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New racism

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New racism is a term coined in 1981 by Marxist professor of film Martin Barker, in the context of the ideologies supporting Margaret Thatcher rise in the UK, to refer to what he believed was racist public discourse depicting immigrants as a threat.

1980s wave of anti-immigrant sentiment

From the 1980s, the increase in global inequalities between poor and rich countries led to significant immigration flows to Europe, even in those less developed European counties that until the 1970s were more a source of emigration.

A new wave of anti-immigrant sentiment had started to emerge in the 1970s, most significanlty with UK's National Front (United Kingdom); in the early such sentiments gained significant support, most prominently with the elevtoral success of Jean-Marie Le Pen's Front National French party, which reached 10% in the 1984 European elections. Le Pen success will serve as a model for many parties and movements that will emulate him all over Europe.

Many scholars have called this new anti-immigrant sentiments, and the ideologies alimenting it, as a new form of racism, and the label "new racism" has been particularly influential. This scholars argued that the new racism had to cope with the mainstream official repudiation of racism, Fascism and Nazism, and as a consequence substituted the rhetoric of race and biology with that of cultural identity.

This sentiments were first expressed by marginal parties, but as they increased their support by attracting voted from mainstream parties, the leaders of such parties, Margaret Thatcher and Bettino Craxi started to embrace some of the same anti-immigrant ideologies.

See also

The term New Racism also urges us to pay more attention to all more or less covert manifestations of racism across the globe despite the advances of the civil rights era: For instance, in the context of the USA Eduardo Bonilla-Silva makes the point that "Color-Blind Racism" (purporting to be race neutral in words, policy, and action) is a new form of racism. This is associated with the view that “the past is the past” and that historical legacies creating and perpetuating disadvantage no longer need to be reckoned with. Bonilla-Silva includes the backlash against affirmative action as a part of color-blind racism — where people hide behind the notion that merit must dominate in selection, ignoring the fact that often the merits of a person of color are ignored or diminished because of the color of their skin. Hence people can draw (with varying degrees of consciousness) on the assumption of being color neutral while in effect operating to discriminate. See http://wws.princeton.edu/wws-news-magazine/archive/fall-winter-2007/americas-new-racism/

Rodney Coates also explores new/covert racism in terms of the ways in which constructions of "race" continue to perpetuate economic, social, political, psychological, religious, ideological, and legal mechanisms of structured inequality.. Patricia Hill Collins in her book entitled Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender and the New Racism (2004) explores new forms of racism by integrating sexuality in to her analysis. At the same time she looks across borders to view racism on a global scale (see http://www.asanet.org/footnotes/septoct08/collins.html). And Norma Romm in her book on New Racism (2010) writes about styles of researching different (and shifting) mutations of racism in a range of social contexts - including transnational patterns of racial disadvantage. She invites us to reflect upon ways in which the doing of research/inquiry - on the part of professionals and others - can itself create an impact in addressing issues of inequality and marginalisation - thus interrupting the dynamics of new racism at the moment of the research process .

Notes

  1. ^ Chin (2009) pp.13, 92, 178-9, 241
  2. ^ Cole, Jeffrey (1997) The new racism in Europe: a Sicilian ethnography, p.11-2
  3. Dancygier, Rafaela M. (2010) Immigration and Conflict in Europe, p.5 quote: "The far-right Front National has served as a model to many anti-immigrant movements in Europe."
  4. Chin (2009) pp.13, 92, 178-9, 241
  5. Ginsborg (2003) pp.62, 176
  6. Guild and Minderhoud (2006) p.173

References

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