Institutions and Racism
Is equality in the workplace a real possibility?
Farhad Dalal argues that ideas of racism and racial equality are embedded in processes of group formation and belonging. Understanding these processes may help us to make practices of racialisation more visible.
Individuals, groups and racial groups
The word ‘race’ is a commonplace. It is readily overheard in conversations at bus stops and dinner tables; it is cited frequently in newspaper columns as they describe the goings on in the world; politicians and activists continually draw on the idea of race; there are entire academic journals and departments dedicated to its study. And perhaps most importantly, the term is enshrined in British law through the Race Relations Act (1976) and its amendments. By virtue of the fact that the term ‘race’ is granted legal status, we are all obliged to engage with it. If we do not, ‘the law’ will reprimand and chastise us variously.
Peculiarly, however, the groupings that race relations regulations require organisations to monitor are not racial categories but ethnic ones. Why is this and what is the difference between them?
It is impossible to find definitions of race that are meaningfully distinguishable from those of ethnicity and culture. In their advice to the citizens of this country, the CRE rely on Suman Fernando’s definitions of these terms: race - to do with visible physical appearance, said to be determined by genetic ancestry; culture - beliefs and behaviours shared by the group, said to be determined by education, upbringing and choice; and ethnicity - shared history, language, culture, a group identity defined from within, which is said to be determined by group identity, social pressure, and the need to belong. There are a great many problems with this way of dividing up the world. For example, the definitions overlap with each other (culture is made part of the definition of ethnicity); they are tautological (ethnicity is defined as a group identity the cause of which is group identity); although race is defined as having to do with physical differences, it is agreed by Fernando himself that there are no such things as races. Similar difficulties are to be found in all definitions that seek to differentiate this trinity.
In fact, it is accepted generally within many discourses (for instance biology and sociology) that there are no such things as races per se. If one accepts this, as I do, then we are faced with a critical problem: if there are no such things as ‘races’, how can there be a thing called ‘racism’? Surely racism exists - but what does it consist of?
The legislation tries to get around the problem by making a distinction between racism and discrimination (on the basis of a - false - dichotomy between thought and action), and then limiting itself to the latter. Racism is said to be the belief that some races are superior to others, whilst discrimination is to do with the activity of treating people ‘less favourably on grounds of their colour, race, nationality or national or ethnic origin’. Race Relations legislation allegedly limits itself to what people do, and does not address what they think. (In its literature the CRE appears to take race itself as a taken-for-granted category.)
The House of Lords sought to clarify the definition of a racial group as that which has a long shared history and a cultural tradition of its own. 1 These two factors are said to be essential to the demarcation of a racial group. Also relevant (but not necessary) requirements are having a common geographical origin, as well as a common language, literature and religion. But surely these latter are categories of culture as they are usually understood. And what of this idea of ‘origin’? In which epoch of the continuing nomadic history of the human species (which as far as we know walked out of Africa) are we going to draw a line, take a snapshot, and say that this is where people are ‘originally’ from? Interestingly, the House of Lords make no mention of physical characteristics in their clarifications of race. So is a racial grouping the same as that of culture?
However, when the activity of racial discrimination is defined, the physical characteristic of colour does feature. Discrimination is said to be racial if it takes place on the grounds of colour, nationality, race, ethnic or national origin.
A history of the terms race, culture and ethnicity shows three things. First, a mish-mash of very different types of things are used to define them - nationality, geography, religion, language, behaviours, beliefs, some notion of ‘where people are originally from’, and colour. Second, whilst attempts to define the terms continually collapse into each other, the notion of colour (in particular those of black and white) has been used from the very beginning to name all three - we talk readily of white and black races, cultures and ethnic groups. Third, there is no agreement as to the number of races or cultures or ethnicities; they seem to spring up suddenly in contexts in which they were previously invisible. This invites a shift of focus from what these terms actually are to the functions they serve. I suggest that the terms are evoked at particular times and places in order to create distinctions, so as to be able to differentiate the ‘haves’ from the ‘must-not-haves’; in brief, in order to create an ‘us’ and a ‘them’. Thus what is critical is not racism, but racialisation, by which I mean the activity which consists of the evocation of the mythic idea of race as an explanatory or organising principle. Thus racism is not just a belief, it is first and foremost an activity.
The question that should continually be asked is thus the reasons for any of these terms being used at a particular moment and in a particular time: who is seeking to make a differentiation and for what reason?
