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Latino
Hispanic
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Native American
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Muslim
For our latest Five Book Plan — posted in conjunction with the publication of Edwy Plenel’s For the Muslims — we invited Deepa Kumar, author of Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, to contribute a list of her top five books on anti-Muslim racism. Kumar is regularly cited as one of the world’s leading experts on Islamophobia and imperialism.
Let me begin by confessing that it was difficult to select only five books on Islamophobia. There are so many excellent works on the topic that it was hard to choose just five. The question I asked myself when whittling down the list was: what are some of the foundational texts that can help offer clarity on this pernicious form of racism at this moment of heightened Islamophobia? I kept in mind both the person who is just starting to grapple with the topic as well as those who are further along. Here then is my list, with apologies to many friends and colleagues whose work I respect but could not include.
Edward Said, Orientalism (Vintage, 1979)
Said’s classic book is still a starting point because it focuses on the birth of anti-Muslim racism within the context of European colonialism. Said analyzes the ways in which the “Orient” (particularly the Middle East and North Africa) was thought about and imagined in the West in cultural products, politics and scholarly writing. He argues that the framework of Orientalism through which the West has understood the MENA region, has, despite some changes, retained its core elements leading people, even in the late 20th century, to racialize Arabs and Muslims in particular ways. Said continued this analysis in a follow up book called Covering Islam, which I also recommend. Here is a note of caution: Orientalism is written in theoretically dense language and can be hard to read, so be prepared. Perhaps you might start by watching a short documentary produced by media scholar Sut Jhally where he interviews Said and brings to life, through the use of film clips as well as paintings, the thrust of Said’s argument. Or you might begin with a much more accessible book, which is also quite fantastic in its own right, Zachary Lockman’s Contenting Visions of the Middle East: The History and Politics of Orientalism.
Gilbert Achcar, Marxism, Orientalism and Cosmopolitanism (Haymarket, 2013)
As much as I admire the work of Said, there are also some limits to his analysis. Various Marxists have offered critiques of Orientalism (one famous critique is by Aijaz Ahmad in his book In Theory). I recommend this book by Gilbert Achcar for two reasons: first, because he unpacks and develops the notion of “Orientalism-in-Reverse” (a very useful concept) and because of his focus on Said’s method of analysis. Achcar shows how Orientalism, the framework used by the West to understand the East, is based on an essentialist view of the “Muslim world.” Such an essentialist view insists that Islam and “Oriental culture” is all you need to know to explain larger social dynamics. He contends that Said, even while being one of the “most brilliant critics” of Orientalism, also fell into an essentialist trap. Said, he says, is prone to geographical essentialism when he suggests that all knowledge produced in the West is necessarily tinged with Orientalism. Instead, Achcar argues that a historical materialist approach is more useful since it is fundamentally anti-essentialist and, historically speaking, marks a radical departure from earlier idealist modes of explaining the world.
Hamid Dabashi, Brown Skin, White Masks (Pluto, 2011)
In this important book, Hamid Dabashi talks about the role of “comprador intellectuals,” or people who are sometimes called “native informants,” in the production of anti-Muslim racism. Leila Ahmed shows brilliantly in one of the chapters of her book Women and Gender in Islam how people like the Egyptian lawyer Qassim Amin collaborated with empire. Amin’s book on women’s liberation in Egypt is a perfect example of the part played by native intellectuals in bolstering imperialist feminism, i.e. the appropriation of women’s rights in service of empire. Dabashi focuses on the current Qassim Amins, such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali for instance who has done more to demonize Muslims than any other native collaborator all the while posing as a “feminist.” The title of the book is a play on Frantz Fanon’s classic Black Skin, White Masks, in which Fanon analyzes the traumatic consequences of the sense of inferiority that colonized people feel and how this leads them to identify with the ideology of the colonizer. Dabashi builds on Fanon’s insights and argues that many of today’s immigrant intellectuals help to sustain imperialism.
