Neither Jews nor Germans: where is liberalism taking us?

Consistently critical of both the institutionalisation of white supremacy and claims to racial essence in any form, Gilroy’s arguments uncover the illusory nature of the contemporary understanding of racial difference. It is his contention, nevertheless, that however illusory these discourses are, they are inside our contemporary understanding of the social world. They are stubbornly resilient.

Paul Gilroy’s latest book

Between Camps draws on an astonishing range of cultural reference – from discussion of Nazi aesthetics and the tropes of hip hop, to corporate multiculturalism and the thought of a neglected generation of black intellectuals – to illuminate his argument, and combines it with an acute moral seriousness. Maintaining a vigilant anti-racism, he reaches beyond the impoverished language of race to introduce a concept of planetary humanism – one which recognises the essential similarity and commensurability of human life, across our planet.

In openDemocracy’s interview with Professor Gilroy we ask him to explain some of his more difficult concepts and to reflect on key areas of his work. This is required reading for anyone seeking to interpret the way that race and racism are invoked and intertwined in contemporary politics, and the role of the political imagination in moving beyond one of humankind’s most pernicious inventions.

Bola Gibson – In your most recent book, Between Camps, you argue for the necessity of moving beyond the language of race. But isn’t your idea of removing the concept of race, or transcending race, quite dangerous? I’ve lived as a black person in a range of places: I was born in Jamaica, raised in England, lived in Zimbabwe for five years, studied in America, and then came back here to London. If we seek to transcend race in our existing societies, we won’t recognise and appreciate cultural differences. What happens is we assimilate into the majority culture, and cultural identity is lost. Doesn’t your argument run the risk of there being an amalgamation of very many different cultures into one? Won’t this mean a dominant race with people sifting into it? Won’t we lose the richness of what I think is true multiculturalism?

Paul Gilroy – I don’t see it that way, as transcendence. Because I don’t see racial categories as working in the way that you imply when you speak of ‘the dominant race’. For me the problem is racism. It is racism that produces races as political agents, gives them substance and makes race into a big issue. This is done in a way that prevents cultural differences from emerging. Some of those cultural differences might conform to expectations defined by race but many won’t. What are these ‘real differences’ anyway? What I know is that, in the kind of life people live in a city such as London, these things do not become ‘issues’ unless racism intervenes to make them an issue.

Culture will take care of itself. None of us should imagine that we can command it, or regulate, organise, police or discipline it. I have tried to study the moments when the fantasy of being able to legislate for the cultural lives and development of peoples, nations and ethnic groups enters into the language of anti-colonial nation-building and anti-racist or African American civil and human rights struggles. Black Americans in the nineteenth century were offered two options, which came either from Germany or from thinkers such as Disraeli. They were offered the chance, philosophically, to be either Jews or Germans. My point is that recent history offers us other options when it comes to theorising our identities and identifications. We don’t have to be either Jews or Germans.

BG – It may be possible to separate the idea of race and culture at a theoretical level. But can you really separate race from cultures that are associated with people who are physically and obviously different, such as Blacks or Asians? Can you transcend race and still have that difference in culture?

PG – You say ‘physically’ and ‘obviously’ as if these things were self-evident. They aren’t. People have to be educated, trained and sometimes bullied into the mentalities that specify race and distinguish it from ‘ethnicity’. I think race and culture are already separated. The danger lies in not making the separation of culture from colour. Otherwise you have to say that the culture of the eighteen-year-old unemployed Bengali boys in East London’s Brick Lane is the same as the culture of the Volvo-driving Indians in North-West London. They may not speak the same language, they do not worship the same God, they did not come to Britain at the same time, they do not live in the same place, they do not do the same work. It is only racism that puts them into the same category: Asians.

Reject the racism that makes them interchangeable and they can be culturally separated. You can then do proper justice to the cultural variations and specificities. The idea of integral races damages the richness of cultures. The same argument applies even more from an international perspective.

Thinking against the grain

BG – The argument, which you suggest is about replacing the language of raciology with a form of ‘planetary humanism’, is quite tough for the layperson to understand.

PG – Why should it be easy? When you’re trying to do philosophical work, with humility, that’s what you do. You are inventing concepts. The first thing to say is that this creative reworking of race and culture is not meant to put people off, but it is very important to me that I am trying to offer an alternative conceptual constellation for people to engage with the question of racial difference. This is hard to do but it is very deliberately done. Whether it works, that’s another matter. But that is what I am attempting in this book.