The language used to describe Africans and other exotics (lascivious monstrous types, apelike, and so on) in the travel records of the early European adventurers is language we would clearly call racist in today’s terms. Yet they did not make use of the term race in their descriptions. I think that this is because at that time the African was not yet human, and so was already Other. Over time, accumulating evidence forces one to admit Africans into the body of humanity, and this is the moment when the term race is required to keep them Other. It is now admitted that whilst they are human, they are of a different race. When the category of race started to crumble in the early twentieth century, then culture came to the fore. Now, it is said that while we might all be one race, they are of a different culture. As the idea of cultural difference becomes difficult to sustain in any meaningful way, there is a retreat to the idea of ethnicity - the internal sense of belonging to a group. The term ethnicity has more respectability, but its work is no different from that of race. The fact that race relations legislation requires one to monitor ethnic groups is testament to that fact.
It is also the case that a semantic history of the terms black and white in the English language shows that the associations and meanings of the terms have not been there ‘naturally’ from the beginning, but have developed and grown over the last five hundred years or so into the signifiers of negativity and positivity that we come to take for granted today. In the English language the terms start off more or less neutrally. From the Middle Ages onwards, white comes progressively to be associated with goodness and positivity, and black with badness and negativity. (For example, blackness does not become associated with death until the fourteenth century). Eventually (from the eighteenth century onwards), they come even to name things that can have no colour - the emotions - in order to signal where they are positioned on the scale of approval - for example ‘black anger’. I would argue that notions of black and white are critical to the project of racialising the world, and that they have been honed to work as signifiers of exclusion and inclusion. It is no coincidence that the Black was named as such by those that designated themselves as Whites. And it is no coincidence that the association and uses of the words mushroomed during the European Imperial adventures beginning in the seventeenth century. It is because race is an empty category that it has had to increasingly rely on an idea of colour to sustain differentiations. Thus the world is colour coded because it has been racialised.
Another part of the argument is that, as each of us is born into, and goes through the psycho-social developmental processes in, an already racialised and colour coded world, we inevitably imbibe the discourses with our mother’s milk. So it is that our psyches too are inevitably racialised and colour coded, so much so that it becomes ‘natural’ in day to day speech to reach for the word ‘black’ when one wants to signal disapproval in some way. A trivial example: the fish caught illicitly and sold clandestinely during the fishing crisis of 1995 were spontaneously called ‘black fish’ on the BBC news (BBC1, Nine O’clock News, 12.2.95).
In sum, the so-called racial identities are fictions manufactured by colonising processes. The fact that they come to be taken up as essentialist categories by those that the categories sought to marginalise speaks not to their reality, but to the power of ideology and discourses that we cannot help but imbibe through the psycho-social developmental processes we are bound to go through.
But saying that ‘races’ are fictions and reifications does not provide solutions to the problem of racism. The paradox is that something that has no material existence comes nonetheless to have a very powerful experiential and psychological existence, so much so that it has a critical role in the manufacture of individual identities. The fact that the world and the discourses have been racialised and colour coded means that we not only come to experience the world in racialised ways: we continually reproduce and reinforce the racialisations in our interactions with each other.
Despite the problems with the word ethnicity, it does capture something significant in its gesture towards the notion of belonging. Radical Group Analytic Theory (based on the work of the group analyst S.H. Foulkes and the sociologist Norbert Elias) would concur with the view that the need to belong is intrinsic and essential to the human condition. However, belonging is not a straightforward experience - it is a problematic. It is impossible to say just what is the essence of a particular ‘us’, say Britishness. When we look directly at the British ‘us’, we find not homogeneity but diversity - multiple groupings, overlapping and conflictual: vegetarians, landlords, Scots, accountants, miners, Christians, Muslims, fascists, liberals, and so on. And if one turns one’s attention to each of these sub-groupings, they too disintegrate into further arrays of diversity. It is precisely because of the impossibility of finding and naming the essence of the ‘us’ that one looks to the margins to the ‘not-us’, and uses colour to demarcate them. However, the idea of the ‘not- us’ is beset by the same set of problems as the ‘us’, in that there is no unity to be found there either. Nevertheless, our minds somehow manage this feat of registering, in any particular moment, an experience of an ‘us’ that is contrasted with a ‘them’: a difference not of degree, but of type. Here is the conundrum: I can always say that two things are the same by virtue of one attribute (say redness) and different by virtue of another (say age). Both are simultaneously true. So the question then becomes why in some circumstances do I find myself having an experience of similarity, and in other circumstances I find myself fixated by the differences.