Steven Salaita, Anti-Arab Racism in the USA (Pluto, 2006)
Steven Salaita’s account of anti-Arab racism in the United States is the definitive book on the subject. Salaita locates the emergence of US anti-Arab racism within the longer trajectory of white supremacy as it emerges from the settler-colonial project and the plantation system. The origins of American racism, he points out, are to be found in the treatment of Native Americans and African slaves, and this unique history informs anti-Arab racism today. He looks at anti-Arab racism before and after 9/11 and argues that anti-Arab racism is to be found not only on the Right, but also among liberals. Written in a powerful and personal voice, Salaita gives readers a sense of what it feels like to be a Palestinian-American in the United States. On that note, if you want to understand what it is like to be on the receiving end of anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racism in the War on Terror era, I would recommend Moutafa Bayoumi’s How Does it Feel to be a Problem.
Arun Kundnani, The Muslims Are Coming (Verso, 2014)
Kundnani’s book is a must read on how the national security state treats “suspicious” people. It is a brilliant analysis of counter-terrorism policy in the US and UK since 9/11. Kundnani debunks the dominant thinking in the War on Terror and shows how theories of “radicalization” that set out to explain why individuals carry out acts of political violence are fraught with faulty and erroneous assumptions. Both in its conservative and liberal forms, the radicalization thesis is based on the notion that it is ideas and culture that drive terrorism rather than the actions of Western governments. The problem, as it viewed in the security establishment, is “their culture not our politics.” Kundnani refutes this argument and roots anti-Muslim racism within the context of imperialism pointing out that what the US and UK do abroad inevitably comes back home.
Okay, I will admit I cheated. I managed to recommend more than five books, sneaking other titles into my description of the fab five. But like I said, it was hard to keep it to five especially in a world where Islamophobia continues to grow at an alarming rate and to inform the politics of ethnocentric nationalisms, war and empire. There is a dire need today for greater clarity on this issue not least because of the necessity to build an anti-racist, anti-imperialist movement that can challenge this form of racism.
Deepa Kumar is a speaker, writer and author, media commentator, and activist. She is a professor in the Media Studies department at Rutgers University.
African American
5
What do you understand by racism?
When I was a child at nursery, before I was old enough for school, my mother had me riding on the back seat of her bicycle. This was in 1966. I was waving to Johnny, who was walking on the other side of the road with his mother, and shouting ‘Hi Johnny, hi Johnny!’ And Johnny ignored me. I don’t remember this, but my mother remembers it distinctly – I muttered under my breath ‘He doesn’t like me because of the colour of my skin’.
How could I, as a 3- or 4-year-old, understand that someone didn’t like me because of the colour of my skin? You’re not conscious of skin colour at that age unless others have made you conscious of it. There you see, right at the root, this sense of difference, and how others perceive that difference. As you go through life, you see different ways in which people use that difference in order to behave differently with you. Not everybody. But racism can start at that level as a very young child, where you begin to be set apart from your peers as a consequence of the colour of your skin (or maybe if you have red hair, or are a woman).
“Racism is about the Other. It’s about xenophobia. Fear of strangers is as old as we are.”
It’s often much easier to talk about skin colour because we have a whole history of creating classifications of people according to skin colour. That history has evolved into mythology, and that mythology has evolved into people’s behaviour to one another. That simple example is not the same as when a police officer shoots someone on the street because they have black skin. There is a spectrum, and it starts somewhere. It can end up with extremism: that is racism. Racism begat race.
Racism is about the Other. It’s about xenophobia, and fear of strangers is as old as we are. That’s why our ancestors lived at the top of a hill, so they could protect themselves against strangers who would come and take their women and their children and their children. Racism is not irrational in that sense: it is not illogical to fear the Other. Race, however, is a different matter.
Yet it’s not all about visual difference is it? Some of the most vicious racist crimes of the 20th century were committed against Jews who weren’t necessarily visually identifiable, but were only deemed Jewish by Nazi laws.
I disagree. When the National Socialists came to power in the 1930s, that coincided with a time when technology was changing. The new technology was film: the talkies. The Germans, and particularly Goebbels, were very adept at turning that into propaganda, and they made sure that Jews looked different – hooked nosed, swarthy grotesques. You can see racial stereotypes in cartoons in North America at the same time, of Irish people depicted as black, literally as black, as if they came from Africa. Even if it’s not obvious to the naked eye in every case, there were visualisations of Jews in the 1930s that played with people’s imaginations. Racism is about getting deep into people’s imagination and shaping the way they feel about the Other.
