‘In Tamworth, the Holiday Inn has been used for asylum purposes for years, and the simple reality is that residents want their hotel back.’ So said Sarah Edwards, a Labour Member of Parliament, in a speech to the House of Commons less than a week before a racist mob targeted migrants in the same hotel and sought to burn it down. The far-right violence of July and August 2024 has been followed by remarkably little further reflection on the nature of racialisation in British society, and barring very few exceptions, there has been almost no attempt to integrate the lessons of this crisis in terms of Marxist theory or to understand what made the sudden explosion of violence so inexplicable to so many. This is made all the more urgent by the growing strength of Reform, marching forward on an anti-migration tide. 

At the same time, in the last few years, certainly since the high watermark of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020, a lexicon of anti-racist concepts and theories of race and racialisation has proliferated, sometimes borrowing from materialist and anti-colonial movements, but invariably also suffering the distortions of co-option by mainstream and liberal actors and corporate Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion practices. Despite the tremendous power and mobilising capacity of the Black Lives Matter movement, and the considerable successes in politicising a large mass of people, it is still the case that a materialist analysis of race has remained underdeveloped. This is not surprising; theory always lags behind political practice, since it is through practice that new phenomena enter the frame of analysis and impose new problems in need of theoretical resolution. This lag between practice and theory nonetheless has real political effects, and developing a materialist account of racialisation is essential to inform a robust anti-racist politics. 

One such example of the underdevelopment of current analyses of race and racialisation can be seen in the recurrent debate, resurrected during the summer pogroms, of the class character of racism. Whether, for instance, racism should be seen to be a ‘demotic’ expression of working class anger, the product of poor education and ‘misinformation’, or rather, whether racism is solely the ‘propaganda’ employed by ‘elites’ to maintain inequality and reproduce domination. This is, of course, a false opposition. I argue that it is impossible to understand the process of racialisation unless one sees that it is a direct product of the material processes employed by the state to regulate social relations, borne directly out of the fictive communities and practices of repression which are central to state management. A revolutionary conception of state power holds that the state is intrinsically and structurally bourgeois; a set of apparatuses which regulate social relations to ensure the perpetuation of capitalist accumulation. By contrast, reformist conceptions of the state at best present the state as ‘an organ for the reconciliation of classes’¹, and thereby ultimately elide the role of state power as a guarantor of racialisation. Therefore, only a revolutionary politics is adequate to the task of developing an account of racialisation capable of informing a consistent anti-racist practice. I use the term ‘liberal’, at its core, to denote this opposition from revolutionary politics on the question of the state; liberal politics invariably, to a greater or lesser degree, in all its different guises, corresponds to a Hegelian understanding of the state as a transcendent entity without a class character, ‘The actuality of the ethical Idea’².

Marxist theory, and the study of the movement and production of value, operates in the first instance with concepts which are race (and sex) ‘blind’. Surplus-value is not, in-and-of-itself, racialised, nor is it a mode of production, nor a class. This creates all sorts of ambiguities when trying to develop materialist theories of race, but race inevitably comes into focus once we are dealing with the governance of capitalist social relations, with imperialism, and questions of hegemony. Nevertheless, even when addressing these questions, the ‘race-blind’ status of the concepts of historical materialism can make it all too easy to adopt economistic shortcuts in our understanding of race and racialisation and arrive at functionalist oversimplifications which do real damage to political practice. In order to avoid such oversimplifications, it is essential to arrive at an understanding of race via the detour of the question of the state. That is, to understand how any relationship between race and class is mediated through concrete interventions of state repression.  

Without sufficient integration of a theory of race and a theory of class, these terms instead jostle for dominance in analysis. Liberal racial politics, at the same time as reifying racial categories, reduce racism to a mere product of xenophobia. ‘Race’, therefore, becomes nothing more than the mark of difference, of alterity from the dominant norm. As Asad Haider notes, ‘in the discourses of identity politics, the category of the white race is rarely theorised because it is instrumentalised as the basis for white privilege’³. In order to sufficiently integrate an understanding of racialisation into Marxist politics, it is necessary to interrogate the manner in which class composition itself is necessarily racialised. This involves an appreciation of the manner in which class composition is shaped by the state in capitalist society. At its root, this is based on developing the anti-economistic insight that class struggle precedes the existence of classes; in a society dominated by the bourgeoisie, bourgeois class struggle, in the labour process and through the state, is dominant in determining the composition of class relations.