As the question is such an important one, let me ask it again in a slightly different form: out of the infinity of differences between any two people, why does one of these differences come to be more meaningful than the rest? The same can be, and needs to be, asked of similarities.
To talk about belonging is to talk of a sense of an ‘us’. But the logic of belonging is paradoxical. For the notion of belonging to have any rational or emotional meaning and significance, two conditions of necessity must be fulfilled. First, in order to be able to belong to one place, it is necessary for there to be another place that one does not belong to. Second, there must be some who are decreed not to be part of the belonging group. If either of these conditions are not fulfilled, then the territory of belonging would become infinitely big and encompass everyone, and so become meaningless. This then is the hard truth about ‘belonging’ - it is created by and through the mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion to which the notion of power relations are critical.
The multiculturalist response
Words are indeed very powerful things. They are so powerful that their mere use not only leads us to believe that the thing they refer to exists; it also leads us to act and behave in ways that take account of the things that are being alluded to. Thus the attempts to deal with racism that accept the idea of race are bound to create new difficulties and conundrums. One significant attempt is multiculturalism.
The watchword of multiculturalism is ‘equal but different’. In this world view, because they do not understand each other’s belief systems, when people of different cultures, ethnicities or races, etc, encounter each other, they are inclined to misinterpret what they encounter; and this in turn arouses in them a mixture of anxiety and hostility. The solution proposed is a mixture of education and tolerance: education, in terms of learning about the Other culture and making it familiar; and tolerance. in terms of tolerating something that is causing one some kind of discomfort. This strategy, although completely sensible in one regard, avoids confronting the problematic of of power and renders the world more benign than it actually is.
One of the ways of testing the multiculturalist thesis is by asking the question, when is an encounter between two (or more) people thought to be not multicultural? Consider: the very notion of multicultural suggests the possibility of its normative inverse, something which one might call mono-cultural. Similarly, the affiliated idea of a ‘cross-cultural’ encounter implies the possibility of an encounter that remains within the tram lines of a mono-culture. But, as I have been arguing, there can be no such thing as a mono-culture. Cultures are structures that institutionalise power relationships. What’s more, the notion of a transcultural encounter is also problematic, as it invokes an idea of an encounter taking place in a region in some way beyond, outside, or prior to, culture itself. Let me put it this way: why do we tend to call the encounter between Mr Singh and Mr Smith multi or cross cultural, and not the encounter between Mr Smith and Mr Jones?
There are two dangers here. One is culturalism, in which we become fixated by culture; the other is trying to do away with culture entirely, to end up in a culture-free space. These dangers are founded on, and alternate between, two kinds of errors. The first error is to take the division of humanity into cultures, races or ethnicities as unproblematic givens, so that the issue becomes one of ‘how to negotiate these differences’: culturalism is the tendency to get mesmerised by some of the divisions between human groupings found in the external social world. The alternative position, of a culture-free space, assumes that there can be a retreat into the internal world of individuals, and that human nature, our humanity, is something outside or prior to the social. My argument - in contrast to both these positions - is that these categories do not exist out there in nature: they are generated and sustained by the logic of power relations.
Institutional racism and the workplace
For the purposes of this analysis, let us say that racism is a mechanism that works against the principle of equality. What I want to turn to now are the workings of racism in the workplace. The first thing to be said is that the workings of racism are usually invisible. In all countries, it so happens that certain groupings tend to do less well in the job market. It is not even clear that there is a problem here. Two or more people went for an interview and one of them got the job. In such circumstances, the conclusion one is often forced to draw is that the world as we find it (these people here better off, and those people there not so well off) is because some kinds of people are just better at some kinds of tasks. (In Finland for example, a country justly proud of its social conscience and democratic practices, about 55 per cent of graduates are women; and the majority of those getting higher grades are also women. Yet when it comes to managers in organisations at the highest levels, women make up just 6 per cent of them.)
So something more must be going on in such situations, something that the principle of equal opportunities does not solve. When that something is clearly colour coded, it is called institutional racism (now renamed ‘indirect racial discrimination’ in the legislation).
