Azhar Ahmed is the latest victim of a concerted effort to re-define racism as "anything that could conceivably offend white people". Ahmed is being prosecuted by police over a statement he made on Facebook.  The police say it is a "racially aggravated public order offence".  

Look at the statement.  There is not a hint of racism in it.  To make it racist, one would have to assume that the troops were not just exclusively white, but somehow the bearer of whiteness in its essence.  Maybe they are in this day and age; maybe it is through imperialist action and its effects both domestically and internationally that whiteness is produced.  But the second assumption one would have to make is that white people are the victims of racist oppression by black people, Muslims and so on.  We'll come back to this. 

A spokesperson for Yorkshire police said: "He didn't make his point very well and that is why he has landed himself in bother."  So, the penalty for not making a point "very well" is prosecution and potentially a sentence of up to six months in prison.  The suggestion, though, is that aside from being "racially aggravated" this statement constitutes an incitement to disorder.  Of course, it is considerably more even tempered than some sentiments I have expressed myself in the past, though I won't suffer arrest or prosecution for it.  In addition, the internet - and Facebook in particular - contains an abundance of pages that really do exist to incite violence.  Yet a Muslim sassing our brave boys is too much for the state.  Either this suggests that Muslims are an excitable brown rabble, apt to start cutting white people up at the merest hint of block capitals and exclamation marks, or it implies that it is the feelings of offended white people that must be protected, lest they be the ones who are incited.  Unsurprisingly the EDL and Casuals United dirt (may I say that, or is it "racially aggravated"?) are delighted.  Muslims won't be allowed to sass our brave boys now that the bizzies are 'on our side'.  Hurrah for the filth!  (Is that okay, or...?)

What is really at stake here?  Why are the police behaving like this?  The blog of the Index on Censorship website suggests that suspicion of Muslims voicing opposition to the troops is rooted in fear and suspicion resulting from 7/7.  To be honest, I think this is lame.  The police and the Crown Prosecution Service are not acting out of paranoia.  But the blog also makes another suggestion which gets close to the truth in my opinion: "Unconditional support for soldiers is now expected, even as we become increasingly unsure of what they’re doing out there. From the most ardent supporter of the war to the most strident critic, everyone claims to be acting in the interest of Our Brave Boys. This is now not a matter of politics, but loyalty ... the “racially aggravated” charge doesn’t stick, unless one is willing to buy into the notion that Afghanistan is part of an ethno-religious war between “Islam” and “the West”."

This suggests that it is the state, through its action, which is racializing this issue.  We know that the state is involved in more than simply the bureaucratic and repressive organization of society.  Fundamentally what it does is a kind of moral regulation, ordering the symbolic world, constituting norms and social classifications.  Obviously the law, and the criminal justice system which executes the law, is critical to this constitutive action.  The state's re-classification of racist crime in such a way as to efface the axis of oppression, to make it such that "racism cuts both ways", was an important precondition for this sort of action.  But what is at stake now is an attempt to re-organize the social body behind a resurgent militarism.  We have seen the PR efforts aimed at cementing a new consensus that can support war indirectly, or at least neutralise opposition, on the basis of pro-troops sentiment.  I think the pukeworthy Military Wives, whatever the producers thought they were doing, was a masterpiece in this sort of propaganda.  But consent does not exist in separation from coercion.  Violence and, literally, terror is central to how consent is secured.  How the police act in producing consent has been dealt with here.

So we could see this prosecution as aberrant, the criminal justice system over-reacting, over-playing its hand, being too fastidious with incitement laws, or whatever.  No doubt some will attribute it to nanny-state authoritarianism, and the usual bores will say that the liberals who support anti-racist legislation caused this to happen.  I think it would make more sense to see it as a speculative manouevre in the application of an emerging discourse of treason.  For that is really the logic of this prosecution.  One has to see this question of 'incitement' in connection with the repressive and racialized response to the riots last Summer, and the generalized unease of the British state about the combustibility of the social order.  Those police actions extended the repertoire of repressive tactics already formed in relation to the student protests, G20, UK Uncut, the climate camp and so on.  As importantly, I think, it has to be seen in the context of the new doctrine of 'total policing', which is essentially about giving the police more of a free hand to intervene in aggressive ways to solve problems of social order, coded as problems of crime prevention.  A premium is being placed on preemptive action, literally - I repeat, literally - on terror.  In this case, it is disloyalty that is being punished, in a racialized way.  The action of the police and courts is about constituting a new field of punishable conduct.  And when disloyalty is punished, there really isn't much that can't be included under its canopy.