I shall therefore begin, in the first part of this two-part series, by exploring some of the weaknesses of liberal racial politics before moving to an examination of the role of the state in shaping racial relations alongside class relations. 

In part two, I will outline an alternative theoretical sketch of the process of racialisation as a process parallel to that of proletarianisation in capitalist modernity, drawing on Etienne Balibar’s thesis of ‘class racism’. This theoretical intervention is necessary for developing a materialist anti-racist politics which avoids the twin errors of reducing racism either to an essentialised expression of the ignorance and degeneracy of the masses, or a propagandistic ‘tool’ of elites. As Jonas Marvin observed in his article following the Summer pogroms: ‘if we are to truly diagnose this moment we cannot be content with an analysis that claims the white rioters as duped, a consequence simply of the left’s defeats and betrayals, liable to be rioting against the wealthy and the powerful were it not for such a weak socialist movement’.⁴ 

In order to dispel and complicate such comforting narratives, a materialist theory of race and racialisation is essential for understanding the power of racism in contemporary politics and developing the means to confront it.

‘Institutional racism’

Liberal political practice lacks a theory of race to the same extent that it lacks a theory of ideology. That is to say, it lacks a theory of political and social relations that does not resolve into a question of conscious motivations. Without such a theory, ideology becomes a question of ‘ideas’, and race is perceived either as the purely discursive product of ruling class propaganda, or as an inherent facet of individual identity. Lacking a theoretical framework to understand the dynamics of structural racism, liberal ‘anti-racist’ politics instead arrive at formulations such as ‘institutionalised racism’. To understand how this differs from a materialist theory of structural racism, it is necessary to briefly examine what it means to define racism as ‘institutionalised’.

Most prominently, the term ‘institutionalised racism’ received official sanction in Britain following the publication of the MacPherson report into the racist murder of Stephen Lawrence. The fact that this report symbolically marked the inauguration of a kind of ‘state anti-racism’, in the form of reform through ‘policy, example and leadership’⁵, makes it especially useful as an example of the contradictions of liberal racial politics. In the report, racism was recognised to be endemic to British public institutions. This was held to be the case ‘irrespective of the intent of the individuals who carry out the activities of the institution’⁶.

The formulation of ‘institutionalised racism’ therefore represents an attempt to represent racism beyond the terms of individualised and conscious ‘bigotry’, which is the norm for liberal understandings of race and racism. However, the formulation of institutionalised racism does not fundamentally develop a new frame of reference for understanding race and racism. It attempts to describe racism at a collective level, but without any concept adequate to collective practice. It should not be understated that the formulation of institutionalised racism was a victory for popular anti-racist politics that had for decades attempted to draw attention to the role of state racism, but it should also be understood that this does not mean that this political victory was accompanied by an adequate analysis.

The metaphor of ‘institutionalised’, ‘endemic’ racism has some advantages for guiding political action. Like a virus, ‘institutional racism’ doesn’t simply affect an institution from the outside, but co-opts its internal functioning, turning otherwise benign metabolic processes into vehicles for its own replication. Combating ‘institutional racism’ was therefore recognised to require a ‘public health’ response, which went beyond internal reform in the police. MacPherson even deployed this metaphor in his report, observing that: ‘the disease cannot be attacked by the organisation involved in isolation’.⁷

However, like a virus, it is clear that the identification of ‘institutionalised racism’ remains an identification of an ‘alien pathogen’. Within this metaphor, racism is an aberration to ‘healthy’ protocol, ‘infesting the police’ and requiring ‘elimination’.⁸ ‘Institutional racism’ is an aberration requiring a solution of ‘reform’; 