I must say that for a long time I struggled to really know quite what was being talked about when the term institutional racism was used. How can an institution do anything? Because ultimately an institution only consists of the individuals that belong to it. And I have created a further problem through the way I have been talking about racism. I have reified ‘racism’ by saying things like ‘the work of racism’, and so made racism sound like it is a thing - a thing that does things to us. It then appears that racism itself is the problem. It is not. The problem is the way that human beings find themselves experiencing and treating other human beings.
How power is institutionalised
I was recently helped to understand the term institutional racism through the story of a school teacher. The teacher really struggled to maintain discipline in his first year of teaching. One day early on in his second year he was excited to have found a solution for himself. At the very start of the new teaching year with a new class, he presented to the pupils a written set of rules of what was to be not allowed and also a graded set of punishments (detentions and so forth) to do with each infringement. Now when a student misbehaved, he said to them: I am obliged to punish you in this way for this misdemeanour because it says so in the rules. The teacher was very excited by the outcome. Wonderfully, the students did not complain but co-operated in the punishment process, because now, whatever was happening, it appeared that it was not the teacher doing it to them. The teacher was only following the same set of rules as the students. The rules had been institutionalised and all were subjugated by them.
The world is not as simple as this classroom, and even the classroom is not as simple as I have portrayed it. However, the very simplicity of the story allows us to see some of the elements of institutionalisation that are normally invisible. Specifically, although on the one hand it is clear that it is the teacher who has actually created the rules, in day to day practice it appears that the teacher is powerless to do otherwise than he does; he is obliged to follow the rules like everyone else.
The point is made clearer through another trivial experience. Recently, whilst walking along a road I saw a shortish policeman. It occurred to me that this was another example of the institutionalising mechanisms at work. In the past, when the rules said that the minimum height for policemen was to be six foot (or whatever it was) then this rule ‘naturally’ excluded people from certain parts of the world from becoming policemen. There was no single person, no grand conspiracy, no statute in Home Office regulations saying that (say) Tamils should not be policemen - it is just an unfortunate outcome of a rule that all are subject to. Of course there are always rationales for the rules, rationales that seek to explain the necessity of the rule being the way it is. However, these rationales are not as rational as they might initially appear. In actual fact all rationales must always contain within them some element of rationalisation.
One can see clearly in the first story that the schoolteacher had the power to determine what the rules were. However, we can also see that in the practical situation in the classroom, that fact has become invisible to the school children. We can intuit that some years later the way in which these rules came into being will have been completely been forgotten. This would give us the impression of the rules having always been there - from the beginnings of time. This is the process of institutionalisation. Further, we can see that the process of institutionalisation obscures the workings of power, leaving us with the illusion that the situation we are faced with is natural, self-evident, and eternal. It then appears to us that policemen just are tall, and it does not even occur to us to question the hows, whys and wherefores of the situation.
This description I have given of the processes of institutionalisation is exactly how ideology is usually described. As is well known, the function of ideology is to give particular historical and contingent arrangements of the world the impression of necessity and inevitability. As Roland Barthes put it, ideology transforms history into nature. Thus I would say that the processes of institutionalisation are identical to the workings of ideology, and indeed each is an aspect of the other.
The thing about power is that the more one has, the more one is able to keep up the illusion of having clean hands, of being innocent if you will. For example, the structure of the military is such that the general - having ordered his troops into action - can sit having a quiet evening meal, whilst the dirty of work of killing is being done by others elsewhere. But even though the soldiers are doing the dirty work, the structure of the situation is such that even they need not feel any personal responsibility for the consequences of their actions. This is possible because a function of bureaucratic structures (and hierarchy in general) is to dissipate responsibilities so that it appears that no actual individuals are responsible for what is taking place. The general has the possibility of sleeping with an easy conscience because (a) he is not doing the actual dirty work, and (b) he has given this order in the service of something greater than him - his country, his people and so on - and so can actually feel virtuous and noble whilst other human beings are being slaughtered. Meanwhile the soldier has the possibility of easing his conscience by virtue of the fact that he is only following orders. He can think that as the intention and decision to propel him into action came from elsewhere, that is where ultimate responsibility must lie. There are two caveats I need to make, however. First, I would like to stress that these are possibilities not certainties; guilt and responsibility are never machined away in their entirety - many a soldier and even generals end up traumatised. The second caveat is to say that I am not arguing that one should do away with organisational hierarchies, structures and bureaucracies (which is an impossibility), nor that the primary purpose of these systems is to machine away responsibility (and therefore guilt). I am suggesting that there is something intrinsic to the nature of hierarchical structures that allows them to be used in this way.
