Why the working class was never
‘white’
This essay – a response
to Satnam Virdee’s Racism, Class and the
Racialized Outsider - was originally published on the much-missed New Left Project website,
26 Dec. 2014.
©
Jon Lawrence, University of Exeter
I
am currently a little over half way through a two year research project re-analysing the
surviving field notes from a dozen or so classic social science projects from
the late 1930s to the late 2000s. My purpose is to use these sources to explore
the shifting nature of everyday life and culture through people’s own words. Though I am looking at much more fragmentary
and mundane language in essence I am following Raymond Williams in seeking to
map shifts in the underlying ‘structures of feeling’ of working men and women
across the last eighty years. I am particularly interested in the shifting balance
between individualism and community in popular culture. One facet of that story
brings me into direct dialogue with Satnam Virdee’s new book Racism, Class and the Racialized Outsider
because it is in popular conceptualisations of ‘community’ and ‘belonging’ that
one is most likely to find evidence of the vernacular racism which runs through
Virdee’s book. However, when one looks at the issue ‘from below’ – through the
recorded speech of working men and women, rather than through the actions of
their supposed representatives, the story looks a little different than in
Virdee’s telling. Three differences of
emphasis stand out to me:
1. Perceptions
of ‘belonging’ tended to be very local – suspicion of the ‘outsider’ was
certainly intense, but it was not strongly marked by ethnicity or perceived ‘racial’
differences.
2. At
the supposed high-point of the ‘racialization’ of the British working class (in
the 1950s and 60s) abstract discussion about nationhood and race, often linked
to the end of empire, was heard much more frequently, and with more emotional
force, from middle-class rather than working-class respondents.
3. In
the Powellite moment, when ‘race’ and immigration really took off as issues in
working-class districts there was already a strong working-class opposition to
white racism – in fact there were two: one socialist and internationalist, the
other liberal and parochial. Left-wing politicians and self-acting ‘racialised
outsiders’ were able to achieve so much so quickly in the 1970s and 1980s because
the British working class was never a monolithic bastion of ‘whiteness’.
We
need to start by recognising the force of ‘class-as-place,’ as opposed to
‘class-as-politics,’ in British popular culture across the period from the
1880s to the 1950s – the period which historians such as Eric Hobsbawm and Ross
McKibbin identify as the high point of distinctive and relatively homogeneous
class cultures in Britain (Hobsbawm, 1984; McKibbin, 1998). Although class
feeling has long been a potent force in Britain, the vernacular sense of class
has never been easily mobilised through party politics (Lawrence, 1998, 2011).
‘Class’ in everyday usage was (and is) a cultural resource to make sense of
social difference and social injustice in a sharply hierarchical and unequal
society. This vernacular sense of ‘class’ was strongly rooted in place, and
could be highly conservative and particularist (McKibbin, 1998). Moreover, this
vernacular culture of ‘class-as-place’ was predicated on an un-resolvable
tension between a sense of solidarity against ‘Them’ ─ the ‘outsiders’ who held
sway over your own and your loved ones’ prospects ─ and of differentiation and
distinction among ‘Us,’ the residents of any given locality. This can be seen
very clearly in classic working-class memoirs such as those by Robert Roberts (1971),
Louis Heren (1973) and even Richard Hoggart (1988), who first theorised the
‘Us’ and ‘Them’ distinction (Hoggart, 1957). Each conveys a strong sense of cohesive and
relatively closed ‘urban villages’ that nonetheless were riven by deep internal
divisions based on skill, gender, status, religion and, yes, also by ethnicity.
And
so when Labour politics sought to construct a political rhetoric which placed
‘the workers’ at the heart of the nation this was driven less by craven
nationalism, let alone xenophobia, than by the need to find some synthetic
political language capable of transcending local particularism. Labour
politicians and trade union leaders had to find some way to overcome the
internal divisions which often fractured the sense of ‘class-as-place’ once
politics became about more than how to defend the locality from ‘Them’.
Turning
to the testimony in the surviving field-notes of social science, one certainly
finds plenty of evidence of indigenous hostility towards ‘outsiders’, and some
evidence of explicitly racial
hostility. But the bold claim that by the 1960s Britain was divided into two
separate, antagonistic working classes, one white and one black, is hard to justify
when viewed ‘from below’. It is equally difficult to find evidence from these
transcripts to sustain the argument that ‘whiteness,’ or notions of racial
superiority, were central to working-class culture in post-war Britain.
Interestingly, the testimony from Bermondsey in the late 1950s displays the strongest
evidence of ethnic antagonism, but this is directed at Irish migrants moving in
from north-west London. Even in the late
1950s there appears to be no recognition of non-white immigration as an issue
relevant to local people.
Similarly,
the Bethnal Green material from the mid-1950s registers evidence of residual
anti-Semitism in this former hot-bed of Oswald Mosley’s BUF, but no evidence of
hostility to immigration from South Asia or the Caribbean. This may simply
reflect the fact that these were not major areas of first settlement for
Commonwealth migrants, but if so that still underscores the limited purchase of
racism as an abstract issue about Britishness in such working-class districts.
