Defining racism

Racism is a system of oppression and disadvantage which is built into the way the world works. Racism isn't prejudice. It isn't about why I like or dislike someone. It’s a system that factors into the economy and how everything works. It’s a system of white supremacy that privileges those who are seen to be white and disadvantages those who are seen to be Black. The latter are at the bottom, and there is this hierarchy in between. That plays out in the economy, in the criminal justice system, in access to health care and so on. That's what we mean by racism.

The rise of white supremacy

The best way to think about white supremacy is to see where it emerges. It really dates to 1492, when Columbus sails the ocean blue and Spain has just kicked out the Moors. Europe is emerging from its Dark Ages, and Columbus goes over to the Americas and kicks off the largest genocide in human history. The midpoint estimate is 73 million people wiped off the face of the earth.

1892 painting by José Garnelo depicting the arrival of Christopher Columbus to America, 1492. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

The logic being played out in this process is that white Europeans are valuable, while Black and brown people can be exploited in the pursuit of profit for those who are white. That’s what you see in the genocide in the Americas. That's what you see with the enslavement of Africans. That's what you see with colonialism and drawing the resources out from the underdeveloped world. And that's what we continue to see today.

If you look around the world today, you will see that so-called Sub-Saharan Africa is the poorest part of the world in terms of GDP. The West, where white people live, is the richest part of the world. And there is this hierarchy in between. That’s white supremacy in action.

The dark side of the Enlightenment

The Enlightenment is produced by white supremacy and, in turn, produces even more white supremacy. Think about the timing of the Enlightenment. It's the 18th century, so it's not at the start of colonial brutality. We’ve already seen the erasure of the natives of the Americas, the enslavement of Africans, the colonisation of Asia. This creates the distorted view that white people are superior. So, when the Enlightenment emerges, what we now think of as the West has already created this idea of white supremacy. When people like Immanuel Kant or John Locke theorise, they’re theorising from this position of superiority, where histories have been rewritten to write out all of the Arab, African and Asian scholars who have contributed to knowledge. They’re theorising from the top and therefore come up with this theory of ideals and rights which is really based on the idea of white supremacy: that white people are rational, that the white race, as Immanuel Kant says, has all the talents of the world.

If you look at someone like Immanuel Kant, whom I spent a lot of time talking about in my last book, his basic theory of rights is that all people have the right to life but only white people have the right to prosperity. That is essentially the world we've created, where bodies like the United Nations want to make sure people have enough to eat and don’t die, but have absolutely no interest in equalising the scales, which have been so unbalanced by this issue of whiteness and racism.

How Europe played catch-up

Before 1492, Europe may have been the only part of the world in a dark age. Think about what the Moorish occupation of Spain brought into Europe in terms of books and even things like cutlery. The rest of the world was relatively more advanced than the West at this stage. We tend to think of indigenous Americans as naked savages, but they had highly developed civilisations. On the island of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, which Columbus called Hispaniola, where he did most of his damage, the midpoint estimate of the number of people who lived there at the time was eight million. It was a highly organised society. Europe was behind and trying to catch up.

This is why you don't have colonialism straight away. It takes time for Europe to catch up with these civilisations. The critical thing that unlocks European progress and advancement is racism and white supremacy, as seen in the American genocides and the trans-Atlantic slave trade. European empires build the wealth necessary to get the gold, the cotton and the sugar. They build the wealth necessary to colonise the rest of the world. White supremacy unlocks everything else that we see in the West.

Three-fifths human

The United States Constitution, which declares that all people have the right to be free, was written and signed by a bunch of slaveholders. A lot is made of that contradiction.

"Slave Market". This image shows men, women and children being sold. Some are cooking food over an open fire. Johann Moritz Rugendas (1802–1858). Wikimedia commons. Public Domain.

But it's not really a contradiction because, at the time, they didn't see Africans as humans. This ties into the Enlightenment idea that non-whites were less than human. In America, Africans were literally noted down as three-fifths of a human being for tax purposes. So, no one really saw the contradictions at the time. We weren’t humans. It was fine. Furthermore, so-called scientific arguments were advanced to suggest that Africans were more civilised in slavery than outside of slavery. That just shows you that white supremacy is the basis of the nation.

