Larvatus Prodeo

A number of recent events are drawing out into the open some of the very fraught conflicts around ethnic and/or racial identity. In Britain, as political thinkers like Tom Nairn have argued, the same processes accompanying the end of the Soviet Empire which saw residual ethnic identities come to the fore when essentially constructed identities which paralleled the rise and hegemony of an imperialist state are continuing their long march through the decomposing institutions of Ukania. Incomplete devolution in Scotland has called forth English nationalism, a phenomenon that had long been eclipsed. As the Scottish Prime Minister-elect in all but name, Gordon Brown, prepares to take over Blair’s tarnished crown, he faces the real possibility of an SNP victory in the Scottish Parliamentary elections. While these contradictions are interesting to explore, one aspect that deserves more attention is mentioned in passing by The Economist in a story which examines, inter alia, the rise of Englishness and the decline of Britishness:

For some groups, Britishness has a particular importance. “English� seems to convey an ethnic, rather than a civic, identity. One of the useful attributes of the British label is that minorities often prefer it. In 2002 pollsters at MORI found that only 9% of ethnic minorities strongly identified with England, Scotland or Wales, compared with 39% of the general public.

As an identity tied to a state, and in fact an empire-state from whose foreshortened realms many of the “minorities” came, Britishness has the utility of not implying ethnic or cultural exclusivity in (the term of the postmodern moment) “values”, but rather a largely chosen identification with certain civic traditions and beliefs. This is by no means a new phenomenon. The Roman Empire’s granting of citizenship to almost all within its borders, and its ability to “Romanise” provincial elites as well as to provide a minimum of security and quality of life to its citizens is the template for this sort of civic identification. The Habsburg Empire, too, tried to sell itself to its peoples as it made the transition from a dynasty to a modern supra-state through a universality transcending ethnic particularities. Its final failure to do so, in the teeth of Wilsonian nationalist self-determination, led to fracture lines which continue to haunt central Europe, and a century of largely tragic consequences.

Attempts to teach “Britishness” in schools, or “Australian values” for that matter, are doomed to failure. In the first instance because of the eclipse of the supra-ethnic imperial identifications themselves, and in the second because the values lauded are not “Australian” but always directed against an intrusive Other (whether the Asians of Pauline Hanson’s dark fantasies of the 1990s, or you know who right now). The USA has been one of the few imperial states with a story to tell and a mythos that makes sense. Or did, until the default identity of “whiteness” itself began to feel threatened and was problematised for the first time in the last few decades.

These are some of the contexts of the debate over whether Barack Obama is “Black” or Black.

Continue reading ‘“Black” is the new Black?’