Diving into the tunnel: the politics of race between old and new worlds

It was in Cuba that concentration camps were first added to the political technologies of colonial modernity, during the Spanish-American war, an episode that ushered in The American Century we have just left. The tropical prospects of Guantanamo Bay are right next door to Jamaica, the island from which Richard Reid’s grandfather set out for England during the late 1940s armed with a British passport.

The identification of the ‘Shoe Bomber’ as Richard Reid, a third generation British citizen, has brought attention to his compatriots among the hooded and chained al-Qaida prisoners now in Caribbean detention – the Britons Feroz Abbasi, Asif Iqbal and Shafiq Rasool. Their presence has baffled most commentators on the September attacks and their aftermath.

Much of the UK’s media has cast them as evil people who have reverted to cultural type : they are among us, but they are not of us. The logic of ethnic absolutism comprehends their affiliation to fundamentalism not as choice, or will, but as an instinctive response to the combined weight of history, tradition and bio-cultural continuity. Their British citizenship is a perverse mishap that retroactively stands as an indictment of overly lax immigration control, flawed nationality legislation and the illegitimate results of arranged marriages.

Cast in this light, their treacherous choices, in so far as they were chosen, remain a private spiritual matter, disconnected from the patterns of everyday life inside Britain. Their fundamentalism is no more or less alien than was their misguided introduction into the country in the first place. They are not traitors to Britain because Britain has not produced them.

Instead, as immigrants, they are doomed in perpetuity to be outsiders. Wherever they have been born, their children and grandchildren will never belong.

This hollow common sense has another timely virtue. It makes other young Britons’ enthusiasm for political Islam nothing whatever to do with domestic relations or domestic racism, with policing, schooling, prison or the labour market.

Last summer there were riots in a number of England’s northern industrial towns. This too was ventriloquised to communicate the same duplicitous, facile, ready-racialised truths. The rioters rioted because they were alien. The proof of their alienness was the fact that they rioted. Even though white British have a long tradition of rioting and hooliganism, last summer’s riots were not regarded as British.

Britain’s jails are brimful with Richard Reids. The unacknowledged effects of institutional racism have polluted the waters of the country’s civic culture. The need for new thinking which can take discussion beyond clichés about assimilation and immigration control goes much further than the shores of the United Kingdom.

A generation has passed since anybody sat down and tried to make sense of the politics of race in Britain. Politicians still respond to profound and militant disenchantment among young British people with litanies of ever-more-elaborate citizenship pledges and obligatory language training. Such measures will do little, if anything, to address the conditions that have produced a routine disaffection that can extend to exceptional treachery.

The black Europeans

Outside of Camp X-Ray, two men are being indicted as members of bin Laden’s international terrorist conspiracy – Zacarias Moussaoui and Richard Reid. Both have intimate but decidedly post-colonial connections with black London life. The story of black European involvement in these geopolitical currents is disturbingly connected to the deeper history of immigration and race politics.

Zacarias Moussaoui, “the twentieth hijacker”, is routinely described as a French citizen of Moroccan ancestry. But he lived in London for nine years, and completed his education at South Bank University in the cosmopolitan space of the area known as The Elephant and Castle.

The network that connects Moussaoui to Richard Reid, the hapless, gigantic “Shoebomber”, encompasses Paris, Brussels and Amsterdam, as well as London. Both Moussaoui and Reid worshipped at the Brixton mosque, which seems to have been a key point, connecting routine frustrations and hatreds of people made angry and miserable by white supremacy to the balm of a fundamentalist utopia.

Twenty years ago, a lost and damaged young man like Richard Reid might have found comfort and sustenance in a different politics, philosophy and culture. Globalising Ethiopianism and Rastafari livity told a plausible story, combining indictments of imperialism with the restorative rhetoric of black power.

The ascetic Rastafari spoke the language of peace and love, of rights and justice, though not in a liberal accent. At the end of the Cold War, they held provocatively to the fundamental unity of humankind – something that could only be recovered if the destructive power of racism could be acknowledged and repaired.

There would be wars until the colour of skin was of no more significance than the colour of eyes; but once southern Africa was liberated, it was clear that the Idren would not be waging it.

The rise of hip hop Islam

The later eighties and nineties saw the poetic eschatology of the Caribbean basin succeeded by a much more self-consciously militant, even militaristic approach to black solidarity. This time it was the obvious product of the overdeveloped world.

A hip hop mentality, derived from American apartheid and addressed to its distinctive conditions of inequality and exclusion, replaced humility with excess. Martin was Uncle Tom and Malcolm was manhood. Under the corporate tutelage of Spike Lee and company, consumerism, hedonism and gun play were no longer to be incompatible with the long-term goal of racial uplift.

For many, the mainstreaming of black culture was a shift that tainted and compromised the very core of black resistance. From then on, America’s Afro-Baptist pieties were an inducement to surrender, not revolution. Islam, rather than Christianity, would supply the patch of solid ground on which post-modern black nationalism could plant its ideological feet.

Willing to break the hold of American-centred thought but unable to turn entirely from its racial phantasmagoria, the austere and authoritarian versions of black nationalism peddled in black London’s underground publications such as The Alarm echoed America’s pseudo-fundamentalist Islam. Fantasies of national rebirth were lubricated by the opportunistic wisdom of figures like black America’s self-styled “truth terrorist”, Dr Khalid Muhammad.

In a depressing moment, defined by the popular ‘gangsta’ slogan:

Get paid,

Get laid,

If you get in my way you’ll get sprayed

– a selective appropriation of Islamic motifs helped to develop communitarian responses to nihilism.