It was very depressing for me to come back to the UK in summer 2001 and to look at the media coverage of the unrest in northern English towns and see that there are ‘race riots’ all over again. It’s as if that conceptual scheme forged not in the 1980s but in the 1950s and 1960s is almost indestructible when it comes to the sorts of shorthand people want to use to make these events intelligible.

Is it a losing battle, to attempt to change that conceptual scheme? It’s all very well to say that by changing the concept you don’t get rid of racism. Of course, that’s true. But it doesn’t mean there isn’t work to do on that conceptual level.

I feel very strongly about the need to see how political language works in this area and the damage it does. Of course, it can make for hard reading. There are reasons why it is a hard read. I’m seeking to engage people all the time against the grain of their thinking about race. To me, that’s part of the work. That is the work actually.

Addressing racism by refusing the language of race

Caspar Melville – If the riots that took place in Oldham and other North of England towns in summer 2001 were not ‘race riots’, what were they?

PG – They might have been, in some respects, racism riots. But they were not race riots: disorders in which races existed prior to the unfolding of the events. These riots might contribute to the making of races, if they are racialised. If people attack the police because the police harass them and don’t treat them fairly, that would be a policing riot. If they don’t like Nick Griffin and the forces of the British Fascists coming in and making them targets, and they feel they have to protect themselves, then for me that’s a political riot.

A third possibility is also very interesting and relates perhaps more directly to the life of those particular post-industrial towns. I have not looked at the data but the informal economy might mean that Asians there can look after their old people better, take care of their community more actively and have a bit more money because they’re less likely to spend it in the pub. If that is true, in areas of unemployment it might make the ‘host community’ resentful and jealous. If so, the response could be an economic riot.

All of these things are certainly going on. To describe it more accurately and productively, we need a convincing civic language of multiculturalism not more ritual incantations about race.

Anthony Barnett – But doesn’t the language of multiculturalism itself rest upon racial difference?

PG – Of course, some of it does at present but I don’t think that it has to. It does so because people have become lazy or because the pressure that results from bureaucratisation and institutionalisation of ethnic categories requires a certain grammar or shorthand. An unaddressed argument about the relationship of ethnicity and culture to racial difference becomes secreted inside the contemporary language of multiculture. Exposure to difference becomes inconceivable except as threat, risk and jeopardy.

CM – So you are not saying let’s get rid of the idea of race so that we can simply say we’re all the same. You are saying let’s get rid of the language of race in order to deal more clearly with cultural differences, which there will always be?

PG – To say ‘get rid of’ sounds a bit simplistic. But, for argument’s sake, yes; let’s get rid of the language of race in order to do some better anti-racist work.

I do happen to believe that we are, in important ways, all the same. If I need a transfusion, I don’t want blood from a horse or a dog. Much of what passes as the politics of race and ethnicity might eventually be written off as feedback from the narcissism of minor differences—the violence that is unleashed by the inability to concede that essential sameness.

The logic of ‘planetary humanism’

CM – Which leads to your idea of planetary humanism.

PG – Well, calling it ‘planetary humanism’ was just a bit of calculated provocation to those complacent Kantians who think they have a liberal monopoly on the idea of cosmopolitanism. Let me say where this impulse comes from. It comes from working through questions of difference, which are integral to the history of race thinking during the last few centuries. I want to know how race thinking brings in the body, how what Bola called visible difference has been produced and organised, how a visual culture of racial recognition and misrecognition became established. Which areas or elements of the body decided it? How many races were there? How does race specify a logic of the type on which other categories of difference can rely?

Race emerged as the trope of difference in this particular modern scheme for understanding bodies and peoples, and nations and powers. The idea of race has a constitutive role in the development of political theory, philosophical thought and economic and historical analysis.

This is not something we can dance around. If there is to be a moment when we can talk proudly, hopefully and honestly about ‘all being the same’, then I would say that moment will only arrive once we accept that we have begun to deal with the damage that racism has done to political thinking, to government and to statecraft – which were all decisively altered by their largely-unacknowledged colonial and imperial histories.

We need to keep this in the centre of our thoughts, and not shove it to the side saying, “Oh, racism, that’s all over with and now we can all be the same”. We have to keep the conversation going about the central role of racism, understanding the way it has impacted on politics, on aesthetic life, cities, on national states, and the representation of the modern world. Only then will I be happy to start these conversations about our all being the same. We cannot do one without the other, and I would not want to do one without the other.

AB – Just to be clear, as this is a very important moral argument. Are you saying, “Let’s discuss and explore our common planetary humanism, provided we also put a critique of the concept of race and the role it has played, which has burdened us for some hundreds of years, at the centre of our thoughts”?

PG – Absolutely. They have to go together.

