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White Backlash and the Politics of Multiculturalism

In the summer of 2001, Britain experienced its worst bout of civil unrest and “rioting” for sometime. These events took place in the formerly industrial (but now economically sedentary) northern towns of Bradford, Oldham, and Burnley and initially involved white and British-Asian youth before escalating and pitting the latter against the full machinery of the police. From this period, the words of a far-right protagonist group, the British National Party (BNP), which proved instrumental in exploiting what had been an uneasy settlement between ethnically segregated and economically impoverished communities, remain uppermost in the mind. As regional organiser of the BNP, Steve Smith told the media “we have had multiculturalism imposed on us for too long, and the indigenous population is being sidelined by the politically correct politicians who are running the country” (New York Times July 4, 2001). Indeed, this crude opportunism seemed to be giving voice to a perception that ethnic minorities were afforded special treatment at the expense of white residents. As one local resident put it: “Asians always seem to jump the line ahead of whites .|.|. I am not racist but if they come to our country they should abide by our rules and not get houses over us” (ibid.). Drawing upon empirical data from a London context, Roger Hewitt’s timely contribution White Backlash and the Politics of Multiculturalism explores how such perceptions might come to pass. By examining the “borderline” between “the reasonable concerns of white non-powerful groups and the racialisation of those concerns” (p. 17), Hewitt suggests that this type of “politics of resentment” need “not come from people who would ever have voted for racist political parties” (p. 55) and, indeed, is not driven by a racism that carries familiar an ideology witnessed in biological or cultural racism. It is instead, argues Hewitt, disparate, confused, inconsistent, and yet embedded within dense generational and spatial networks that both encourage and perpetuate it. Couched in a comparative historical analysis of public policy philosophies towards integrating ethnic minorities in Britain, the U.S., and Australia, the book explores, in the author’s words, “the narratives of daily life that shows the larger historical dialogue at work” in “backlash” politics, something that is best understood as a symptom of “a disparate set of responses to equality discourses as they unfolded from the 1960s to the present” (p. 4). After general and historical introductory chapters which outline the movement from conceptions of equality that informed the civil rights movement to those at work in the practice of anti-racism and policies of affirmative action, the book switches to a ethnographically informed micro-sociological account of “narrative and counter-narratives” in what Hewitt describes as “boundaries of legitimate disclosure” (chapter 4). This specifically includes a discussion of Roland Adams, a 16-year-old African-Caribbean boy murdered by a gang of white youths, as well as the immediate political responses to it by local communities, not least the apparent defensiveness of white communities to the accusation of a general, localised racism being attributed to the area. This story becomes an increasingly familiar one as Hewitt goes onto discuss the racism on working-class London estates where a second, more well-known murder of another African-Caribbean boy, that of Stephen Lawrence, also takes place. The discussion of spatial elements and the rich ethnographic data in this work are real delights and for that reason alone it ought to be read by student, teacher, commentator, and legislator alike. In the end, however, Hewitt largely offers a class-thesis that filters everything through an increasing neo-liberal encroachment into state-supported programmes of anti-racism and multiculturalism. Although he fairly seamlessly weaves this narrative through his analysis of the U.S., Canada, and Britain, the important and defining differences of each context risk being lost where a familiar tale of economic exploita-