Se comprobó la efectividad del plan de juegos de mesa aplicados al adulto mayor del

vocabulary” (Phillips 2008: 180) of ‘segregation’ and ‘mixedness’. This section explores how participants talked about Glasgow as a diverse and ‘mixed’ city, how they contrasted this with towns and cities ‘down south’, and what this tells us about the ubiquity of a particular understanding of racism.

When asked to reflect on the differences between racism in Scotland and England, a number of participants in Glasgow drew on a particular repertoire of terms and images to describe racialised communities in England. Communities down south were ‘isolated’, ‘ghettoised’ and ‘segregated’:

I think one [reason for more racism in England] is that Muslim communities down south are more segregated. They are ghettoised, I would say – I’ll say, use these coined words – so for example when I go see my friends it’s like streets literally of just, you know, Asian dominated or Arabic dominated or African dominated, or so on. Birmingham’s the same. (Kadhim, faith-led organisation, Glasgow).

Meanwhile, racialised communities in Scotland were juxtaposed with those in towns and cities in England. Glasgow’s communities in particular were described as not just diverse but de-segregated, and ‘mixed’. As Maria, who works for a faith-led organisation in Glasgow, describes:

I did feel like living in England, travelling around England, the borders between communities was stronger, and then when you come up to Scotland, I don't know whether it's because it’s a smaller place or because it's used to having a lot more

tourists than just kinda being more residential or whatever, that they're used to it...? But it just seems a lot more diverse and people seem to kind of accept it.

Later in the discussion, she goes on to say the following:

[In London] it's in pockets. So because everything's separated and everything's different, and communities are settling with people that they know, everything is kept a little bit separate. It's easy to play the blame game. Whereas in Glasgow everyone's a bit closer together, it doesn't take very long to get from the West End to the east side, north, south, wherever it is. So I think that makes a difference, geographically. (Maria, faith-led organisation, Glasgow).

Maria hints at an assumption underpinning these descriptions that an exposure to cultural difference guards against racism; people are more ‘used’ to diversity, and less susceptible to racist scapegoating. Kadhim echoes this step in logic when he describes the reaction of people in Scotland to terrorist attacks associated with Muslims. Kadhim explains that the response in Scotland does not develop beyond what he calls a “wee flare up” because, he says, people in Scotland have “everyday access” to Muslims. He goes on: “they’ve got friends, everyone’s got someone, that contact that they have, [and they go] you know what, nah, it’s just a one off or isolated”. Such accounts provide key examples of what has been coined a “contact thesis” (Kundnani 2007: 133), which assumes that racism is born out of a lack of exposure to racial or cultural difference, and that geographical ‘segregation’ is a major cause (rather than symptom) of racism.

More recently we have seen the popularisation of the myth of ‘no-go zones’ in particular English cities, bolstered by the far-right (see Dearden 2018). However, narratives of segregation are not only produced by the far-right and consumed by those with little first- hand experience of diverse urban environments. As Kadhim explains, he frequently visits friends in England. Furthermore, Maria lived in England for a significant portion of her life. These are first-hand observations, but they are mediated by a mainstream political discourse which has pushed forward an integrationist (Kundnani 2017) or culturalist (Lentin 2004) understanding of racism. The Casey Review, a UK government-

commissioned review into ‘integration’ published in 2016, is a key example of the way in which an integrationist logic has come to dominate the political conversation around

racism (as discussed in chapter 2, section 2.6). The recommendations of the Casey Review reproduce the idea that conflict is a product of segregation, that particular communities (most often Muslims) are ‘self-segregating’, and that accusations of racism are preventing people from addressing ‘real’ issues around cultural difference.

