Race and Immigration in the New Ireland

8. Reflections on Race in Contemporary Ireland

C H A P T E R E I G H T REFLECTIONS ON RACE IN CONTEMPORARY IRELAND S T E V E G A R N E R Any reflection on the category “race” in the contemporary world is inevitably framed by the cumulative layers of meanings and practices attached to bodies and cultures over the previous centuries. If the idea of race resembles anything, it is a palimpsest,1 with past interpretations leaking through to make the ink of the present run. Accordingly , I present some historical notes not as a distinct prelude to the “real” story, positing a rupture of past and present, but as the beginning of the story proper. I want to begin by establishing three elements of the analysis set out here, and to which I shall return throughout. The first is about shifting the understandings of the scope of racism, away from its attribution to aberrant and deviant individuals and also away from the notion that these are old ideas and practices that no longer apply in North America or Europe. The place to which we are moving these understandings is where racism (as a set of ideas and practices) is also embedded in the structures of society. This functions in the ways people routinely think about groups of people who are “not like us,” in how the “us” is imagined, in the way laws operate, and in the way 175 people have differential access to resources and services. In brief, racism is about power differentials encapsulated in social systems. All of this necessarily has a historical dimension—hence the talk of the past, but, I reiterate, it is not located only in the past. The second point is that to fully understand racism, we have to grasp that it embraces not merely physical differences but culture and, equally as important, that this has always been the case. Think of the nineteenth-century obsession with bodies as expressions of cultural superiority and inferiority as the anomaly, or blip, in the story of race. The element of continuity has been the reliance on understandings of innate cultural difference, that what lies beneath the skin, fat, bone, and muscle is determinant and distinctive. Thus, what is referred to as the “new racism,”2 “cultural racism,”3 or, at a stretch, “color-blind” racism4 represents an ideological “return to normalcy” as far as presentations of race are concerned. Third, the way in which power relations and cultural understandings are wedded is through processes involving the material (practices ) and the ideal (ideas). One of these spheres alone is not enough. As in the cases of class and gender, the dominant group normalizes its dominance in the world of the material through the realm of ideas, so that this domination becomes natural and unremarkable. There are advantages and disadvantages to be gained from the system of structural discrimination: some are winners, and some are losers. From this understanding of racism, individuals can disagree with the ideas that constitute racism while still benefiting from the material outcomes their society produces for them. Structural racial discrimination is a form of social contract, and while some whites are not signatories to it, they still derive material and cultural advantage from it.5 To apply this strictly to the Irish case, in which racialized others are also white, focusing too much on the color line leads us to a misleading picture of the actors. However, not focusing on it enough leads us to a misleading picture of the complexity of the situation. Finally, focusing only on migrants and only on contemporary Ireland loses the specificity of the story of race.6 Our mission, therefore, is to begin addressing epistemological ignorance: “Whites will then act in racist ways while thinking of 176 Steve Garner themselves as acting morally. In other words, they will experience genuine cognitive difficulties in recognizing certain behavior patterns as racist.”7 Social scientists in particular should seek to avoid making the starting point assumptions that are actually outcomes of racism. These might include the assertion that racism no longer exists; that racism only exists elsewhere; that only odd people, rather than normal, nice people, can be racist; or that race is only about skin color. Instead, we must take into account the full spectrum of ideas and practices that constitute racism and recognize that ways of knowing (epistemologies) are not neutral. Here I am going to focus on the racialization8 of social relations in...