Not me, obviously.  (Good luck with that.)  And probably not you either.  But, you know, those white people.  The endless parade of white victims, the oppressed white, the white who can't say what they really think and yet endlessly say it at length, for a living.  I fucking hate these people with every last residue of bile I can muster.  Send them back, I say.  These are the people now calling Diane Abbott a 'racist' for saying that 'white people' love to use 'divide and rule', it being an old colonial tactic.  Abbott says she was trying to express a more complex idea, nuances of which were lost in Twitter's 140-character limit.  But I don't really care.  I'm not even going to waste time explaining what's wrong with the idea that white people are the victims of racism.  You think your feelings have been hurt by Diane Abbott?  Come talk to me for five minutes, and I'll fill your ear with some hisses you won't forget.  

The counterpart to reactionary outrage-mongering, of course, is liberal condescension: in the vein of "oh, she's a very silly woman, saying these provocative things, giving the right a cause to change the subject".  This is wrong in many ways.  First of all, what Abbott said was, in a very loose sense, correct: 'white people' do indeed love to play divide and rule.  Not all of them, good lord no.  Not you or I.  Not the good whites (there are some good whites).  But I think we all know that there's a troublesome minority in our midst, the ones who give us all a bad name, whom we must root out and expose, and hand over to the authorities.  That's all I'm saying.  Second, I would rather have a politician who expresses things bluntly and occasionally blunders but is usually on the right side of the argument (Abbott, for all her flaws, is better than most Labour politicians in this respect), than a calculating mountebank who plays for position in the spectacle.  The fact that this is the main line of criticism coming from liberals is indicative of the kind of domesticated, gentrified political game they're playing.  Third, Abbott's comments may provide the occasion for the right to go on an offensive, but let's not pretend this wasn't inevitable.  Following the verdict against the two Lawrence suspects, and the way in which this drew attention to the facts of institutional - no, structural - racism in British society, it was a dead cert that the media would search for a way to restore white victimhood.  

The real problem is not that Diane Abbott says "silly" things.  It is that public speech is regulated according to conventions largely dictated by the powerful; that the social ideas and images that govern what is acceptable in speech are produced by people with a definite interest in domesticating dissident perspectives.  This is something to be opposed, not adjusted to.  But first, before all that, white people need to shut up.

This is just an addendum to recent debates. Racism does not cut both ways, and it cannot. By definition. This is a point that we are forced to recall every time there is a bogus witch hunt, such as that would caused Shirley Sherrod to lose her job as the Georgia state director for rural development in the US Department for Agriculture. As Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor pointed out, the controversy was only possible because the right had successfully re-defined racism:

It's also a point that bears remembering when the slogan of the British National Party and the English Defence League is that "racism cuts both ways". They are not saying this in isolation. They are saying this against the backdrop of media reports which are specifically designed to confuse this issue. The effects of this are not felt only on the right. I have myself been engaged in debates with perfectly decent liberals who, for one reason or another, had forgotten that racism is a structural matter, and not to do with mere prejudice. But, once again, the backlash was assisted by a considered change in the way in which knowledge about society was gathered by the government. In the US, of course, the "color-blind" approach of the liberal sector of the ruling class and the state bureaucracy was consecrated after WWII following the sociological work of Gunnar Myrdal, whose net effect was to reduce racism to a set of social attitudes rather than the structure of oppression which produced them. This later provided the neoconservative and segregationist reactionaries with one of their mobilising tools: attempts to mitigate the effects of structural racism, through affirmative action for example, were "reverse racism". If racism was not seen as a system of structural oppression, then attempts to remedy structural discrimination could be depicted as themselves racist. But I think the turn, in the UK, was somewhat more recent, perhaps because the fruits of anti-racist struggle were more recently enjoyed.

This re-definition of racism is particularly potent when it affects the perception of behaviours that are defined by the state, and of course the main form of behaviour that the state gets to define is criminality. The issue of "racially motivated crime" has always been at the centre of anti-racist struggle, because its definition, and the subsequent treatment of such crimes, is at the centre of the state's handling of discriminatory and oppressive behaviour, and particularly its promise in 'race relations' legislation to protect minorites from racism.