Europe is no different. Here, we think that slavery was something that happened in the Caribbean rather than in France or England. In England, for example, slavery was actually illegal but, of course, it was perfectly legal in the Caribbean. But because America is a settler colony enabled by slavery, it has to be much more open about these laws and these rules. But these were laws and rules that applied everywhere across the West.

The legacy of empire

Britain is still rooted in the legacy and continuation of empire. We haven't changed the economic system. The wealth the country is built on is still the same. It isn’t a coincidence that Britain's largest corporate entity is Lloyd's of London, a multibillion-pound corporation that got its wealth from insuring the slave trade.

The wealth endures, and so does the poverty. My families are predominately from the Caribbean. You see a lot of economic inequality among people of Caribbean descent. But we shouldn't even be in the Caribbean; slavery is why we're there. No reparations have ever been paid for the damage that was done. Mass poverty still exists in the Caribbean. If you want to understand poverty and the economic relationship of people of Caribbean descent to the state, you couldn’t possibly understand it in any other way. More importantly, this exploitative relationship Britain has with the Caribbean is maintained today. The same could be said about Africa and India, even though the latter is rising.

The Windrush scandal

The Windrush scandal is a perfect example of how race plays out and the legacies of empire. The background to this is the legal migration of Caribbean people to the United Kingdom before the 1970s. Many came as children and had every legal right to be here. But when the government brought in its “hostile environment” policy, it meant that we had to have checks. People who had been here for decades and who had every right to be here didn't have the right documents. They couldn’t prove that they belonged in Britain, and many thousands lost their jobs and were deported.

This photograph is one of 37 images taken at Waterloo station, just weeks before the British Government's Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1962 came into force. Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.

It’s known as the Windrush scandal after the boat that docked in 1948, bringing the first wave of immigrants from Britain’s former colonies to the mother country. The scandal was tied to Caribbean countries for that reason, but it also swept up immigrants from Africa and India. It shows you that even though we were all part of the nation in theory, in reality we were subjects and not citizens. That speaks a lot to how Black people are treated today, even those born here.

The university is racism

There’s a quote I wish I had come up with. It’s by Deepa Naik, an organiser in London. She said: ‘The university isn’t racist. The university is racism.’ That’s how we have to think about it. The promise of university learning, which in the West is heavily rooted in the Enlightenment, is that you acquire a deeper and more progressive understanding of the issues. But on the issue of race, it actually makes it worse. When race becomes scientific, it becomes attached to the biology of individuals and the “proof” that non-whites are not fully human.

Until the Holocaust, racial science was widely accepted. Take statistics for instance. The statistics we still use and that I was taught in university were the creation of Francis Galton, a eugenist who used those same statistics to “prove” that Black and Jewish people were less than human.

Lessons from Stephen Lawrence

The most important step in understanding racism is to stop conflating it with individual prejudice. Take the murder of Stephen Lawrence and the subsequent inquiry by Macpherson, which talks about institutional racism. Stephen Lawrence was killed by a group of people who were clearly racist. It’s a racist murder. But that’s not why the story is important; it’s what happens after that makes it important. Because Stephen Lawrence is Black, and because he’s with his Black friend, the police don’t investigate properly. They don’t follow any leads. They assume it’s a gangland crime.

This is not primarily a story about prejudiced individuals. What makes it racist is that these individuals got away with it for 20 years because the police and other institutions didn't understand, didn’t prosecute and didn’t take it seriously.

Racism is systemic. You can't stop prejudice. There will always be white people who don't like Black people, Black people who don’t like Asian people and so on. The question is: how does the system deal with that? That's what racism is. The Lawrence story tells us that we need to focus on the structures, the police, the courts and so on. We spend far too much time focusing on individual prejudice, which actually takes us away from addressing the real problem.

Discover more about

the true meaning of racism

Andrews, K. (2021). The New Age of Empire: How Racism and Colonialism Still Rule the World. Penguin Books.

Andrews, K. (2019). Back to Black: Retelling Black Radicalism for the 21st Century. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Andrews, K. & Palmer, L. A. (Eds.). (2016). Blackness in Britain. Routledge.

How to understand racism