We can also get to see in this scenario how rationales are being mobilised to bolster activities. Like the schoolteacher, each can claim that they are only following the rules. It should be stressed, again, that on the whole these rules are experienced as naturally occurring injunctions - to love one’s country, to defend one’s way of life, and so on.
The analogy of the army also helps us see why it is that the rawest and crudest instances of racism - that is, the most visible - are often seen in the most deprived areas. The captains of industry, or you and me sitting having a cappuccino in Covent Garden, are able, just like the generals, to make it appear that our hands are cleaner than they actually are.
The analogy of the classroom, although useful, of course seriously misrepresents the ways in which such rules arise. In the classroom the teacher made a conscious decision to invent the rules in order to manipulate the students. In real life there is no such Machiavellian figure, or international conspiracy, planning how to benefit certain groupings and disenfranchise others. This is a problem which arises in evolutionary theory: how do we end up with things that look like intricate designs despite there being no designer? And the answer in this sociological and psychological arena is the same as in the biological one. These rules emerge and are thrown up by the processes of interaction which take place in the field of power relations. However it is that these rules come about, they inform the shapes and forms that institutions come to take. The result is that institutions, including the workplace, come to embody and represent these self-same rules. In sum, one of the functions of the structure of institutions is to bolster, conserve and perpetuate particular ideologies - and here is the twist: to do so without giving the appearance of doing so.
In the descriptions I have given so far, I have made things appear more fixed and simple than they actually are. Let me correct that now. Institutions, like cultures, are not homogenous in the sense of sustaining a single ideology. In any one moment there are any number of ideologies, in all sorts of shapes and guises, contesting and struggling against each other. One rule might be - we must make money for our shareholders; another rule might be - we must look after our workers; another might be - we must concern ourselves with the environment, and so on.
For ideology to function at its best, it must remain invisible; it must be as though it simply was not there. The reasons, the rationales, for acting in certain ways and not others, must be given a basis in something else, something rational. Although there is always something reasonable in the rational, its very reasonableness serves as a screen that hides the rationalisation.
This invisibility is one reason why the issue of institutional racism is so intractable, and allows numerous commentators to say with equanimity and conviction that there is no such thing as institutional racism - and they say this despite the evidence supplied by an enormous number of reports by government and academic research bodies.
The invisibility of discrimination
Since institutions (no less than individuals) emerge from and reside within psycho-social discourses, they will of necessity come to embody, reproduce and reinforce the prevailing ideologies and conventions that are found there. I take it as axiomatic that one of these conventions is the powerful linkage of blackness with badness, and goodness with whiteness. So all of us, all institutions, must embody and reproduce them in some way.
I would like to stress the phrase ‘in some way’: this embodiment and reproduction is not the same everywhere and for all people. It is continually contested and modified. So I am not espousing a crude pessimistic determinism in which things are fixed forever. The point is that something exists in the British context (the theme of black and white) that necessitates contestation. Thus all institutions will come to have structures that somehow work in the direction of privileging its white constituents over its black ones. Thus there is much evidence that black members of an institution are found to do less well than the white members at a statistical level. But because the mechanisms of marginalisation are invisible, there exists the possibility of explaining away these facts in a variety of ways, and it is to these I will now turn.
The denial of the existence of racism is integral to racism itself. It is part of what makes it work. If there is no problem in the first place, then nothing needs to be done. The understandings that are offered to explain why things are happening in the way that they are, are rationalisation masquerading as explanations, whose function it is to explain away the possibility of something untoward happening at an institutional level.
The first kind of explanation is the idea that if the white members are doing better in the system, then it is because they are better. The rationale behind this explanation is that of meritocracy. And this must indeed be true on some occasions - at times a white colleague is more deserving of promotion than a black colleague. The key here is the phrase ‘some occasions’, because on other occasions this is not the case. But the way things work, the instances in which the assertion is true are used to make invisible the occasions on which it is not true. And the way in which this happens is as follows.