To be clear, I am not suggesting that the participants referred to above agreed, or would agree, with the recommendations made in the Casey Review. Nevertheless, accounts by participants are revealing. In some cases, they point to important questions around the relationship between racism and “conviviality”: a term used by Gilroy (2004: xi) to describe “the processes of cohabitation and interaction that have made multiculture an ordinary feature of social life in Britain’s urban areas and in postcolonial cities elsewhere”, and which I return to later in the chapter. However, widespread appeals to notions of ‘segregation’ also suggest that an integrationist framework for understanding and

approaching racism has become somewhat hegemonic, beyond Westminster. This includes widespread assumptions about the extent and significance of ethnic segregation, which do not always reflect the reality on the ground where, overall, ethnic segregation across the UK has in fact decreased (see Finney and Simpson 2009).

We might assume particular organisations or groups to be more susceptible to an

integrationist framing of racism depending on how closely aligned groups are to the state or to the way that racism is conceived by the “public political culture” (Lentin 2004: 179). Yet such a framework for explaining racism was drawn on by a wide variety of

participants involved in different organisations and activist groups. So, while the likes of Maria and Kadhim, who work for two different faith-led organisations, pointed to the apparent issue of ‘segregated’ communities, so too did activists involved in more explicitly anti-racist work. Mo, for instance, who has been involved in challenging the far-right in Glasgow, reflects on why the far-right has had less of a base in Scotland than in England:

SH: So is that about it being easier [in England] for groups like Britain First to recruit people?

Mo: Yeah, yeah, to recruit and easy targets. They wouldn’t be able to do that here because where would they go? Where would you go? You know?

SH: Okay, so to recruit people to Britain First. Mo: Both.

SH: And/or to target…

Mo: Yeah, yeah, who do you target, ‘cause our communities are so diverse, it’s mixed, you know?

SH: Okay, do you feel like it’s too, too mixed up?

Mo: Yeah, you can’t really go and target anybody, I mean I can’t think of a single place in the whole of Scotland where they could. Back in the day they used to say Pollokshields [an ethnically diverse area in the Southside of Glasgow]. Well when you go to Pollokshields it’s very mixed, it’s not like that […] they can’t really target anywhere, so I think that’s the reason. So they cannot form a base, and they cannot target anything for that reason. So I think that’s one factor. One key factor. Sociological research in urban environments has found a similar narrative of ‘mixing’ as an apparent antidote to racism. For example, in her research in Oldham, Rochdale and Bradford, Phillips (2008) found that the idea that segregation was problematic and widespread persisted despite evidence to the contrary. Similarly, Harries’ (2017) work found that young people in Manchester drew on the idea of mixedness to distance their experiences of racism from those in other places (such as the Northern towns that feature in Phillips’ research) and times. Harries looks at “how the young people gravitate towards these kinds of narratives, even when their lived experiences offer far more complex and nuanced understandings of living with difference” (Harries 2017: 52); as I explain later in the chapter, the enduring appeal of an integrationist narrative does not reflect the lived reality of many of the participants in the research, and it is these very tensions that point towards an alternative rendering of racism in the city.

Scholars have argued that the notions that anti-racism emerges from either a natural inclination (as discussed previously), or that it is a consequence of exposure to difference, fails to take account of the state’s role in reproducing racism. Lentin (2004: 107), for example, explains how a “state-sponsored anti-racism” has been key in the

“culturalisation” of anti-racism, which “continues to underpin a form of anti-racism that sees racism as a prejudicial behaviour, separate from the political conditions of a given state” (Lentin 2004: 81). Developing this idea in the context of Scotland, in the following section I address the role of the Scottish state, or the devolved Scottish government, in perpetuating this form of ‘anti-racism’ in Scotland, via an appeal to Scotland as a particularly inclusive nation.

4.2.3 ‘Dear Racists’: Scotland as the anti-racist bystander

The desire to continually distinguish Scotland from England may in fact reveal more about the ubiquity of a particular form of anti-racism than it does about any distinct form of anti- racist culture in Scotland. A number of scholars have critically reflected on attempts by the Scottish government to construct a Scottish identity based on a civic nationalism, arguing that civic nationalism should not be treated as straightforwardly distinct from processes of racialisation normally associated with forms of ethnic nationalism. Liinpää (2018), for example, counterposes the SNP’s public discourse of ethnic inclusivity with the

government-supported ‘Homecoming’ campaign, arguing that the campaign foregrounded a particular (white) vision of Scottish ancestry, heritage and culture, while neglecting the nation’s historical links with the Caribbean and India via the transatlantic slave trade. Similarly, Penrose and Howard (2008) consider the Scottish government’s ‘One Scotland, Many Cultures’ campaign, highlighting the ambiguities in the way that the campaign framed Scottish national identity in relation to race and culture.

