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18 - Response to Martina Tazzioli and William Walters
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- By Liz Fekete
- Edited by Russell Foster, King's College London, Jan Grzymski, Uniwersytet Warszawski, Poland
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- Book:
- The Limits of EUrope
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 13 October 2022
- Print publication:
- 05 April 2022, pp 201-204
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- Chapter
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Summary
In this thought-provoking essay, Martina Tazzioli and William Walters argue that the political concept of solidarity is under-theorised in the academy, particularly as compared to concepts such as justice, equality, citizenship, equality. But in calling for a sharper ‘analytics of solidarity’ they are clear that theory must be informed by practice and that the perspectives of those struggling for migrant and refugee rights in a ‘new era of protest’ are key. By interrogating solidarity within the migration context, they show how the bounded and bordered nature of top-down solidarity, as institutionalised both in EU declarations, charters and policies and the more recent state-model of ‘good refugee hosting’, divides citizen from foreigner, betraying universal values. They contrast the branded ‘paternalistic humanitarianism’ favoured by the European Commission, with the bottomup internationalist (and therefore anti-racist) solidarity of Europe’s citizens’ initiative of solidarity practices at the French-Italian frontier as a case study. This essay takes the attempts to criminalise those NGOs and individuals who create lieux de lie (spaces of life) for migrants and refugees and defend the ‘spaces of sociability’ fostered by migrants themselves as the vantage point from which to expose EU’s repressive approach to migration, as the ‘hostile environment’ (first coined by Theresa May) is generalised across Europe. The authors stress ‘how history continues to shape contemporary practices of solidarity’, a history that migrant struggles draw upon and lessons they reactivate.
It is ‘nativism’, with its rhetorical rallying cry of ‘our own people first’, and its populist vocabulary that reduces ‘non-natives’ to ‘swarms’, ‘invaders’ or, as Italy’s far-right interior minister Matteo Salvini puts it, Africa’s ‘new slaves’, that forms the backcloth to the authors’ concerns. The term xeno-racism, first deployed by A. Sivanandan (Sivanandan, 2001), is used to describe a virulent form of racism meted out to foreigners and its institutionalisation within law and policy through specific measures that segregate asylum seekers and migrants from the rest of society, strip them of human rights and render them vulnerable to deportation.
two - The growth of xeno-racism and Islamophobia in Britain
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- By Liz Fekete
- Edited by Michael Lavalette, Laura Penketh
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- Book:
- Race, Racism and Social Work
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 01 February 2022
- Print publication:
- 30 December 2013, pp 33-52
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- Chapter
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Summary
In this chapter Fekete looks at the growth of ‘xeno-racism’ – a ‘non-colour-coded’ racism that is based on conceptions of immigration status, culture and religion. Racism is not a static concept. Within social work understandings of ‘race’ and racism we have often utilised Peter Fryer's (1984) important three-fold distinction of the racisms of slavery, empire and post-war migration. Martin Barker (1981) in the early 1980s was already arguing that there was clear evidence of a ‘new’ racism that focused on culture (and was exemplified by Thatcher's infamous ‘swamping speech’ in the run up to the 1979 UK general election). Fekete argues this process has continued and deepened as a result of political and economic changes over the last 25 years. It is exemplified in media debates, in policy frameworks around asylum seeking and in state-controlling frameworks for so-called ‘problem communities’. The relevance for social workers is obvious: the victims of racism may be black and Asian men or women, or they could be Polish or Romanian workers, or people from Roma communities or perhaps, most demonised of all, people from Muslim communities from anywhere across the globe. In our practice, and in our understandings of the world, we need to be aware of the structural and institutional barriers that social workers, social care workers and social work service users from these racialised groups will face. The Professional Capabilities Framework (PCF) domain 6 requires social workers to keep up to date with current social science knowledge bases, and in the field of ‘race’ and racism Fekete's discussion of xeno-racism is an important concept for social workers to grasp and engage with.
Introduction
The recognition of institutionalised racism by Sir William Macpherson, in his 1999 report into the death of Stephen Lawrence, was a watershed. But even as one form of racism was acknowledged and, to a limited extent, addressed, new forms of racism were emerging, based less on colour than immigration status, culture and/or religion. Already in the 1990s, a new form of non-colour-coded racism was giving rise to a discriminatory approach towards asylum seekers and refugees, who were excluded from the welfare state and demonised as illegal immigrants and asylum shoppers from ‘over-populated’ and ‘socially insecure countries with weaker economies’.