`Our passports on our faces'
01 January 1991
`Our passports on our faces'
artdoc August=1992
CARF no 6, January/February 1992
[Campaign Against Racism and Fascism]
Excerpts from a speech given by black activist and writer A.
Sivanandan to the Refugee Council's Annual Conference,
November 1991.
This country has never faced up to its racism, never learnt
its lessons. And so, once again, we are back to the same
things - government humbug and hypocrisy, scare stories by the
gutter press, phoney rationalisations by the intellectual
Right - that we went through in `62 and '64 and '65 and '68
and '71 with the Commonwealth Immigration Acts. Then, too, the
government pretended that it was talking about Commonwealth
immigrants per se, when it meant immigrants from the black
Commonwealth - like it now talks about refugees qua refugees,
when it means refugees from the Third World. This is not just
a harmless euphemism, but a contrived double-speak which
allows you to keep your virtue even as you conceal your vice.
So that Mr Baker can declare `I am not a racist. I don't want
Poles any more than I want Zaireans.' But it is the Zaireans
who are fleeing a totalitarian regime: the Poles have no
longer any need to. And it is the West that has kept Zaire's
Mobutu in power for the last 26 years. As in the 1960s, we are
back, too, to the numbers game. Then the argument was that
fewer numbers (of blacks) made for better race relations.
Today, the argument is that fewer refugees means less fascism.
`If we fail in our control efforts,' said Mr Major at the
Luxembourg Summit,`we risk fuelling the far Right.' The fewer
the refugees, the fewer the people for fascists to attack -
which leads us to the inexorable conclusion: no refugees, no
fascists - which is stupid.
It is the sort of argument that gives respectability to
racism, puts the burden of racism on the refugees and gives
credibility to fascism. It is the sort of argument that allows
one to overlook the wholly irresponsible, totally racist
action of the German government when, instead of protecting
the refugee hostels in Hoyerswerda against fascist attack and
arresting the attackers, it removed the attacked to refugee
camps.
And, as in the 1960s and '70s, the politicians are once more
getting ready to play the race card in the coming election. In
1964, it was Peter Griffiths and Smethwick and the slogan was:
`If you want a nigger neighbour, vote Labour.' In 1978, it was
Mrs Thatcher, and her line ran `people are really rather
afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people
with a different culture'. In 1991, we have Mr Lloyd, Home
Office minister, saying `we can't have the whole of Asia and
Africa coming to live in London.' And, judging from past
history, if Labour see that the Tories are getting electoral
mileage by playing the race card, they won't hesitate to use
it either.
But we are not just going over the same ground as in the 1960s
and '70s, we are not just regurgitating the racism of that
period. We are also adding to it, compounding it, by having to
borrow from other European racisms, by colluding with the
lowest common denominators of French and German racism in the
process of forging a common European policy on refugees and
asylum-seekers.
And this new, common, market racism, this new pan-European
racism, has given rise to a whole new set of myths and
stereotypes, its own brand of institutionalised racism and the
outbreak of a new pan-European fascism. The myth has been
created, for instance, that the vast majority of refugees who
come to Europe are bogus, that they are economic refugees and
not political refugees. But such a distinction, particularly
when applied to the Third World, is totally fallacious because
it deliberately overlooks the monolithic nature of the
political world we are moving into, the so-called New World
Order.
There is no Third World any more. The Third World is an aspect
of the First World, a consequence of th