It is the nature of statistical evidence that some of the data that constitute that evidence will directly contradict the statistical truth. For example, a statistical truth might be ‘most of the apples in this basket are red’. However, it is also true that some of the apples in this same basket are green. What takes place next is that these particular truths are used to deny the veracity of the statistical truth, which is like saying the fact that because some of the apples are green must mean that it is not true that most of the apples in the basket are red. For example, it is true that some black lawyers have reached the highest echelons of their profession and become Queens Council. This then is used to make the problem one of particular individuals. It is said if Winston and Satish are able to become QCs, then the fact that Harish, Meena and Sandra have not been able to must have to do with some difficulty in them. This then is one of the main strategies used to render institutional racism invisible. What is being said is that institutional racism does not exist, and that the problem as such is that of particular individuals.
On some occasions, when it becomes blatantly clear that something racialised has indeed taken place, the individualising strategy is once again called upon to do its work. Now it is the ‘bad apple’ theory, and it is used to say that it is this or that particular policeman, or social worker, or whoever, who is unfortunately racist. And if we cast out these individuals, things will be ok.
The interplay between visibility and invisibility is a complex one. The question one always needs to attend to is when do people of colour become invisible and when visible? The following story draws out some of the intricacies.
Recently I was invited to contribute to a training programme to do with leadership that was designed specifically for the so called ethnic minority members of a number of organisations. By now it is clear what is meant by ethnic minority - black people, the darkies. Anyway, I arrived at lunch time and there in the dining room of this conference centre were two groups having lunch - and it was very clear which was the group I was going to be engaging with. One table was entirely white, and the other primarily black.
I was told by one of the organisers (both white) that those at the white table were here for stage two of the main training. It had been previously noticed by the organisers, that participation by the ethnic minority members was almost non-existent in the main training. It had therefore been decided to run one specifically for the ethnic minorities, and so here they were, attending stage one of the same training. Now this seemed to me to be a good thing - they had noticed the problem and tried to do something about it.
During the training session I described the powerful impact the dining room had on me when I first entered it, seeing that the people at one table were all black and the other almost all white. And I had wondered how it was that that such a powerful division had come about in that way given that we were not living under a system of apartheid.
Part of the answer was given then by one of the black members who said that on arriving on this course he was surprised to see a white colleague from his organisation in the other training. He was doubly surprised because he did not know (a) that the colleague, whom he thought he knew quite well, was on an ongoing training, and (b) he did not even know about the existence of that training. And then he was further surprised to discover two more white colleagues from his organisation also on that training.
How are we to understand what is going on? Clearly something very powerful had gone on in the organisation so that the lines of communication had circumnavigated this person, or gone through him as though he were not there. He was invisible to those who had disseminated information regarding the training. We may surmise that unconsciously - or perhaps consciously - the disseminators discounted him as a potential candidate for that training.
We may surmise further that on his return, if he were to question how and why he was rendered invisible, it is very likely that it would be explained away as a one-off, that it was an oversight of some kind and that it was not done intentionally by anyone. And no doubt this rendition would at some level be true - no one individual intentionally excluded him. There must have been a chain of communication of A telling B about the training, who made a passing reference about it to C at the photocopy machine, and so on. And somehow, this chain never included the black person in question. It is really hard to comprehend how this can happen given that (a) there was no conspiracy, and (b) any one of the people who knew could have linked him into the information chain. This is exactly what makes the process of institutionalisation such a powerful and efficient mechanism in perpetuating ideologies, privileges and divisions. Its very silence and apparent non-existence is its strength.
In my experience, what often happens next is that if the black person persists and does not buy into the one-off explanation, they are seen as difficult and as having a chip on their shoulder. When one does not feel heard, one either gives up, or is compelled to shout louder and louder, until one’s voice gets shrill in its insistence, and gets to sound like whining. And that certainly does get heard, and is used to condemn the character of the complainer as weak in some way, which in turn distracts from the content of the actual complaint.
Alternatively, the voice might become angry. Now the black person is experienced as threatening and disruptive. One of the defences put up by the institution (more precisely: people who constitute the institution) is one in which it is said that there is no basis in reality for the complaint; there is no conspiracy to keep black people down; the event that took place is a one-off and so meaningless. If this were true then the conclusion that one is then forced to draw is that the difficulties must lie within the black person. The protestor becomes perceived as the problem. In effect, what has taken place is that the black person has been diagnosed as being paranoid. The thing to note in these not improbable scenarios is the fact that what has become painfully visible is the black person as bad (angry), mad (paranoid) or weak (whining), and what remains invisible is that which has set off the whole situation in the first place.
