Who are the ‘real’ racists? Liberal conceptions and their limitations

I have outlined how the centrality of ‘fear’ to participants’ understandings of Islamophobia points to a rendering of Islamophobia as a problem of (non)interaction, specifically in relation to cultural difference. I have also argued that this risks leaving us with an

impoverished understanding of how Islamophobia operates, and the diverse ways in which it impacts on the lives of Muslims in the UK today. But what are the wider repertoires that participants draw on to make sense of their understanding of Islamophobia? In this section, I draw on interview data to explore how liberal conceptions of racism come to frame how Islamophobia is understood by participants, and – with reference to the experiences of Muslim women participants in particular – what these conceptions struggle to capture in terms of the relationship between Islamophobia and liberalism itself.

We can look to broader discussions about racism within interviews with participants to begin to interrogate this relationship. One key example comes from John, who is a trade unionist. In an account of how he came to be involved in anti-racist work, John describes watching a documentary about the Holocaust as a child, and the impact this had on his understanding and approach to racism later in life:

And then I saw a documentary on the Holocaust when I was thirteen […] and from that moment on I got it, and when I heard National Front were sympathisers of Hitler I… it was just a no-no to me, and has been ever since. And so I suppose really ultimately by a young-ish age I'd formed the view that the main lesson of the last hundred years is the way that the politics of hate turned a relatively civilised country into a monstrosity. And it could happen again. And so when the BNP came to [my hometown], I just thought, well zero tolerance. A bit like a disease, you can't allow... you can't allow it to grow to a certain size and hope it won't grow more. You have to stamp on it, but it wasn't possible, but it wasn't possible to physically stamp on it, it had to be politically neutralised.

This often-poignant extract reveals a number of assumptions relating to the relationship between racism and liberal democracy. On the one hand, John explains how his learning about the Holocaust, and the awareness that “it could happen again”, has motivated his continued involvement in anti-racist work. However, in John’s account we also see traces

of a particular framework at play, in which the racism of Nazism is understood as a kind of rupture, turning a “relatively civilised country into a monstrosity”. John goes on to

describe the racism of the BNP as analogous to a disease, again appearing to draw on a broader conceptual framework which suggests that more recent far-right groupings are a deviation from an otherwise ‘healthy’ society. In other interviews, too, there were similar attempts to draw distinctions between a cohort of ‘real’ racists and the rest of society, including those susceptible to saying or doing racist things out of ignorance. ‘Real’ racists were framed by a number of participants as firstly pathologically unique, and secondly, as a sort of ‘hangover’ from another time or era. In the extract below, for instance, Dan makes a distinction between ‘Blood & Honour’ types, and otherwise persuadable individuals. ‘Blood & Honour’ here is a reference to the neo-Nazi organisation that became particularly prominent in the 1980s. Dan’s description suggests that those associated with this sort of organisation are of another, more backward era, and therefore consigned to irrelevancy and not worth engaging with. Further, they are viewed as exceptional in their resilience to physical violence:

And also a lot of Blood & Honour types, yeah? Who’re in their 40s and 50s. 40s, 50s, 60s… do they deserve a slap? Yes. Do they deserve to be put six feet under? Yes. But is it worth engaging and going to prison for? No. These people are past it man. They might have done stuff in the 80s. Also, people who were in Blood & Honour will get their heads kicked in ten times and still go out and do stuff, like they’re hard-line Nazis, that’s what they are. Lads who go to Football Lads Alliance stuff that are in their twenties, these are the people that we need to be engaged with and talk to and [educate].

