Racism isn’t about race, says anti-racist

There’s a curious rant over at the Guardian by A Sivanandan, “a leading black intellectual and anti-racist campaigner” (does concealing one’s first name make one seem more intellectual?), in which he claims that

In fact Hodge seems (Guardian pre-, Scotsman post-) to have been focusing on Asian communities, not “blacks”. It’s slightly alarming that Sivanandan (go on someone, tell me what the A stands for), director of the Institute of Race Relations and editor of Race and Class, seems to have missed one of the big public lessons of the Rodney King riots: that in LA neither black looters nor Korean shopkeepers saw the latter as part of oppressed blackdom (see eg Janine Young Kim, Are Asians black? The Asian-American civil rights agenda and the contemporary significance of the black/white paradigm (Yale Law Journal)).

Further reading of Sivanandan (it’s not Adolf is it? Adolf was a popular first name for the children of sub-continental nationalists in the 1940s), suggests that he believes that racism is no longer racist. In 2001 he published an article, Poverty is the new black, which sets out to show that “The roots of this summer’s violence can be traced to the xenoracist culture of globalisation”. While you try to figure out what the hell xenoracism is, here’s a bleeding chunk of his piece:

I think Mr Sivanandan is simply too lazy to change the demagogic habits of a lifetime and adopt an analytically useful term like poorhate. Here’s more from his Guardian piece:

For a start, “colour bar” never left the vocabulary; even if it had, to characterise it as right-wing seems slightly hard on a guy like Henry Gunter, who came to Birmingham from Jamaica in 1949 and wrote in 1950:

That sounds to me like someone who knows what he’s talking about.

Similar posts

• SOS Racismo: pro-Islam, indifferent to anti-Semitism
  The French left’s anti-racism proxy appears to have lost control of its Spanish entity, which appears to have lost sight of
• Don’t waste money teaching tourists Spanish
  The Observer informs us that a new language class being tested by Thomson in Spain could help holidaymakers untie their tongues. Spanish
• Well, a republic, obviously, but who’s going to be president?
  I have the
• Worst ever theatre experience
  Sergi Belbel’s A la Toscana, last night, first night at the Teatre Nacional de Catalunya, of which Mr Belbel is the
• Bollocks to grammar
  The Guardian has tracked down the British Labour Party’s deputy leader and leading pugilist, John Prescott.