However, less has been written about what these campaigns say about the framing of racism as an issue by the Scottish government, and if and how this framing plays out on the ground amongst individuals and groups working on issues of race in a Scottish context. During the course of this research, a campaign was launched by the Scottish Government and Police Scotland which helps to further illuminate the ways in which racism has and continues to be treated as an individualised, pathological phenomenon, and simultaneously, the ways in which the nation is imbued with an inherent anti-racism. The campaign aimed to address various forms of ‘hate crime’ in Scotland and featured a series of ‘letters’, displayed in various public spaces around Scottish towns and cities. The letters were

variously addressed to ‘bigots’, ‘transphobes’, ‘homophobes’, ‘disablists’, ‘racists’, and – crucially – signed ‘Yours, Scotland’ (see Figure 1, below).

Figure 1: a design from the ‘Dear Racists’ campaign (Scottish Government and Police Scotland 2018). In this campaign, ‘Scotland’ is constructed as a sort of anti-racist bystander, an example of the individualisation of racism writ large. I borrow the notion of the antiracist bystander from Lentin’s (2017) critique (see also Lentin and Humphry 2017). While Lentin develops her argument in the Australian context in relation to Australian racism studies, the concept of bystander anti-racism neatly encapsulates the presentation of racism in the ‘Dear

racism” (Lentin 2017: 132), which fails to explain the political conditions that lead to public expressions of racism (see also Lentin 2016). In doing so, Lentin (2017: 131) argues that “bystander antiracism displaces race while appearing to challenge racism”.

Somewhat ironically, this version of Scotland as an anti-racist bystander is (re)produced by Police Scotland and the Scottish Government, whose names and logos appear clearly at the bottom of the ‘letter’. There is something incongruous, then, about the threat made by the signatory to ‘call the police’ on the imagined racist recipients, since the police are quite evidently ‘signatories’ of this letter. The threat to ‘call the police’ is also particularly salient in a wider political context which has seen, amongst other forms of racialised police violence, a wave of online attention to white people ‘calling the police’ on black people in everyday situations. Many of these examples have come from the US (Mays and Piccoli 2018), but this is not to say that the same pattern of racialised policing does not occur in the UK, including in Scotland. Indeed, Police Scotland were ‘called’ to the scene in 2015 shortly before Sheku Bayoh died from being restrained by several police officers on a street in Kirkcaldy (Akhtar 2019).

Set against this wider context of racialised police violence, the ‘Dear Racists’ campaign represents a striking occlusion of the role of particular state institutions in perpetuating racism (in this case, the police), and a re-positioning of them as part of an imagined anti- racist collective referred to as ‘Scotland’. This is, of course, not a new phenomenon, but the popularisation of the idea of ‘hate crime’ has perhaps opened up new avenues for parts of the (nation)state to position themselves as anti-racist whilst reinforcing racialised notions of belonging and perpetuating more insidious, structural forms of racism (see chapter 5, section 5.3.3 for a more detailed analysis of the ‘hate crime’ agenda). What is significant here is the role occupied by the nation in the case of the ‘Dear Racists’

campaign and other similar initiatives. In this sense, it is interesting to note that the ‘Dear Racists’ campaign is not so different from a UK-wide initiative launched after the EU referendum, which was named the ‘#BetterThanThat’ campaign and aimed to tackle hate crime on a platform of ‘British values’ (Siddique 2016).

