Page 55 - Culture Society and Economy

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CULTURE, SOCIETY AND ECONOMY

actively ongoing, material root. It once had such a root but has one no
more. One’s explanation of racism then must be that it is due to a sort of
historical-cultural inertia on a massive scale. It is primarily a social-
psychological hangover from the colonial and slave past, not a resur-
rection of and reinforcement of that past on the basis of real material
interests in the present period. Yet I would maintain that it is impossible
to understand the vitality of racism in the twentieth and twenty-first
centuries as due to some kind of unspecified ideological momentum from
the past. As was the case with the collapse of liberalism and the resur-
gence of racism in the late nineteenth century, the contemporary imperi-
alist root of modern racism must be the point of departure. From the
viewpoint of a materialist theory of imperialism, the deep North–South
economic divide and the renewed struggle among the great powers for
global geo-political advantage are the root features of contemporary world
racism. The huge global political and economic inequalities and the
jostling for strategic global advantage inevitably generate a strong sense of
racial and ‘civilizational’ superiority in the developed North. Immigration
and the economic pressures engendered by globalization further aggravate
these basic tendencies. It is precisely this subordination of whole peoples
globally and not just at the local and national levels which is the differentia
specifica of racism in the imperialist era. Black people are thought of
as inferior everywhere in the world by very many among all non-black
peoples.
As already noted, there is much reference to the influence of
colonialism and slavery in Gilroy’s work. But the absence of any grasp
of the role of finance capital and imperialism as the foundational process of
present-day racism remains the enduring failure of his work to this day.
His resorting to Vološinov or to Hall’s metaphorical statement that ‘Race
is the modality in which class relations are experienced’, apart from beg-
ging all the important questions, collapses race into class. 15 One cannot
understand the force and durability of racism by seeking explanations of
it at purely the local or national level, regional, or even the ‘Atlantic’
level. The forces which drive racism are global in their very nature.
Gilroy’s shifting the unit of analysis from single nations – Britain, the
United States – to a so-called ‘Atlantic’ region merely substitutes a less
narrow ‘Atlanticist’ regionalism for a narrower nationalism. Indeed,
Gilroy does not take note of the fact that the very creation of communi-
ties of Black Atlantic sailors settled in the port cities of Europe is largely
a result of the replacement of sailing with steamships and the expansion
of shipping after the 1860s. Significant numbers of Black, Indian and
Arab sailors were employed as cheap labor on European shipping lines and

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