By contrast, one does find significant hostility to immigration as an abstract
issue in the testimony gathered from the New Town of Stevenage at exactly the
same time. Interestingly, most of this overt racism came from middle-class newcomers
to the town for whom it was an abstract political issue about national decline
and the loss of empire, not a personal issue rooted in local experience.
This
is not to deny the existence of working-class racism, or to suggest that racism
is somehow acceptable if rooted in perceived socio-economic grievances, but it is to suggest that the concept of a ‘white
working class’ needs problematizing, as does the claim that the British working-class
was strongly committed to a post-war vision of ‘White Britain’ analogous to the
politics which sustained the idea of a ‘White Australia’ until the 1960s. Yes,
old, settled neighbourhoods could be profoundly distrustful of outsiders – all
outsiders, including the researchers seeking to study them – but when it came
to race they were internally divided. We certainly hear working-class racist
voices – often echoing stock racist complaints about over-crowding, welfare
dependency or exploitative landlords and small businessmen, but we don’t hear
the deep pathological racial fears laid bare in the letters sent to Enoch
Powell after his so-called ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech in 1968 (Whipple, 2009).
But
more importantly, we also hear strong anti-racist
voices loudly and clearly. At Wallsend on Tyneside, where the researchers were
gathering their data just as Powell shot to notoriety, we find workers
expressing casual racism, but we also find eloquent expressions of an internationalist,
solidaritistic perspective in which, crucially, black and white are seen as
sharing the same working-class interests. Racism is denounced as a deliberate capitalist
strategy to divide workers against themselves, weakening their ability to
challenge those with power over their lives (shipbuilding had long been a very
fractious industry and its workers had plenty of experience of the dangers of
internal sectarian battles). Even those who endorsed
the Powellite line on immigration were usually quick to distance themselves
from overt racism (the English racist’s urge to appear liberal is not a new phenomenon). In a discussion among a
group of blacksmiths one man declared ‘We ought to keep the blacks out. They’re
no worse than me but they ought to stay in their own country.’ One of his
workmates claimed to agree but then offered a striking caveat which exposed
both the myths about immigration that were fuelling these fears and his own instinctive
liberalism: ‘But if they work a year before drawing National Assistance I don’t
mind that.’ This, I would suggest, was the other source of opposition to
vernacular working-class racism: a widespread popular liberalism which served
to contain, and to some extent tame, instinctive prejudices against outsiders –
racialized or otherwise. We too often fail to recognise that liberalism was
more than a hypocritical veneer across British society – it was a powerful
discursive script which helped to delegitimise intolerance and prejudice in the
eyes of many working people. As Raph Samuel counselled, the myths we live by
have great power over us; academics must study that power as well as expose the
myth.
Popular
culture was not monolithically racist, let alone white supremacist, in the
1960s. On the contrary it was riven by intense arguments over the meaning of
immigration. The scenes played out on
the sofa between East End docker Alf Garnett and his Left-wing son-in-law in the
controversial sit com Till Death us DoPart (1965-75), were taking place daily in workplaces across Britain in the
late sixties and early seventies. It was
not working people who racialised the idea of the English ‘working class,’ but
academics and journalists (e.g Michael Collins's 2004 book The Likes of Us or the BBC's 'White Series', 2008); the sooner we recognise
that the ‘white working class’ is not a thing,
but rather an unhelpful media construction which the Left must eschew, the
better. Not only does it deflect attention away from the virulent racism in
other parts of English society, but it reinforces the idea of working-class
people as unchanging, anachronistic and ‘left behind’. The ‘racialisation’ of
class in Britain, has been a consequence of the weakening of ‘class’ as
a political idea since the 1970s – it is a new construction, not an historic
one, and it is profoundly unhelpful. It makes it all too easy for millions of
people hit hardest by neo-liberal economics to be dismissed as somehow reaping
what they deserve.
References:
BBC
(2008) ‘White’ series on BBC2
Collins, M. (2004), The Likes of Us: A biography of the White
Working Class (Granta)
Heren, L. (1973), Growing Up Poor in London (Hamish Hamilton)
Hobsbawm,
E. (1984) ‘The formation of British working-class culture’ pp. 185-9 in his Worlds of Labour: Further Studies in the
History of Labour (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)
Hoggart,
R. (1957), The Uses of Literacy (Chatto
& Windus)
Hoggart, R. (1988), A Local Habitation: Life and Times, 1918-1940 (Chatto & Windus)
Lawrence, J. (1998), Speaking for the People: Party, Language and Popular Politics,
1867-1914 (CUP)
Lawrence, J. (2009), Electing Our Masters: the Hustings in British Politics from Hogarth to
Blair (OUP)
Lawrence, J. (2011), ‘Labour and the politics
of class, 1900-1940’ in D. Feldman and J. Lawrence (eds), Structures and Transformations in Modern British History (CUP)
McKibbin,
R. (1998), Classes and Cultures: England,
1918-1951 (OUP)
Roberts,
R. (1971), The Classic Slum: Salford Life
in the First Quarter of this Century (MUP)
Whipple, A. (2009), ‘Revisiting
the “Rivers of Blood” Controversy: Letters to Enoch Powell,’ Journal of British Studies, 48: 717-35.
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