After decades of anti-racist struggle, the MacPherson report can be read in terms of the ‘compromise’ position of the state. Racism could be recognised as being endemic to British institutions, but not integral. Indeed, MacPherson’s definition of institutional racism makes clear the ideological contradiction that it steps in to resolve. It defines racism negatively, as a failure to provide the ‘professional’ service the state is meant to confer to all citizens⁹ and as a barrier to the participation of ‘minority ethnic people’ in civil society. Through the superficial recognition of racism as ‘institutionalised’, the verdict nonetheless salvages the conception of ‘healthy’ civil society, which can be achieved through reform to restore the universal promise of liberal citizenship rights once the alien pathogen of racism is eliminated. 

Furthermore, over the last year, it has become even more clear how such concepts can be readily co-opted for explicitly reactionary purposes. Accusations of ‘two-tier policing’ from racist agitators directly mirror the language of institutionalised racism, and in many ways must be seen as a reactionary backlash against the top-down, modest recalibration of race relations following the MacPherson report. The uselessness of the framework of ‘institutionalised racism’ for a robust anti-racist politics is demonstrated in precisely the way that it invites this co-option, since the metaphor of a neutral public service ‘captured’ by racism just as readily lends itself to the opposite notion of a police force ‘captured’ by ‘woke ideology’ (no matter how strongly the empirical reality of draconian policing and sentencing of Palestine and Climate protesters belie this fantasy).

Racialisation – categorisation and pathologisation

Of course, the formulation of ‘institutionalised racism’ was not invented by Lord MacPherson, but was used for decades previously to describe a reality which anti-racists experienced, but lacked the conceptual tools to fully analyse. The co-option of this formulation, and the expansiveness and ambiguity of the term ‘institutionalised racism’, nevertheless offers a useful case study in how the ruling ideology consists in developing and policing a shared vocabulary through which divergent perspectives can be rationalised and antagonistic analyses subsumed. This process indicates the ruling class’s attempts to constitute the ruling ideology as a unified ideology which can accommodate and neutralise the political demands of different social constituencies. This is directly mirrored in the way that categories of race themselves come to a certain adequation between the state’s management of ‘race relations’ in the interests of ‘public order’, and the emancipatory demands of constituencies on the receiving end of racism. Simultaneously, this imposition of racial categories exists in tension with the social and political content with which given categories are invested through the struggles of racialised groups against racist repression, and the material antagonisms in society which these terms step in to describe.

Categories of race, therefore, exist as the product of a kind of negotiation between racialised groups and the state. This means that racialisation involves a dialectic of imposition and subjective investment. To state the obvious, since it is through these categories of race that people experience racism, it is also through them that racism is often resisted. This ‘negotiation’ can be better understood in relation to the more general question of ‘ideology’. Since racial ideology must simultaneously incorporate the subjective experience of racialised people, and provide the ruling ideology with a means of reproducing the social control of racialised subjects, as well as their arrangement into ‘ethnic groups’ for the purposes of governance and administration, ideology establishes the shared ‘language’ by which social antagonisms can be navigated. 

Althusser remarks that there is ‘something irreducible’ in the fact that ‘it is the sailor’s work that gives the sailor his ideas, the farmer’s work that gives the farmer his ideas, and the blacksmith’s work that gives the blacksmith his ideas’.¹⁰ More directly, ideology is not a question of ‘ideas’, but rather the accompaniment to a practice, without which the practice is impossible. Thus, for the ruling ideology to be effective, it must, to some degree, harmonise with the ‘local’ ideologies arising from ‘local’ social practices whilst also systematising them in ‘regional’ and ‘global’ ideologies which help to rationalise and justify the power of the ruling class. However, because the ruling ideology must necessarily take account of the ‘local’ ideologies that arise from different social practices, including practices of resistance, it is contradictory and internally inconsistent, and involves a necessarily incomplete ‘systematisation’. Equally, it is important not to draw conspiratorial conclusions; whilst certain policy interventions or strategies may be conscious, the overall construction of the ruling ideology is not. Just as ideology is an expression of relationships of interdependency, ideology arises from and rationalises social practice in a way which is, for the most part, unconscious. The ruling class’s ideology is as much a product of the social practice of ruling as an ideology of solidarity is a product of the practice of social struggle.

