Racism and Brexit: notes towards an antiracist populism

Abstract

This article takes Brexit and Nigel Farage's right-wing populism as a starting point to consider the populist politics of racism and antiracism. I demonstrate how two key figures of right-wing populist discourse -the "white working class" and the "liberal elite" -have come to describe a political grammar with a widespread influence and explanatory resonance across the political spectrum, and which have as a result formed a racial common sense in Brexit Britain. Rather than accept the terms of a debate that has been set by the populist right, I draw on Ernesto Laclau to describe a rival politics of antiracist populism. Although it is far from straightforward to navigate, engagement on the terrain of the popular is not optional if we are to counter a fatalistic tendency to conceive of antiracism as a minority or elite concern.

Othering Mushrooms: Migratism and its racist entanglements in the Brexit campaign

“…Whereas the sense of 'being too many' is assigned to those positioned as intruders, that is to say to immigrants and especially those who are not white, the sense of 'being all over the world' -the charge of anti-nationalist sentiments such as cosmopolitism -is raised also against the liberal elites that are cast as the enemy of 'ordinary people' (here meaning 'the white working class'). Within the context of the Brexit campaign, this racially coded, nationalist anti-élite sentiment was perhaps most visibly expressed by the Tory Party Prime Minister Theresa May in a speech delivered after the EU Referendum vote (Pitcher, 2019(Pitcher, : 2494 where May insisted that 'if you believe you're a citizen of the world, you're a citizen of nowhere'.…”

The Urban Zemiology of Carnival Row: Allegory, Racism and Revanchism

“…This is particularly relevant to the contemporary parallel with the UK. Some advocates of Brexit are white supremacists, believing in the innate superiority of the White "race" over others, but as the majority of the population of the European Union would be classified as "White" by white supremacists, the relationship between racism and Brexit is complex (Pitcher 2019). One way to understand the intersection of different prejudices is that unlike the negative pole of the binary opposition, the positive pole is subject to meaningful subdivision.…”

Interventions on European nationalist populism and bordering in time of emergencies

“…That is, they promote the construction of a social Europe rather than exit ( Halikiopoulou et al., 2012 ). Thus, inspired by Ernesto Laclau, Pitcher (2019) even pleas for an antiracist populism.…”