If you go back to the origins of racist classifications in the 17th century and into the Enlightenment, what we find there, in the so-called laws of nature are classifications of plants, of animals, and also of human beings. What scientists saw were humans who were ‘negro’; those who were yellow, ‘Asiatics’; and white Europeans. The classification put white Europeans at the top of the hierarchy. The philosophers and scientists, most of whom had never met a black person, perpetuated myths about this hierarchy.
You’ve chosen Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies as your first book. Why did you choose that?
Popper is a very personal choice. I saw him lecture at the London School of Economics. I was a working class boy who was given the chance of going to university in the early eighties and attended the LSE. I had a sense of being different. I had a sense of self that my grandfather helped instill – he was old school Labour, and a communist. He thought that you should make something of yourself in the world, to take what you have and make an impact. My father was German, raised in Nazi Germany, so I have a very clear sense of the wrongs that were committed in Nazi Germany. Karl Popper was a grand figure of philosophy at the LSE then. I was already prepped to receive his wisdom as I knew he’d come from Vienna, I knew he was a refugee from Nazism, so it was a natural association. So there were very personal reasons I had for going to hear him lecture.
“You’re not conscious of skin colour at that age unless others have made you conscious of it.”
But when I went to the lecture, I realised I was the only person of colour in that packed lecture theatre. He talked about the enemies of the open society. It struck me that one of the enemies of the open society was exclusion. Popper doesn’t discuss colour, but he does talk about those who are ‘in’ and those who are ‘out,’ those who are part of the process, and those who are not part of the process. In the early 1980s we’d had riots in Brixton, riots in Toxteth. I’d been involved in riots in Broadwater Farm—not throwing Molotov cocktails, I should add—I just happened to be there by accident. That context meant that I really wanted to delve into the questions Popper was asking, especially the question: Who is democracy for? Popper thought it was mostly about keeping the demagogues and dictators out, not about getting the democrats in.
His book helped me to think in a different way about society. It gave me a strategy of looking for an alternative narrative, of testing the dominant position. As a journalist, it made me much more sceptical when I was presented with the dominant line: a little voice in the back of my head said, ‘Really? Let’s think of the alternative proposition here.’ In that way, Popper’s book was important for me. It gave me a kind of epiphany and helped shape a method of seeking the alternative narrative.
Your second choice is Franz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks. Why did you choose this particular classic text?
Franz Fanon was born and raised in Martinique, part of the French empire. It’s still a ‘département d’outre-mer,’ in other words, it has the same status in France as Isère does, or Calais. It is essentially a European island. Fanon was a man of colour raised in a culture where blackness was a stain. Blackness was regarded as useless to the state, useless to commerce, useless to education. And he fought against that. He was a disciple of the great thinker Emile Césaire. Fanon was not just a thinker, he was an activist, a doer. He later moved to Algeria. He wanted to bring about change, not just think about it. Unfortunately he didn’t live long enough to see that happen.
I read this book first in French, when I was an undergraduate studying in France. I was so taken by this book, with its beautiful use of language. You didn’t read many books written by black people, and he had such a facility with language, and I thought how amazing this was. Then, when I delved into the meaning of the book, I realised that essentially he was saying that black people are re-burdened by skin colour in a white-dominated society. They learn to live as white people, but underneath they are really black people. That’s a contradiction, a kind of self-denial. But it’s a plausible proposition, particularly in the 1950s when it wasn’t straightforward for people like me to be professors in universities. It wasn’t impossible, but it was very difficult. The opportunity for people of colour to play a part in the life of Britain or France or North America wasn’t there. He was railing against that.
He gave people like me, raised in the 1970s, learning about the world in the 1980s, something to hold on to. It wasn’t so crazy to ask myself: ‘Am I living a lie?’ ‘Is this mauvaise foi [bad faith]?’ Being educated, in my case in premium institutions such as the London School of Economics, but never talking about race, never talking about difference, never being asked what I thought, as a person of colour, about the education I was receiving, never reading a book by a black person unless you went out and found it, not looking at the experiences of the diaspora. Still today, in our curriculum, there’s very little of that. Franz Fanon, being a person of colour living in an outpost of France, made me think there were some common threads here.