In contrast, young men who are involved in newer organisations such as the Football Lads

Alliance (FLA) which was founded in 2017 (Hope not Hate 2018) are viewed as

redeemable. There seems to be, then, a sharp distinction drawn between these different groupings, and with it, different approaches and tactics. This is not to say that there are not some important qualitative differences between far-right groups which may well inform the sorts of strategies that anti-racists pursue. However, such a distinction deserves some critical assessment. Particular discussions in Glasgow further emphasised this, making a sharp distinction between identifiable ‘racists’ and the rest of society. In such cases, the

distinction appeared to contribute to the idea that Islamophobia is less of a problem – if a problem at all – in Scotland, and a number of participants referred to the historical absence of fascist activity in Scotland (in other words, identifiable ‘racists’) as an indication of an absence of Islamophobia. Paul, who has participated in anti-racist work as part of a group affiliated to his local football team, describes as part of a written interview how the

Scottish Defence League (a far-right organisation in Scotland also referred to as the SDL)

have been consistently challenged in Scotland, and links this to an absence of Islamophobia:

If I am completely honest I don’t think challenging Islamophobia, as a single entity factors into the work we do, I don’t think it is a huge problem in the country where we reside. We challenge all forms of discrimination equally, be that on the streets or in the terraces. We would never shy away from challenging Islamophobia if we felt it was a huge problem in Scottish society, like any time the SDL rear their ugly face, they have been challenged and sent back under their rock.

Note here how members of the SDL are distinguished from other members of society via the insinuation that they exist ‘under a rock’ and are therefore (temporally or spatially) separate. At the same time, when asked to reflect on where Islamophobia comes from, Paul writes: “much like other forms of prejudice it’s often contrived by the establishment to villainise a proportion of society for political gain”. Thus, Paul presents a theoretical understanding of Islamophobia as operating on a structural level that is not applied to a Scottish context, or to what he describes as the “very tolerant” city of Glasgow, in which context racism is understood only in terms of the presence of identifiable racists. It is also worth reflecting here on how the assumption that there is an identifiable and distinct set of ‘racists’ who stand in opposition to the rest of society is actively reproduced by particular parts of the state, which may in part explain the kind of disconnect at play in Paul’s interview. As I outlined in chapter 4, the Scottish government’s ‘Dear Racists’ campaign provides a particularly compelling example of this. Such a framing of racism obscures Islamophobia as a form of racism in particular because of the couching of Muslim difference in so-called ‘culture’ rather than biology, and the ways that ‘cultural’ concerns can be embraced – and institutionalised – by liberal states.

In a critique of how Islamophobia has come to be defined, Sayyid (2010) makes the case that Islamophobia has tended to be viewed through the lens of a Eurocentric, liberal, and hegemonic understanding of racism. In this conception, Sayyid (2010) argues, racism is defined in relation to the Holocaust, which is understood as an aberration of Western modernity, rather than a product of it (see also Bauman 1991; Hesse 2004). Racism, then, is understood as needing racists to enact it:

Thus in the absence of Nazis, quasi-Nazis or self-ascribed racists it becomes virtually impossible to imagine racism, for the Eurocentric concept of racism cannot conceive of racism without identifiable racists. (Sayyid 2010: 12)

Since racism can only be understood in this individualised form, one way to explain the racism that appears to exist even in the absence of “self-ascribed racists” is via an appeal to ignorance. In this formulation, “racism is produced by ignorant and uninformed people rather than racists, the unintended consequences of the actions of otherwise decent people” (Sayyid 2010: 12). This seems to resonate with the kinds of discussions outlined earlier in this chapter which centred the emotion of ‘fear’ in various ways, rendering racism and Islamophobia no more than unfortunate by-products of individuals having not enough – or sometimes too much – exposure to cultural difference. Drawing on the arguments made by Sayyid and others, the role of Nazism in participants’ discussions of Islamophobia

provides an interesting window into the dominance of a liberal framing of Islamophobia, and the kinds of responses such a framing tends to produce. It also points to some

complexities around how to respond to Islamophobia in light of diverging views as to who exactly is considered to be ‘a racist’.

