GLOBAL APARTHEID

Commenting on the Stephen Lawrence murder case, the writer points out that racism is enshrined not only in British institutions but also in those institutions which now dominate the world, and even penetrates the instruments of 'globalisation'.

By Jeremy Seabrook

March 1999

[Stephen Lawrence, a black student, was stabbed at a bus-stop in south London in 1994. He bled to death on the pavement. Police neglect and incompetence ensured that no one was arrested, even though five white youths with a history of racial violence, were suspected of involvement. No charges were laid in spite of the dead boy's companion at the time of the murder having identified three of them. Stephen Lawrence's parents brought a private prosecution against three of the youths. They were found not guilty. By their tenacity and persistence, Mr and Mrs Lawrence eventually persuaded the Labour government to set up an enquiry into the circumstances surrounding the failed police investigation. That report was published in February 1999.]

The report into the police response to the murder of Stephen Lawrence concluded that institutional racism exists within the Metropolitan police force. The official acknowledgement of this open secret was generated with wonder and penitence. The rulers of Britain, amid scenes of lachrymose elation not witnessed since the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, resolve to bring about 'a change of heart', declaring that 'our society' will no longer tolerate the intolerable, will root out racism, will transform the institutions of the land.

This, like any other declaration of war upon an abstraction, is as unconvincing as it is unrealisable. In any case, whenever the words 'our society' are used it means there is some major problem to be solved, for which popular involvement is required. It is never 'our society' when it is a question of the distribution of wealth, the apportionment of privilege. Inclusiveness and participation are invoked only when it comes to the question of who pays the costs, who takes responsibility when the moral bankruptcy of leaders becomes clear. You don't have to travel far in Britain to understand that the anti-racist rhetoric is for display only. The hand-wringing is the gesture of a metropolitan elite, the repentance is the sham of leaders who wish to project a Britain of the imagination, where all is tolerance, fair play and equality of opportunity for all.

Of course, most people do not express their racism openly. A complex semaphore of nods and winks and metaphors is used to signal what they really mean. They will say elliptically, 'It used to be lovely round here'; and in that simple expression of nostalgia they have indicated that their neighbourhood was fine until the blacks came. They say, 'I'm not racist, but...', and that means if a white boy had been murdered there wouldn't be all this fuss. Or 'It's all gone too far', meaning blacks now receive more favourable treatment and we're victims in our own country.

'Our' racism is enshrined, not only in the institutions of the land, but equally in those which now dominate the world; for these also emanate from the rich industrial countries. Racism penetrates the instruments of 'globalisation', a process which is then presented with deterministric inevitability, inescapable as tomorrow's sunrise. With the whole world now living under the astrological sign of the market, we see the racism of the powerful of the earth replicated and magnified in the 'architecture' of the global order; a form of what Titus Alexander describes as Global Apartheid.

Nothing that emanates from the Western financial institutions, the World Trade Organisation, Western governments, the transnationals, does not carry forward fear and hatred of the poor of the earth, and an apologia for discrimination and exploitation of them. And the poor remain, overwhelmingly, non-white.

When governments of the South are told to cut budgetary deficits, in accordance with structural adjustment programmes, it is rarely defence expenditure that suffers, it is not the bureaucratic structure that is dismantled; nor are infrastructural projects abandoned which are supposed to beckon investors to come and take advantage of the helplessness of the people. How much easier to eliminate subsidies on food, to cut health and education budgets; how much simpler to delay improvements in drinking water and sanitation; how painless to undermine the shaky welfare of the poor rather than assault the well-being of the rich!

In Britain, the contempt for the family of a murdered boy simply reflects the racism and brutalisation of the wider society. This is, in turn, only a refraction of global inequities. But we can glimpse in a single symbolic act of violence the distant workings of world-wide institutions which bear the ideology of an older imperial order into a new millennium. Pious declarations of anti-racism are far easier than to confront the economic order which contributes so spectacularly to the racism we are supposed to abhor. We can all, like the police, have 'anti-racist training', but the apparatus of dominance in the world goes unchallenged.

Who are the injured and humiliated of the earth? What is the colour of their skin? Where do they live? How do they die? What efforts are made to save them from the effects of globalisation, that process of human triage, in which the market decides who will live and die, that slow genocide, that version of population control, which are the real unacknowledged consequences of the work of the International Monetary Fund, the WTO, the World Bank, the governments of the Group of 7?