There is another lesson to be learnt from this scenario. The fact that a ‘special’ training was offered to the ethnic minorities can be construed as positive discrimination. This special training is a compensation for a failure within the system. However, if this failure is kept invisible, then the only thing that is visible is apparently that ‘they are getting special treatment! They are being favoured over us!’ We can see then that if the ‘compensation’ is the only thing that is registered or noticed, it can set off feelings of resentment, jealousy and envy in the mainstream population. Reports in the mainstream media tend to pick up on and report exactly these sorts of ‘favours’, which in turn inflame the populist mind.
This resentment in the mainstream gets further fuelled by a sense of being accused and blamed for being one of the better off - this is particularly galling when it seems that it is they that are the better off. To use a term like ‘institutional racism’ is no help in a moment like this; it just further fuels the antipathies, and generates an impasse. ‘What institutional racism?’ is the outraged cry. ‘Just look at the special treatment they are getting - they are jumping housing queues and get all sorts of state benefits, whilst we have to wait for years’.
I will take up some additional reasons as to why is it so hard to see what is going on through another anecdote. An organisation convened a workshop to look at and think about the experiences of its black members in order to reflect on its possible unconscious processes. During this workshop one of the participants said: ‘I am not responsible for what happened in earlier times and places. I did not colonise Africa and have nothing to do with slavery. I am an individual and I treat others as individuals - some people I like more and others less. I am just like everyone else’.
This is not an uncommon reaction from those in the mainstream; they feel unfairly criticised and accused of doing something, or feel unfairly blamed and made responsible for the sins of their fathers and their fathers. Now, I have a lot of sympathy for what this person is saying. And yet something more complicated must be going on. To understand what that might be we need to recall the fact that racialised discourses conceived the racialised ‘us’ in two sorts of ways - vertically and horizontally.
By vertically, I mean lineage - the so-called bloodline that is drawn from one’s ancestors to the present day. This ‘us’ stretches back in time, and indeed to the beginnings of time. And by horizontally, I mean typology. This ‘us’ is an ‘us’ because all those that belong are of the same ‘type’ - Caucasian or Black or Mongoloid or whatever. In contrast to the first kind of ‘us’ that lives in time, the second kind of ‘us’ spreads across in space.
These versions of ‘us’ are not usually distinguished, and, depending on the rationalisation one wants to mobilise, one or other of these will be utilised. The participant in the workshop, in saying that, as an individual living in the year 2004, she really is not responsible for the historical processes of colonisation and slavery, is saying that she is not part of a lineage-‘us’. Whilst there might be a bloodline between her and her ancestors, she is saying that she is not responsible for their crimes, and should not be held responsible for the actions that they took. Fair enough.
However, in the here-and-now she is in fact benefiting from privileges accorded to her as a white person by the processes that have become institutionalised. And this occurs without her having to do anything. In other words, whilst she is personally not responsible through lineage, she nonetheless benefits by virtue of typology. This occurs because the actions of the ancestors have prepared the world to be biased towards the whites. Thus, whilst this participant’s rejection of lineage is understandable and visible, she renders invisible the benefits she derives from typology.
Her cry that she is an individual is an unconscious strategy to avoid acknowledging that she does in fact get benefits from the way that the system is structured. This helps her say, truthfully, ‘But I haven’t done anything!’. Maybe, but one is never just an individual. One cannot not belong to groups, and the relations between groupings are always power relations. In fact I have been arguing that groupings are generated by power relations. You can see what is happening here. The black is systematically marginalised by virtue of the grouping s/he is part of, whilst the denial of the significance of the groupings by the white person is a means of obscuring the workings of power.
If there is anything at all to the idea of institutional racism, then we would have to admit that those at the centre, those that benefit from the processes of institutionalisation, must have a vested interest in not knowing about the conditions that put them there. This is because any change in the situation would necessarily entail a dilution of the privileges that they are currently accorded.
About the Author
Farhad Dalal is a psychotherapist and group analyst, who also works with organisations. He is a training analyst and supervisor for the Institute of Group Analysis, London, and a founding member of the South Devon Psychotherapy and Counselling Service. He is the author of Taking the Group Seriously (1998) and Race, Colour and the Processes of Racialisation (2002).
Notes
1. In 1983: see www.cre.gov.uk/gdpract/ed_s_legal.html .
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