The FLA and a splinter group, the Democratic Football Lads Alliance (DFLA), emerged in interviews in Manchester as key points of contention in relation to whom participants deemed to be ‘legitimately’ describable as racist. As such, they provide key examples of a particularly complex terrain which determines how Islamophobia is understood and responded to amongst those who participate in broadly anti-racist work. The FLA was founded in June 2017 in response to the terror attacks that year, and by October had mobilised a crowd of up to 50,000 to its national march (Hope not Hate 2018: 23). The DFLA, whose first march took place in Birmingham in early 2018 (Hope not Hate 2019)

has since usurped the FLA and is of particular interest here as its mobilisation in Manchester in June 2018, and the wider response from the left, was mentioned by a number of those I spoke to in the city.

The conversations around the DFLA and how to approach it appeared to revolve around one point of contention in particular: how should anti-racists understand and respond to this organisation, whose core message has focused on addressing ‘Islamic extremism’? Dan, who has been involved in anti-fascist community work in Greater Manchester,

describes how he finds the mobilising of concerns around ‘extremism’ particularly difficult to navigate:

After that [the original FLA march] there was another demo that was called by a more explicitly racist or far-right group, on the anniversary of the bombing [the 2018 DFLA march], so that must have been this year, on the anniversary of the bombing for victims of the Manchester bomb. You can’t protest that as a left-wing group, or as a left-wing community organisation. Because the narrative that then comes from that is that you’re supporting the people who bombed Manchester. The far-right aren’t daft. They’re pretty stupid but they’re not daft in terms of stuff like that. [Another anti-racist organisation] actually went out and protested it, and looked like idiots, because – of course they did. But… you can’t protest stuff like that, and the whole thing of like ‘we’re not Islamophobic, we’re just against Muslim extremists’, then the whole line, all the lines become very blurred very quickly. And it’s very difficult to… we’re against Muslim extremism as well, do you know what I mean? Who in their right mind wouldn’t be?

Here Dan highlights a common rebuttal made by or on behalf of Islamophobes: “we’re not Islamophobic, we’re just against Muslim extremists”. This is a key example of what Alexander (2018: 13) describes when discussing the tactical “separation of Islamophobia as ideology from Muslims themselves”, which facilitates the dodging of accusations of racism; part of the ‘de-raceing’ of Islamophobia (Alexander 2018). Crucially, Dan’s description points to the seeming impossibility of responding effectively in the face of what he refers to as a ‘blurring of lines’; an obfuscation which conceals the usefulness of a cultural framing for the reproduction of Islamophobia, including the concept of ‘Islamic

extremism’ to the securitisation of Muslims via the ‘war on terror’ (Kundnani 2014). Thus, Dan’s account raises significant questions around how the left can and should respond to forms of racism that tend to be articulated through cultural registers.

Another interview in Manchester revealed an alternative interpretation of the DFLA’s mobilisation in the city. As part of our conversation, Madiha – an anti-racist activist in Manchester – recounted her horror at the response (or lack of it) to the emergence of the DFLA by others on ‘the left’. Referring to statements made by a senior trade union official, whose calls for dialogue with the DFLA and criticisms of the left had been reported by media outlets across the political spectrum (see Dathan 2018; Kimber 2018), Madiha says:

Can you imagine he said that about Mosley, or Hitler, or Mussolini, or any of these fascists? You know, I couldn't comprehend, and I remember thinking I feel slightly panicked because I don't know how to respond to him, because this was not what I was expecting. And then he talked about... you know and he's had a meeting with the Democratic Football Lads leadership, and actually he understands their concerns [sounds shocked].