However, this Islam was leavened with diverse occult and new age themes. In the best protestant fashion, it soon turned inwards. The desire to re-make the world began to take second place behind the obligation to re-make oneself.

Power was exercised in ever more narrow circuits: over one’s own body at the gym; above all, in the regulation of interpersonal conduct between men and women, between parents and children.

America was initially thrilled and horrified to be told that John Walker, its very own wigger Talib, was a suburban hip hopper from an affluent Californian family. He was converted into a Muslim fanatic through over-exposure to the prison conversion autobiography of Malcolm X.

The idea of contamination by blackness is an old script. The notion that Black militancy initiated Walker’s descent into irrationality may yet aid his insanity defence. It qualifies his image as a traitor with layers of psychological confusion.

We discovered that his father, Frank Lindh, had abandoned his mother for a man. With his primal identity on the line, Walker’s acts became comprehensible within the rules of a corrupted family romance.

The clown-foot bomber

Though Richard Reid’s parents have also been dragged to prominence in the national quest for an explanation of his conduct, his less pampered life tells an altogether different sort of tale – one as deeply English as Walker’s is American.

More than the antics of those maimed Mullahs now active in the shadows of Arsenal football ground and elsewhere, Richard Reid has been used to manifest the uncomfortable truth that British multiculturalism has failed.

His place in history is already assured, not by his ideological commitments or his almost comical ineptitude, but by the bizarre instruments of his failed martyrdom: the sophisticated training-shoe bombs that enclosed his gigantic clown-sized feet.

Those iconic feet matter, of course. In the midst of all the simplistic rubbish that has been spouted about his racially-mixed parentage, they have been made to bear all the weight of nineteenth-century theories of hybrid vigor.

Like his enormous body, those feet not only confirm Reid’s essential monstrosity, but represent him as the cuckoo in our national nest: fed and nourished by misplaced goodwill, only to repay that kindness with violence and indifference.

His trainers make an announcement to a world more used to savouring the cool Britannic achievements of celebrity “half-castes” like Scary Spice, Ryan Giggs and Sade. They say that race mixing, rather than being a routine, essentially banal feature of contemporary British life, is another misguided social experiment. It can only end in catastrophe.

From mangled roots to brotherhoods of angels

The vivid tabloid accounts of the Reid family’s fortunes over several generations support this default view of the relationship between ‘race’ culture and social pathology. From that angle, the seeds of Richard’s recent tragedy were sown long ago by Hubert Reid his migrating Jamaican grandfather.

But it is with the figures of his estranged father, Robin (a wretched specimen of the tragic mulatto type seemingly plucked from the depths of Enoch Powell’s worst nightmares), and his mother Lesley Hughes, a white Englishwoman who attracts sympathy by having made a mistake twenty-eight years ago, that things get serious. All the damage done to Britain by post-war immigration becomes apparent.

Mrs Hughes had the presence of mind to divorce her black husband and flee to the English countryside. From her rural home, she looked with palpable horror toward the bad behaviour of the long-lost child. Like Victor Frankenstein’s hideous unnatural offspring, it seemed to have chosen a path of destruction as its compensation for exile from kith and kin.

Bravely resisting the pressure to make failed family life into the overall explanation of his son’s treachery, Robin Reid offered an eloquent counter-analysis of both their blighted lives. He repeatedly cited the effects of British racism, trying to create an emotional and psychological context in which his son’s strange choices might be suddenly comprehensible.

Robin describes himself as a Cockney, born within the sound of London’s Bow Bells. He reveals that he has spent eighteen of his fifty-one years behind bars for numerous minor offences. Though he has managed to go straight for the last eight years, the press confirms his disreputable character with the fact that he has been living on benefits during all of that time. His son, Richard, also became a criminal.

Though acknowledging his failure as a father, Robin Reid refused to identify that as the key to his son’s fate. He claimed credit for introducing the boy to the Islamic faith, which he, like Malcolm X, discovered while in prison, and which he used subsequently as an antidote to the racism that bounded and broke his hopes.

Robin Reid says firmly that he found refuge from that same racism in the fraternal kinship provided to him by the Hell’s Angels who, exactly like the Islamic brotherhood which took in his errant son, did not care about race or colour. The historic tension between the claims of communities we choose and those into which we are born has seldom been more starkly stated.

A cat born in a kipper box…?

For more than thirty years, the logic of British racial thinking specified that the social and political problems embodied in the invasive presence of immigrants and their kin are an intrusion: an alien wedge cutting in to an unsuspecting nation.

This is why Britain’s black settlers were always immigrants. Recent talk of refugees and asylum seekers remains saturated with traces of racism, regardless of the wholesome intention to place these discussions on a new footing that shares nothing of the alarms of Enoch Powell who famously foresaw a river of blood.

As Reid’s case hit the headlines, there were attempts to storm the Channel Tunnel, as others sought to emulate his grandfather and reach England’s promised land. Today, the traditional desire to push immigration away dovetails neatly with the new mood. September’s horrors and their ongoing aftermath are used to fix a clash of contending civilisations and their mutually incompatible cultures.

Whatever the demographics of pensions provision and negative population growth may stress, there is a powerful warning here for would-be architects who look forward to a coffee-coloured future. A cat born in a kipper box will nonetheless remain a cat.

It is harder, but more important, to take post-colonial conflicts into account. We need to think through why young black Europeans in particular might find fundamentalism attractive, and be willing to hitch their hopes for a world without racism to the absurd engine of an Islamic revolution.