In ‘Racecraft; the Soul of inequality in American Life’, Barbara and Karen Fields identify ‘the will to classification’ as ‘a habit so fundamental that, without it, there can be no racecraft’.¹¹ And indeed it is undeniable that racialisation involves an inherent tendency towards categorisation and classification. Whilst the most flagrant examples of the categorising tendencies of racialisation can be observed in ‘traditional’ scientific racism and eugenics, racial categorisation persists outside of this specific phenomenon. After all, how else can governance be sustained than through the constant provision of ‘demographic information’ which continually produces racial categories in the form of statistical approximations about the views, economic averages, and birth or crime rates among different ‘ethnic groups’ through surveys, censuses, and police reports alongside other forms of monitoring and surveillance? 

As an analytical metaphor, however, the notion of racialisation as a process of categorisation or classification has its drawbacks, bringing to mind as it does a two-dimensional process of ‘filing’ and discriminating based on relative characteristics. Crucially, the notion of race as a concrete abstraction which may be sub-divided through the ‘categorising’ tendency of racialisation implies a correspondence between different experiences of racialisation, as if ‘race’ were a single overarching category with a common modus operandi, beneath which comparable processes of ‘racialisation’ can be identified (race as the form, ‘Blackness’ or ‘Muslimness’, or ‘Jewishness’ &c. as the content). This is reinforced by the notion of ‘race’ as an aspect of individuals’ ‘identity’ which is theorised in an expanded form in intersectionality. 

In reality, however, it is hard to sustain the idea that different processes of racialisation follow a comparable script. The ‘ideal forms’ of different ‘ethnic groups’ on the census are radically disrupted when viewed in concrete relation to the materiality of social relations. Race manifests less often as identity and more often as relation, for example, as an all-too-obvious explanation of ‘social problems’ such as crime and unemployment. Racial ‘categorisation’ might therefore be better described as ‘pathologisation’ to convey the more or less arbitrary practice of grouping together disparate ‘behaviours’ into a discrete ‘pathology’ explaining, and displacing, concrete antagonisms. This definition of racialisation as a form of ‘pathologisation’ also allows us to situate the process at a sufficient degree of contingency; racialisation is ‘determined’ to the extent that a pathologisation must sufficiently ‘explain’ a given social relation, but contingent to the extent that any number of the overdetermining relations at play may be emphasised in this explanation, often inconsistently and suiting contradictory political purposes. It therefore also follows that ‘racial characteristics’ are determined relatively contingently, and politically.

Sivanandan provides an example of how racial pathologies produce a circular bind within which ‘prediction produces its own justification’¹² in reference to housing in Britain:

‘The colour prejudice of landlords and landladies coupled with the shortage of houses made the crowding, and in some cases the overcrowding, of much of the accommodation available to the migrants inevitable and this, in turn increased their image of undesirability.’ From being refused accommodation on the grounds that they were coloured, they were now refused houses on the grounds that they would overcrowd.¹³

The same mechanisms are demonstrated in the way the increased impact of Covid-19 on ethnic minorities was reported, with an assumption that vulnerability to severe health complications has ‘genetic’ or ‘hereditary’ explanations, whilst increased exposure to transmission through frontline work and increased viral load as a product of poor-quality crowded housing was underplayed. Even more recently, through the overriding pathologisation of Muslim ‘subversion’ we have seen a whole host of social ills and processes reframed in racial terms, as Richard Seymour writes: ‘In the last few years, we have heard from senior politicians that ‘Islamists’ run the country, that peaceful Gaza protesters are a ‘thuggish mob’, that a parliamentary debate on a Gaza ceasefire had to be blocked to prevent the terrorist murder of MPs, that ‘Hamas’ was to blame for Labour’s poor showing in the West Midlands’¹⁴. In all these examples, the signifier of ‘Islam’ steps in to reframe mundane social processes through a racialised lens.