While I was researching my article for the ISJ about racism, navigating the enemy territory of official statistics, I happened upon the fact that from 1994, the British Crime Survey changed its practise of reporting racially motivated crimes. As far as I could gather, the BCS had only begun to count racially motivated crimes in 1988. At first, the victim was only asked about racism as a possible motive if the victim was judged by the interviewer to be non-white. Which is not to say that white people were not asked about racist crime - but the question was 'ecological' rather than personal. They were asked to comment, for example, on whether they thought racist crime was a particularly large problem where they lived. As you would expect, white Britons were less inclined to think of racist crime as a problem in their area than non-white Britons. The reason being that white Britons, insofar as the majority were not perpetrating racist crimes, were not on the receiving end of them either.

The decision to count such crimes in the first place was an important concession to the anti-racist movements of the 1980s. I should say that the BCS's counting procedure was initially at odds with police practise, since the latter were compelled to collect data on racially motivated crime in the mid-1980s. The official police definition of a racially motivated incident was: a) any incident in which it appears to the reporting or investigating officer that the complaint involves an element of racial motivation; or, b) any incident which involves an allegation of racial motivation made by any person. This was different in two ways. First of all, it included the possibility of white victims of racism, and secondly it prioritised the perception of the investigating officer above the prima facie account of victims.

Perhaps for that reason police measurements of racially motivated crime varied considerably with that of the BCS. In 1991, 20% of the victims of recorded incidents of racially motivated crimes, by police statistics, were white. And, despite casting the net wider (and including a more comprehensive list of crimes in their reporting), the total number of racially motivated crimes detected by the police was way below the number detected by the BCS. In a single year, the police failed to detect 80,000 such crimes. This could reflect a number of factors, but it is reasonable to suppose that among them was a lack of willingness in an institutionally racist state bureaucracy to take the possibility of racist motivation seriously. This is a point supported by the fact that between 1988 and 1992, the rate of police detection of racist crimes increased by 77%, while the BCS detected only a marginal increase in that period, suggesting that political changes entailed greater bureaucratic pressures on agents of the police to take racism seriously.

Subsequently, however, changes to the BCS counting meant that any victim of a crime was asked if he or she felt there was a 'racial' motivation, wherever the victim was situated in the racial system. In this new procedure, it was just as plausible - by official lights - for John Tyndall to be the victim of racial oppression as it was for a young black man in Eltham to be. This change was taken at the height of the scandal over the murder of Stephen Lawrence. It followed more than a decade of central government hostility to efforts made by local councils to counter the effects of racist discrimination. And, importantly, it was clearly the result of a considered decision. It had to have come from a conscious, calculated change in the underlying conception of racism deployed by officials, which the statistics were there to report on. Somebody, or some bodies, in a government bureau had to take the initiative in driving this agenda through. I have searched in vain for an official explanation or elaboration of the rationale behind this. One Home Office report [pdf], discussing the change, simply takes it for granted that there were "racially motivated incidents where the victim was white" that the old BCS counting system had not acknowledged. I have no doubt that to many of Whitehall's finest minds, this would be uncontroversial, but it plainly isn't so. Part of the confusion might arise from the nebulous terminology, "racially motivated", which itself potentially implies the model of racism that is in dispute. Yet, nonetheless, there was initially an implicit recognition of a different model, in which racism is structural, even given the use of such a problematic terminology. The rationale behind the change, if it has ever been made explicit, would be an interesting topic of study in itself.

And it would be important. The gathering of data on such matters - statistics, etym. 'the science of the state' - is no neutral exercise, but a hugely important tool of governmentality, as well as a weapon of political struggle. Given the state's immense resources in data collection and knowledge production, its ability to shape popular culture and the output of the capitalist media is considerable. The change I refer to would is discussed in official reports as if it were a minor bureaucratic 'correction', made in a rarefied atmosphere by number-crunching policy wonks, but it shaped the agenda, and it filtered into popular awareness. It certainly fed into the racist reaction, and the spurious victimology that drives support for fascist groups like the BNP. (I offer two examples of the effect that this change had on the media's reporting of racist crimes: here and here. Both of these are chosen for being mainstream reports, widely cited to reinforce the bogus victimology I refer to.) The decision to redefine racism in this vitally relevant field, one that is itself overlaid with racist connotations about black criminality, obviously taken at a high level, has played an important role in enabling the subsequent state-driven neo-Powellite reaction, whose effects we are living through.