It could scarcely be otherwise. The maintenance and strengthening of privilege among the (predominantly) white global minority, creates the injustices and growing inequality which the whole world knows. It is only to be expected that these will, in one form or another, come back to haunt the societies constructed upon them. They disfigure and distort the lives of those apparently advantaged by them; which perhaps helps to account for the violence, crime and social dissolution in the rich West. When the rich monopolise the necessities of the poor, this does not enhance their lives, but merely expresses a form of sterile power, for no other reason than permanent celebration of their own dominance.

We have heard much rhetoric about 'new beginnings' and 'changes of heart': after every catastrophe - famines, wars, impoverishment - the 'never-again' vows are the familar lament of a capitalism which has for 200 years filled the air with its cries of repentance; 'Never again' was the declaration only half a century ago, when the time of Nazism, of blood and ashes, convulsed the continent that has always seen itself as the cradle of civilisation.

The government of Tony Blair can no more address the local injustice to the family of Stephen Lawrence than it can reverse the global tide of wealth from poor to rich. Indeed, it has no intention of doing so. Growing social injustice is all part of an impersonal - and even 'natural' - process, for which no individuals, not even government leaders, it seems, not even the executives of mighty transnational corporations, not even the functionaries of the international financial institutions, have the capacity to control.

No one wants to know in the West. The kind of willed unknowing, the collusive self-deceit of the rich is more dangerous and more damaging than all the ignorance, superstition and backwardness which we are supposed to see in other cultures, which are allegedly more 'primitive', less 'developed' than our own.

So why won't they spare us the breast-beating, the crocodile tears, the sham humanitarianism, the bogus concern? You have only to see the humanity that works in the sweatshops of the world, that labours on plantations of oranges, bananas, pineapples and all the other amenities that grace the lives of the rich, the multitudes who perish in front of the TV cameras of the world. It is no secret; a tacit complicity is the price we pay for our own frail well-being.

It was shocking in early March 1999, to hear that the British government had sent a detachment of police officers from Britain to investigate the murder of white tourists in Uganda, allegedly by Hutu members of the Interhamwe; the urgency of this contrasted unhappily with the neglect and dilatoriness of investigations into the death of young black men in Britain. Their imagination, if not their humanity, is atrophied, for they do not see the connections, and cannot draw the conclusions which the majority of the people of the world will reach.

Of course, Third World elites, whether these have 'returned' to democracy, or have appropriated power to themselves, are above all, the surrogates, messengers and servitors of the rich North. They are continuing colonial practices and policies acquired from their former masters. Their function is as the emissaries and representatives of power and privilege which do not originate with them.

Pensioners and dependants of a global system, they have developed a new middle class as a buffer between themselves and the poor. But their more profound purpose is pure theatre - to distract and to demonstrate that the global system is colour-blind. 'See, there are rich non-whites, so how can the system be racist?' They serve as alibi and cover-up for global racism; and are highly rewarded by the mentors and manipulators. This wider process also has its equivalent within the Western societies, where the evolution of a limited black middle class has been fostered precisely to show there is no discrimination; even while the majority undergo daily humiliation and injury.

The principal agent of our consciousness of the world is, of course, the TV; which is also the major instrument in the maintenance of the melancholy and fragile privileges of injustice. For the TV screen is the windowpane against which the noses of the excluded are pressed, as they stare into cameras that bring their image into the defensive interiors of our existence. We know that they want what we've got. It is upon this unexpressed understanding that the structures of continuing racism are strengthened and reinforced.

A whole iconography that pervades our life is there to support us, as we rest gladly, if uneasily, in its persuasive images. At every turn we are greeted by messages that reiterate the subtext, which is that we should not interfere with so wise a dispensation of things, not question, let alone upset, the existing arrangements. TV brings to us child soldiers in Sierra Leone and Sri Lanka, spreading impoverishment in Indonesia, hunger in Sudan, the traffic in human beings in India or Cambodia, ethnic and religious strife from every part of the world. It is presented in the guise of 'news' but it is politics. It is all an object-lesson, designed to teach us - as if we don't know - where our best interests lie.

The great imperial adventure of the West came home to roost in the 1930s, when its racist ideology was repatriated to Hitler's Germany; a homecoming of values which Europe had practised for half a millennium throughout the world.

Events such as the Lawrence murder (and indeed, the unsolved killings of scores of black people in Britain, the deaths of whom go unmarked publicly, apart from the grief of their loved ones, and some bunches of flowers on the sidewalk marking the prosaic spot where they were killed, a bus-stop, a blind alley, a brick wall), bring to us a faint echo, a lingering image of the practices which we underwrite daily all over the world, as we go about our business, indifferent to who must suffer that we might enjoy the tainted and savourless privilege of our unquiet, dissatisfied - and hence diminished - lives. - Third World Network Features

About the writer: Jeremy Seabrook is an author and freelance journalist based in London.

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