Determining relationships – racialisation and repression

Policing the Crisis offers an excellent case study in how this process of pathologisation operates in relation to practices of state management and state repression. The authors examine the way in which the ‘signifier’ of race was introduced through ‘moral panics’ to justify and rationalise the ‘law and order society’’ Police specifically targeted ‘black youth’ to the extent that the situation and experience of ‘black youths had ‘a paradigmatic relation to the whole ‘mugging’ phenomenon’¹⁵. Thus, associations of ‘black youth’ were pathologised in association with violent crime and depravity.

The authors locate the reason for why police practices took this form in the already established deterioration of ‘police-black relations’; as the specific crime of mugging came to stand in for the more general confrontation between ‘police power and black people’. The reason for this deterioration, however, is key to understanding the relationship between racialisation and repression. The 1960s had seen tremendous growth in the ‘politics of dissent’; rising industrial militancy coincided with large demonstrations which found the police involved in ‘public order tests of strength.’ The growth of left-wing organisations, the student movement and the increased threat of domestic terrorism, particularly exacerbated by the growing crisis of the British state in the North of Ireland, seemed to require a tougher, more visible police presence (successive Chief Constables’ Annual Reports commented on the increased involvement in ‘public order’)¹⁶. The tougher police presence had a direct impact on the way in which ‘race relations’ were policed, but this connection, and the way in which a generalised crisis of public order was able to congeal around ‘police-black relations’ is significant. Hall et al. observe that: 

other familiar [scapegoats for the crisis of public order] in the same period were ‘militants’, ‘subversives’, ‘communists’, ‘foreign agitators’, and so on. But whereas the latter have little actual presence, though much ‘mythical’ media presence, immigrants are both highly visible and highly vulnerable.¹⁷

It is worth observing that race has such sticking power as a signifier due to the metonymic associations that it is able to draw on and articulate, including ideas of ‘essential’ cultural and behavioural difference and ‘hereditary’ traits, making it a flexible ideological metaphor which can be employed as an ‘immediate’ explanation in a diversity of social contexts. Hall et al. go on to explain that in a period of rising unemployment in the 1970s ‘policing the blacks’ became ‘synonymous with the wider problem of policing the crisis’¹⁸. The interchangeability of these terms and their capacity to collapse into one another offer a profound insight into the relationship between racialisation and repression. Crucially, it demonstrates how the signifier of race is simultaneously able to ‘stand in’ to represent and rationalise a generalised crisis of public order, whilst at the same time being itself structured and produced in response to the demands of social control and the particular forms this takes in the repressive apparatuses of the state. More recently, whilst the metaphor of ‘mugging’ has largely retreated from the public consciousness, we might consider how the racialised image of ‘knife-crime’ intervenes in the particular context of an urban ‘population problem’, simultaneously rationalising the disproportionate targeting of black youth through ‘Stop and Search’, providing ideological grist for police ‘campaigns’ in schools and residential neighbourhoods, whilst also creating for police a particular ideological framing of the ‘public order’ problem and repression against political demonstrations¹⁹.

Understanding the ideological construction of ‘race’ is thus produced to a large degree through the practice of repression, and the racialised ‘encounters’ of practices such as policing can help us identify the signifying structure of racial pathologies. Crucially, it can help us to see what the understanding of racialisation as a process of ‘categorisation’ can often miss: the convergent articulation of distinct racial pathologies. This is a dynamic that intersectionality, with its focus on how racialised experience is produced as an overdetermining aspect of individual identity, is also prone to overlook. For instance, whilst intersectionality might provide a framework for demonstrating the particularity of the experience of a black Muslim, overdetermined by these two racialised aspects of their identity, it does not provide a particularly clear means of understanding the contextual nature of racialisation. For instance, how a Sudanese woman may be racialised as ‘black’ in her encounters with police, but ‘Muslim’ when navigating airport security in a manner which is not reducible to the uniqueness of a ‘Black Muslim’ identity, but instead reveals the way that relations of repression racialise her in those encounters. 

