How multiculturalism breeds racial resentment

In a city marred by social and economic inequality, multicultural policies have ignited a fierce competition for scarce state resources. Racial, religious groups have been pitted into battle against one another.

In this tense environment, a sinister rumour takes root. It suggests that a heinous act has been committed by members of a minority community against another racial group. The rumour soon spreads like wildfire, inflaming tensions throughout the local area. Thuggish gangs soon start flooding into the city from other parts of the country, causing havoc. A violent race riot erupts. As the city descends into turmoil, the police scramble to dispel the malicious lie, but their efforts are futile. Chaos reigns. People are seriously injured and two are killed before order is restored.

This may sound like a description of the riots now engulfing towns and cities across England. But it’s actually the story of the largely memory-holed Birmingham race riots. They took place over the course of an October weekend in 2005, when members of the British Jamaican community fought with British Pakistanis in the Lozells and Handsworth area of the UK’s second city.

The parallels between then and now are striking. The rioting of the past week was prompted by false reports that a Muslim migrant was responsible for the Southport knife attack. Likewise, the Birmingham disorder was also ignited by a false rumour – in this case, the claim that a young black woman had been raped by Asian shopkeepers. The rumour quickly spread online, via pirate radio stations and even in more mainstream outlets like the black newspaper, the Voice. DJs on pirate stations, such as Sting FM, were soon calling for violent revenge. ‘There are not enough of you pussies out there in the street! This is between blacks and Muslims’, said one DJ at the time. Online, chatrooms on websites like Blacknet and Supertrax echoed this hatred. ‘I hope Asian women are getting their throats cut as we speak’, read one post.

Then as now, too many commentators were eager to blame these malicious rumours, this online ‘misinformation’, for the subsequent violence. This led, as it always does, to all-too-predictable calls for censorship to stem the spread of falsehoods. But censorship is never the solution. Not only does it lead to the suppression of free speech, it also does nothing to address the reasons why such rumours gain traction in the first place.

The rumour that a Muslim migrant was responsible for the Southport stabbings, for instance, played on pre-existing fears and prejudices on the margins, fuelled by the grooming-gangs scandal, Islamist terrorism and crimes committed by asylum seekers. In the case of the Birmingham riot, the rumour resonated among British Jamaicans because of long-simmering tensions between them and their British Pakistani neighbours, thanks to the growing economic disparities between the two groups in the area.

Many black people at the time resented the fact that South Asians had begun taking over local businesses, including those that sold black beauty products. At the time of the riots, of the 50 or so stores on Lozells Road, 90 per cent were Asian-owned.

For some among the Afro-Caribbean community, the Asian takeover felt like an economic and cultural encroachment. An email doing the rounds at the time, picked up by website Pickled Politics, captured the animosity. ‘Black people’, it read, ‘need to realise that they are been shitted on by Indians who now supply them with the very food they eat, their cosmetics and health care’ (sic).

Of course, there is no inherent reason why people from one cultural background shouldn’t own businesses principally serving those from other backgrounds. Indeed, there is no reason why people from one ethnic group should see those from other backgrounds as their rivals at all. But the problem was that, in Birmingham in the 2000s, these groups had already been set against one another in a battle for state resources. This was due, in large part, to the multicultural policies of Birmingham City Council.

Following the example of the Greater London Authority, Birmingham City Council had been trying to support and engage minorities as minorities. The council was effectively dividing the local community into Afro-Caribbean and South Asian blocs and distributing funding on that basis. As one commentator described it at the time, ‘in Birmingham, you see projects for the black unemployed, not all the unemployed; for disadvantaged Asians or Indians or Muslims, not all the disadvantaged’. With groups effectively competing for state cash, this was always a recipe for division and conflict.

Author Kenan Malik summed the situation up well in his book, From Fatwa to Jihad: ‘Birmingham’s policies… did not respond to the needs of communities, but to a large degree created those communities by imposing identities on people and by ignoring internal conflicts which arose out of class, gender and intra-religious differences.’

In short, multicultural policymaking in Birmingham provided much of the fuel for the 2005 race riots. It separated often impoverished people into identity categories. It encouraged them to think of themselves in terms of their racial identities and to view their problems through a racial lens, often from primary school onwards. It then set these reified identity groups against one another in a competition for state support. It proved an incredibly divisive, ghettoising and inflammatory mode of policymaking.

And yet, it seems no lessons were learned. If anything, the divisive multicultural identity politics of the 1990s and 2000s has only become more entrenched in the years since. Indeed, identity politics has now been thoroughly institutionalised, in the British state and beyond. Today, public institutions across the UK are fixated on racial differences, obsessed with dividing and serving people in terms of their racial identities. As the terrible scenes in towns and cities across England remind us, this has had a devastating effect on social cohesion.

Yet our political and cultural elites refuse to see that all is not well in the world of ‘diversity’. They jealously gatekeep discussions around multiculturalism. They doggedly shield identity politics from any criticism or challenge. And they do so even though it has been glaringly obvious to many of us for years that this has both rehabilitated and created new forms of racial thinking. It is this racial thinking that has now violently erupted on to our streets, with armed Muslim gangs and far-right thugs making a great show of ‘protecting’ their respective groups.

Locating the causes of these race riots in the divisive multicultural, identitarian policymaking of our political class in no way justifies them, of course. The rioting is despicable. But we must still understand its causes. Only then can we start working towards preventing such horrific scenes from ever happening again.

It is paramount that we, as a public, are able to engage in honest, open debates about what is happening. This would provide the chance to hear a range of conflicting perspectives and to start properly addressing people’s grievances. Above all, we need to interrogate our political class over its commitment to policies that have helped create deeply divided communities.

As one commentator who reported on the Birmingham riots put it at the time, ‘bounding people to particular identities has led them to fear and resent those of different identities, because these “blocs” become competitors for power and influence’. The devastating effects of this identity politics – its revival and renewal of racial, racist animosities – are now all too apparent.

Inaya Folarin Iman is a spiked columnist and founder of the Equiano Project.