AB – So you’re not denying the existence of race in order to get on with the job of planetary humanism?

PG – No, but from my perspective it is racism rather than any integral natural difference that makes race meaningful.

AB – But how do you distinguish your planetary humanism from what you might call classic liberal individualism, which treats race as a kind of false consciousness? The two have a similar ring; is this the provocation?

PG – The point of my provocation is this: the question of race needs to become part of an argument over where liberalism is going at this moment and what it is going to become. This is what I am saying. Some liberal voices in the debate over multiculture will ship in race to perform a certain kind of function in their analysis, and then ship it back out again. Michael Walzer does this and so does Charles Taylor in a different – Canadian – way. Neither of them says much about the bequest of anti-black racism or slavery to the present, or the history of colonial exploitation.

They are developing what might be termed a habitable liberalism. Its critique of classic, economic liberal individualism is one that I share. But from my perspective it is not complete. They find it impossible to speak either about the impact of racism historically, or about its contemporary political significance. Their pieties about cosmopolitan and tolerant societies are no substitute for a more open engagement with the problem of racial hierarchies.

Perhaps there is an even more difficult challenge: I think there has to be a different kind of language of the public good in this project. It needs to go beyond the languages of citizenship, which are available on the shelf. I hope that a larger confrontation with the history of the damage done by race thinking to traditions of political reflection will mean that some different conceptions of planetary or trans-local citizenship will be imagined. The life of someone wrapped up in all the riches of the overdeveloped world should really count for the same as the life of someone who doesn’t have water and electricity in the South.

If you can think this through, it changes your notions of citizenship, entitlement, obligation, mutuality. The way that race has functioned in the history of imperial and colonial power takes us to the limits of that political vocabulary, showing how materialist and idealist explanations might be expected to coexist under the sign of race. After all, race has the magical power to bring irrationality and rationality together.

AB – We recently ran an interview with Internet guru, Esther Dyson, where she talks about the need for world parties.

PG – That is the kind of dreaming that I find useful.

AB – Isn’t it reasonable for people to feel afraid that they’re going to be dissolved by your planetary humanism? Articulate intellectuals may be at home in a world government of planetary humanism in which all people are citizens, but those with smaller cultural and intellectual resources will fear being at a loss. The nation state is the instrument that creates a people and their democracy is their self-determination. These fundamental terms have come to us through the emergence of nationalism. If you then turn round and say, let’s have global government, won’t the things that have allowed people to free themselves be dissolved?

PG – I don’t see the national state as an effective guarantor of that elusive democracy. Just as it’s obvious that the dominance of European and American powers is coming to an end, I regard it as equally obvious that the time of national states is also coming to an end. Therefore, we have to think about what we want to try and create from this point on. This means giving up some of the certainties that come from a more parochial kind of life.

Planetary humanism is not just for the rootless cosmopolitan and the vagrant intellectual. Most people are having their racial and ethnic differences given back to them by their national or ethnic leaders as a way of controlling them and channelling their hopes – their dreams and their aspirations – towards goals that are defined by an indifferent and self-serving oligarchy. People are anxious. They feel that they need something else apart from these sham certainties. That’s certainly what I hope.

And it’s also the case that there are people outside the overdeveloped world who have got their own ideas about what their trans-local affiliations and commitments would mean. There is a new emerging sense of what kind of institutions are needed in order to meet cosmopolitan demands for justice and a new moral order. It may well be that these things are not going to be settled within the repertoire of habitable liberalism. Perhaps the trans-local affiliations of political Islam’s diaspora speak to this need?

The black intellectual tradition

CM – When I first came across your work, you were presented to me as a black intellectual. How does your idea about going beyond race square with that?

PG – Well, I have been called that! Whatever impossible condition is signalled by the idea of being a black intellectual…. The point is that the traditions of humanistic thinking, which have been part of the political and philosophical habits of the western hemisphere, have also, loosely speaking, been part of anti-colonial and pan-Africanist thinking for several centuries. They are quite easy to identify. Some are religious in nature, some not. There is not much creativity in saying this, as people have struggled with these things before.

What I felt was required was an element of historical periodisation that would engage the idea of the human again in a slightly different spirit from the way it was played out at the start of the twentieth century when Du Bois and company took it up. We can look at the political languages of humanism in the twentieth, and even in the nineteenth, century when a number of African American intellectuals were engaging this sort of problem in lasting ways, born directly from their struggle against slavery.

After all, the slaves were forbidden to become literate on pain of death. Eventually their restorative nation-building projects in Liberia, Haiti and elsewhere were characterised by attempts to work with, and sometimes against, the political and moral language and authority that was given to them by their enforced Christianity. I would put Frederick Douglass in that bracket.