We are also able to better observe how – in the relationship between ‘local’, ‘regional’, and ‘global’ structures of racial ideology – distinct racial pathologies are able to occupy positions which determine and structure the expression of other racial pathologies, not according to some innate ‘logic’ of essential racial characteristics, but rather through the practices of state repression themselves. The means by which Hall et al. demonstrate how the confrontation between ‘police power and black people’ came to structure the relationship of ‘policing the crisis’ allows us to consider more concretely how different forms of racialisation fulfil the role of rationalising and subsuming ‘local’ ideologies at a ‘global’ level in a form which is determined by practices of repression. The role played by Islamophobia in contemporary culture provides a clear example of a racial pathology which structures racial signification at a more or less ‘global’ level, simultaneously articulated in demotic anti-immigrant sentiment and state-sanctioned ‘counter-extremism,’ as well as the international ‘War on Terror’. Contemporary Islamophobia gathers together associations of cultural incompatibility articulated in the ‘clash of civilisations’ motif with an explicit connection with terrorism, thereby providing a culturalist racial metaphor for the practices of state control and counter-insurgency employed by different states around the world, from Palestine to China, from Turkey and Syria (with Recep Erdogan or former president Bashar al Assad’s rhetoric of combating violent ‘jihadists’) to the foreign policy objectives of Western states. Karma Nabulsi has noted how British state ‘counter-extremism’ initiatives, such as Prevent, represent the ‘importing of colonial policing practices into domestic British security and intelligence work’ which were previously ‘developed over the centuries in Ireland, Scotland, India, Africa, China and the ‘Near East’, up to and including Yemen and Oman in the 1970s’²⁰. 

Of course, we cannot directly map Hall et al.’s analysis to the present moment; despite the scale of demonstrations against the Israeli genocide, it would not be true to conceptualise the policing of these demonstrations in terms of a ‘public order test of strength’. Nevertheless, with a little modification, understanding, for instance, the close imbrication of Israeli capital in the military and tech development sectors and the concomitant association between Zionist ideology and policing and securitisation, the analysis of Policing the Crisis can help explain how, in place of ‘mugging’, the signifier of ‘terrorism’ facilitates and arises from a different kind of repression. How, for instance, it is adequate to a process of public order management that relies much less on the visible presence of policing operations within racialised communities and in the public space more generally, and much more on surveillance technologies, arbitrary detention, and the symbolic repression of individuals through extreme sentencing under the guise of the defence of ‘national security’.

We can therefore hypothesise a determinate relationship between the strategies and shared objectives of imperialist states and the structure of racial pathologies, including the nature of ‘dominant’ racial pathologies which, depending on the imperatives of international capital accumulation, come to structure a more general expression of the ‘racist complex’. We can observe something similar in the way in which antisemitism acted to structure European racism between 1870 and 1945, in the period when European states confronted rising organised proletarian internationalism, which they pathologised under the racial signifier of ‘Judeo-Bolshevism’. To say that particular pathologies of racialisation play a ‘dominant’, ‘structuring’ role is not to make any claims about their relative severity or incidence compared to other ‘forms of racism’, nor to suggest that there is anything inevitable in the fact that ‘Islam’ plays this role in contemporary imperialism. Rather, it is to observe an adequation between repressive and disciplinary practices of social control and contingent political circumstances (here the Western intervention in Muslim-majority countries and the existence of ‘unintegrated’ diaspora populations in Europe). Key to understanding processes of racialisation from a Marxist perspective is therefore understanding how the relationship between the state and capital shapes international competition between capitalist states, and how this in turn shapes domestic practices of repression employed to maintain ruling class hegemony.

