing quasi-imperialist ventures abroad can mask the chasms of class and education, or divert the masses, at home. Consequently, the social problem appears insoluble; acrimoniously polarised societies seem to verge on the civil war that Rhodes feared; and, as Brexit and Trump show, the capacity for self-harm has grown ominously.
This is also why whiteness, first turned into a religion during the economic and social uncertainty that preceded the violence of 1914, is the world’s most dangerous cult today. Racial supremacy has been historically exercised through colonialism, slavery, segregation, ghettoisation, militarised border controls and mass incarceration. It has now entered its last and most desperate phase with Trump in power.
We can no longer discount the “terrible probability” James Baldwin once described: that the winners of history, “struggling to hold on to what they have stolen from their captives, and unable to look into their mirror, will precipitate a chaos throughout the world which, if it does not bring life on this planet to an end, will bring about a racial war such as the world has never seen”. Sane thinking would require, at the very least, an examination of the history – and stubborn persistence – of racist imperialism: a reckoning that Germany alone among western powers has attempted.
Certainly the risk of not confronting our true history has never been as clear as on this Remembrance Day. If we continue to evade it, historians a century from now may once again wonder why the west sleepwalked, after a long peace, into its biggest calamity yet.
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