There is nothing especially bold or daring about continuing that work today. That’s why I tried to get Fanon and Martin Luther King, who are interlocutors on the question of how black political culture engages modernity, to function as antipodes for my argument in Between Camps. It would perhaps have been better scholarship to say that Fanon’s argument about humanism derived from his intellectual relationship with Sartre and de Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger. But that would be for another book.

One example of this was what I saw in South Africa, where there was the legacy of non-racialism as a political commitment that gave a special moral energy to the anti-Apartheid struggle. Today, people there seem to be backing away frantically from the implications of having taken up that non-racialist position. They are throwing up their hands saying, “No, of course that was the wrong thing to do, it meant we didn’t talk enough about race!” when actually it may be that the political legacy of non-racialism is something that people outside South Africa need to think a bit more about.

I found myself saying to them, “Maybe you’re wrong to think that you should back down so fast”. It is significant that so much of what was intimidating them into a withdrawal from the commitment to non-racism is an American export that promotes a distinctive political agenda around affirmative action and the rest of it. That position imagines that North American attitudes to race will suffice and are infinitely translatable. Of course, we know that in the US, black people are 13 per cent of the population and in South Africa white people are 13 per cent of the population. So, the definitions of multiculturalism and so on are completely discontinuous.

It is interesting to me how spontaneously and effortlessly that rather imperialistic American view has been articulated. How easy it is for those US interests to substitute themselves for people in Soweto or Sao Paulo. It is a curious thing to behold.

The Americanisation of blackness

CM – What’s the relationship between this and American dominance of the world’s popular culture?

PG – I think they’re very closely related. A large percentage of younger people in a place such as South Africa are only too happy to accept an American specification of their relationship to power and their understanding of the technologies and responsibilities of being a free person. Globalisation is Americanisation most of the time. Its cultural consequences are catastrophic when they infiltrate and compromise any alternative local understanding of what it means to be a free and autonomous person. America exports its technologies and technologies of the self. It fosters a particular way of relating to oneself as a free agent in the saturated space of consumer society.

CM – But aren’t American forms, such as hip hop, rearticulated to local conditions, used in hybrid ways which change their meaning – like South African kwaito, a hybrid mix of hip hop, house and African music? Did you get a sense of that?

PG – My sense of it was that hip hop is also an insidious minor part of American cultural imperialism. It’s the same experience I have had in other places in the southern hemisphere where local traditions of music-making, self-expression and critical self-creation are being drowned in an ocean of basketball, BMWs, sportswear, thongs and the whole ghetto-fabulous bling bling US thing.

Do you know Achille Mbembe’s work? He has a wonderful book, On the Post-Colony, and he’s interested in the vulgarity of power in post-colonial regimes. The absurd surreal spectacle of these wealthy people racing their Ferraris, dodging the wild donkeys, is really disturbing while AIDS and war swirl all around.

The richness of post-colonial cities

CM – You have often argued that the post-colonial city, such as London, might provide models for moving beyond narrow conceptions of race and nation. The cosmopolitan city offers, in your argument, a powerful version of multiculture, but this is under threat too, from the forces of commodification that use the language of multiculture for their own ends.

PG – Yes, and that language has been stolen by people who want to manipulate people into buying sports shoes, and a government that doesn’t see any broad civic value in the ability to live with difference.

There are some fascinating questions about the political lives and energies of great cities, especially those that preceded the establishment of the national states. So many of these national states have been founded on the ideal of purity and the fantasy of homogeneity which today means ethnic cleansing. Whereas someone who has been formed in a multicultural city such as London – that is, anyone under the age of twenty-five – thinks that all of this absolutist stuff about race is basically bullshit.

They have encountered a liberating, ordinary everyday kind of contact across the lines of race, at the level of lived experience. So, no mystification is possible. The work of taking people beyond the virtual realities of race is absolutely routine when they’ve grown up in a post-colonial metropolis such as London. What does the guy in The Streets say? “Have no prejudice, that’s my hypothesis.”

The question is, does the civic life of the metropolis see this experience as something that is valuable? When you have special advisors on race saying that we need black-only schools as a solution to the city’s race problems, it’s clear that that there is a failure of political imagination. These people are squeamish. They don’t want to upset the apple carts of their professional lives as consultants and experts.

You cannot control the organic ecosystem of this complex multicultural ecology. But those in power won’t acknowledge that there is something here to be appreciated as an exceptional civic resource: exceptional, certainly in European history, perhaps even in world history.