As our conversation continued, Madiha explained that she felt that such demands for engagement with the DFLA were reminiscent of “talking about hugging a Nazi”, and entirely inappropriate given what she saw as the DFLA’s denial of her very right to exist as an ethnic minority Muslim woman. If nothing else, the various positions represented by this particular trade unionist, and by Dan and Madiha, suggest that there are ongoing debates and tensions amongst anti-racists in terms of how to make sense of and respond to newer articulations of Islamophobia. Diverging understandings and approaches emerge, at least in part, from specific subjective experiences; for example, the demand for dialogue and engagement is much more likely to come from a white man who does not experience the same direct threat of violence as a visible Muslim woman might from members of an organisation such as the DFLA. This being said, the positioning of the DFLA as no different from Nazis fails to capture the complex ways in which Islamophobic discourses are mobilised, and accusations of racism simultaneously de-fanged, as evident in Dan’s account above.

What does it mean to make such a sharp distinction between far-right activity and (more) mainstream politics, where ‘real’ racists are viewed as pathological outliers? In an article addressing the public response to the political assassination of MP Jo Cox in 2016, and drawing on an analogy of domestication, Hannah Jones (2019: 3) urges us to be critical of such distinctions:

The distinction between “un-respectable” and “respectable” misogynist white supremacism might be considered the relationship between the “wild”, “unruly”, or “undomesticated” misogynist white supremacism of Cox’s murderer on the one hand, and the “domesticating” and “domesticated” misogynist white supremacism of daily life on the other.

Similarly, Mondon and Winter (2017) suggest that such a distinction does not map so easily onto the diverse forms of Islamophobia that we have seen proliferate in recent years. For them, ‘liberal’ and ‘illiberal’ forms of Islamophobia overlap and reinforce each other. Illiberal articulations of Islamophobia include the political outputs of the far-right, “taking their ideological impulse from anti-egalitarian and authoritarian movements” (Mondon and Winter 2017: 2164); liberal Islamophobia includes those political discourses which appeal to notions of a ‘progressive’ West, often seemingly inclusive of other racialised minorities but to which Muslims are asked to pledge ‘loyalty’ if they are to be considered sufficiently ‘moderate’ for acceptance (Mondon and Winter 2017). Crucially, Mondon and Winter (2017) argue that the fixation on ‘illiberal’ articulations without an understanding of this relationship actually serves to “legitimize, normalize and internalize certain forms of racism as they appear to stand in opposition to more reviled forms” (Mondon and Winter 2017: 2157). In this way, we see a consistent mainstreaming of Islamophobia, but also – as the above suggests – a real challenge for anti-racists who, having historically mobilised against clearly identifiable articulations of biological racism, must now navigate the more complex terrain of Islamophobia’s cultural dimensions.

Indeed, there were many examples referred to in interviews in both Glasgow and Manchester which represented the more ‘everyday’, banal forms of Islamophobia that emerge in this context, and this was particularly the case for Muslim women participants. A number of these participants discussed either their own everyday experiences as Muslim

women who choose to wear hijab, or the experiences of friends and family. Most often what was expressed was a trepidation around what it means to be a ‘visible’ Muslim woman navigating public places and spaces. Sometimes this trepidation related to the fear of being physically and verbally attacked, which visible Muslim women are particularly at risk of (Zempi 2020). In one conversation, Asma – a young Muslim woman who was previously involved in a student Islamic society and student politics in Manchester – recounts how different she felt when she began wearing a hijab for the first time in her early twenties. Talking about the 2017 Manchester Arena attack, she explains:

But I remember when the Manchester one happened in particular – I wasn’t in Manchester, which didn’t help – and for the first time I was a hijabi, so I remember being like ‘I am a visibly Muslim woman now’. And I remember being generally… I was considerably more worried this time about going to work the next day, and you know going around Manchester as considerably more visible. Luckily nothing happened to me, but friends things happened to them, and you know whenever a terrorist incident happens, wherever it happens in the world, there are so many messages sent out [within the Muslim community] being like, especially women, like ‘if you’re going on public transport, be careful’. Try to avoid public transport, like stay at home if you can. Like these messages are the norm.

Similar concerns about navigating everyday life as a visible Muslim woman were echoed in a particularly revealing example which came from Madiha, who has herself experienced