In Policing the Crisis, the authors go to great lengths to demonstrate how processes of racialisation coincided with specific problems of policing the poor and the unemployed and facing down industrial militancy. They argue that ‘black crime’ intervenes as a signifier which helps to reproduce a crisis of the working class ‘through the structural mechanisms of racism, as a crisis within andbetween the working classes’.²¹ In 1973, the White Paper on police-immigrant relations warned of the necessity over the coming months of separating ‘the great majority of hard-working, law-abiding citizens’ from the ‘small minority of young coloured people’ ‘refusing’ work²². This has a parallel in Priti Patel’s claim in 2020 that labour shortages caused by new immigration controls could be compensated by getting 8.5 million ‘economically inactive’ citizens into work²³. This particularly clear example of state actors ‘playing off’ the poor and working class against racialised constituencies suggests that there is a determinate relationship between the process of racialisation, the particular ways in which the state contributes to the construction of race through repression, and the broader management of state hegemony as the hegemony of the ruling class, through which the working class is reproduced as a subjugated class. 

Hopefully, this first part of this series has gone some way in problematising some inadequate understandings of race and racialisation and proposed a very rough sketch of some alternatives. Based on the outline of racial ‘pathologisation’ presented above, and the manner in which racism is therefore inextricable from other social demarcations within society and from the broader process of capitalist social reproduction, it is worth briefly considering some of the more recurrent narratives within the contemporary far-right racial imaginary. For instance, the initial catalyst for the 2024 pogroms, the killing of three children in Southport, was capable of inciting such a ferocious response because it aligned with core tenets of racialised thinking, principally of the ‘threat’ posed to ‘our’ women and children by racialised populations. It is impossible to understand the scale of the pogroms or their libidinal charge without understanding this fundamental pathologisation of racialised populations as violent and predatory, and the associated masculinist obsession with virility and the ability to ‘protect’ women and children from an externalised threat of predation. Indeed, this framework, which employs a racial metaphor to ‘explain’ gender relations, serves to sanitise the violence of racists as righteous (or as invisible when directed at their ‘own’ women and children), also dovetails with the martial metaphors of racialised migrant populations as an ‘invasion’, and of the sinister associations intended in describing the ‘importation’ of ‘military-aged men’ in small boats.

The imbrication of racial pathologisation within wider processes of social reproduction, from the family to the school system, will be explored further in the second and final part of this series.

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1.  Lenin, State and Revolution, (1917) ↩︎
2. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, (1896) ↩︎
3. Asaid Haider, Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump (Verso, 2018) ↩︎
4. Jonas Marvin, “Four theses on Fascism, Pogroms and Liberation”, 2024: https://proletarianblues.substack.com/p/four-theses-on-fascism-pogroms-and ↩︎
5. “The Stephen Lawrence Inquiry”, 1999, page 49: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-stephen-lawrence-inquiry ↩︎
6. Ibid, page 48 ↩︎
7. Ibid, page 49 ↩︎
8. Ibid, page 49 ↩︎
9. Ibid, page 49 ↩︎
10. Louis Althusser, Philosophy for Non-Philosophers (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017) ↩︎
11. Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields, Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life, (Verso Books, 2012) ↩︎
12. A. Sivanandan, A Different Hunger: Writings on Black Resistance, (Pluto Press, 1982) ↩︎
13. Ibid ↩︎
14. Richard Seymour, “Dreaming of Downfall”, 2024: https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/dreaming-of-downfall ↩︎
15. Stuart Hall, Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson , John Clarke, Brian Roberts, Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order (Macmillan, 1978), page 51 ↩︎
16. Ibid, page 48 ↩︎
17. Ibid, page 50 ↩︎
18. Ibid, page 332 ↩︎
19. Elliott-Cooper, 2020 ↩︎
20. Karma Nabulsi, “Don’t Go to the Doctor”, 2017: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v39/n10/karma-nabulsi/don-t-go-to-the-doctor ↩︎
21. Stuart Hall et al., Policing the Crisis, page 339 ↩︎
22. Ibid, page 329 ↩︎
23. Mason & O’Carroll, 2020 ↩︎

Will Searby