This occlusion of the role of particular state institutions in perpetuating racism can be understood as a symptom of the postracial context (Goldberg 2015). Focusing on the Dear

Scotland campaign, what conditions make possible a public campaign to tackle racism

which completely exorcises the colonial history of the nation state, as well as the racist history and present of the police as a state institution? As Goldberg (2015: 65) argues, the postracial renders racism in particular ways:

Responsibility for racist expression is reduced to an individualized account, to a bad apple, a rogue element. This denies responsibility to structural conditions or larger social forces. For neoliberalizing postraciality, racism is an anomaly, the mark of a past historical moment… racism remains merely a stain on the social fabric, to be washed away as quickly as possible.

Crucially, Goldberg argues that policing and militarisation are central to the way that racism operates in the current postracial moment. So, while the police seek to project racism onto individual offenders, there is a simultaneous increase in the policing of

racialised populations. This raises an important question in the context of Scotland: is there reason to believe that policing in Scotland diverges in any significant way from that in England in terms of the policing of racialised populations? Certainly, there were multiple examples given by Muslim participants in Glasgow that pointed to the discriminatory targeting of Muslims in the context of ‘counter-terrorism’ policy in Scotland. A number of these examples are explored further in chapter 6, section 6.2.2, as part of an extended discussion on Muslim activists’ everyday encounters with the Prevent policy. Here, however, I would like to highlight the broader political context in Scotland through the contribution of one participant, Keith, who works with an organisation focusing on policing in Scotland. Keith first of all describes his sense of the insidious yet increasing presence of the police in particular spaces in Scotland:

In the Muslim community at large, a police presence has become totally

normalised. Nobody thinks twice about, you know, if there’s a Muslim event then there will be a police presence or a police stall. People tend to see it as a bridge- building exercise.

More than this, Keith suggests that there is a clear strategy by Police Scotland to maintain a presence in Muslim-led spaces, characterised by “an extreme determination by the police to build relationships with Muslim organisations”, including mosques. This is perhaps

unsurprising, given the evidence of a similar strategy of co-optation by police forces in England as part of the UK’s counter-terrorism strategy (see Kundnani 2014). However, what is important here is that Police Scotland are seemingly able to carve out an identity distinct from their counterparts in England. Raj, who works for a government and council- funded anti-racist organisation in Glasgow, provided one particularly compelling example of the public perception of the police in Scotland, how it differs from that in England, and what the implications of this might be in terms of actually addressing institutional racism. Raj highlighted a news story that was covered in 2017 and which focused on an anti-racist organisation in Scotland accusing Police Scotland of institutional racism (see Hutcheon 2017). Raj’s surprise is expressed, not in relation to the claims themselves, but at the fact that they were deemed worthy of an ‘exclusive’ front-page news spread by a major Scottish media outlet. For Raj, this was an indication that various Scottish institutions had failed to reckon with the reality of institutional racism in the police force, to the extent that the accusation was seen to be somehow revelatory. Raj described his feeling that the same would not happen ‘down South’, since “the Met accepted it [the claims of institutional racism], begrudgingly, really begrudgingly, but then put in place things to move them forward”. In this respect, Raj saw the reaction to these claims in the Scottish press and by Police Scotland as an indication of “how race is viewed in Scotland” and part of what Raj described as a “backwardness” in relation to tackling racism.

Keith also cautioned against the notion that the way the police operate in Scotland is in any way ‘better’ to that in England, particularly in relation to the policing of Muslim

communities, telling me the following:

I suspect Prevent in Scotland has in fact been more effective in pressuring the Muslim community and shaping the views of [the] Muslim community and keeping them out of participation in controversial areas of politics than it has in England. It’s been perhaps a more softly, softly approach, so if you see the primary problem as being how ‘in your face’ and abusive Prevent is, rather than how much it’s impacted on Muslim participation in political life, then you can say, if you want, that Prevent in Scotland is better. To me, it seems worse and more dangerous, and I think it’s very problematic when people highlight Prevent in Scotland as a success

story. It probably is from the government’s point of view. It isn’t from ours and it shouldn’t be from the Muslim community’s.