“What matters? What’s on the surface? Does my black skin determine who I am?”
This was the kind of alternative narrative I felt I had to pursue in order to understand my role in this society. What was I going to do with my learning? Was I going to work for a bank and make lots of money, and just hide myself away in a little private world? Or was I going to contribute to a more public wealth that tries to challenge and channel some of these ideas into public discourse? I chose the latter, and stayed an impoverished journalist for twenty-five years.
Nevertheless, looking back at Fanon, this book still resonates for me. In a way, that’s an indictment of how little the academic world has done, in Europe, to try and take on board his ideas and channel them into the curriculum and help our cosmopolitan society, that is rooted in its history, to come to terms with the modern diverse nations that we are – I’m talking about France, Britain, Germany to a lesser extent, Spain, Portugal, the United States.
Let’s move on to the scientific treatment of the things that make us who we are: genes. You’ve chosen Steve Jones’s book, The Language of Genes. This is a book generally about genetics, not specifically about race, but within it there’s a lot that illuminates discussion of race.
You began the conversation by asking me about racism: racism is something that’s done to others, it’s a confection, it’s a socially-engineered notion. Race, however, is supposedly something objective, scientific. Of course, after the Second World War, after the Holocaust, people looked at this problem of race and racism, and they saw how people could see difference and use it against people. So they said racism is bad, xenophobia is bad. But they didn’t really deal with the problem of race and the poppycock that has passed for science in that area for the past two hundred years.
What attracted me to The Language of Genes was its clarity on this issue of what lies beneath the skin. What matters? What’s on the surface? Does my black skin determine who I am? When I was younger I was a great athlete and an excellent dancer. And of course people said, ‘You’re athletic, you know how to move because you have a black skin.’ That’s ridiculous. As it happens, my mother, who is Anglo-Irish, born in Hornsea in North London, is one of the best movers you could come across. That’s probably where those genes came from, not my visible skin colour. This sort of thinking always invites the question: What’s really going on? Jones got to the heart of this.
In 2000 I made a film called The Faster Race for the BBC, around the time of the Sydney Olympics. I asked the old question, ‘Why do black men run faster?’ Well, ‘Do they run faster?’ is obviously the first question. The prejudice is that black men run faster, and the evidence is that in the Olympic finals all the way back to Jesse Owens, black men seemed to take first, second, and third in nearly every event. The thrust of the film was to delve into the science. Steve Jones was a very passionate advocate in that film for the view that science shows that race, as a scientific concept, offers us no clarity at all on why we are different, why we function differently. That’s race in the broadest sense: black, white, Asian. It doesn’t help us. It isn’t scientifically useful.
“Race as a scientific concept offers us no clarity at all on why we are different.”
This helps us recognise that the original racial ‘science’ was nonsensical. Let’s not blame those scientists, because they didn’t have the tools available now. Now we can understand better that what goes on underneath the skin really matters. In The Faster Race we realised that we were asking the wrong question: blackness is not the issue here at all. Population groups is the issue. Kenyans run fast for long distances because they have a capacity to absorb oxygen and use it efficiently because they’ve been raised at high altitude. That is the answer for them. It’s not the colour of their skin. West Africans and Caribbeans have fast twitch fibres, and therefore they can sprint faster, as a population group. But it’s not the colour of their skin, it’s what going on underneath that matters. So for me, Steve Jones’s book was a text of liberation in a strange sort of way: imaginative liberation, not political liberation.
What Jones offers is that sense that we can liberate ourselves, because we can imagine things in a different way. That doesn’t mean that racism suddenly disappears. Our heads are traumatised with this notion of race. Steve Jones provides us with new memory to lay over the trauma that will help us to move on eventually. He’s applied modern science to an old problem.
Your fourth book is the Ordeal of Integration by Orlando Patterson.
All my choices have a personal aspect. I didn’t know about Patterson until I was appointed as a lecturer at the LSE in 1987. I was, I was told, the first black British lecturer ever to be appointed to the LSE. But there had been some black lecturers before from the Caribbean. Orlando Patterson was one of them. He’d ended up going to the US, to Harvard, among other places. I was interested in these people of colour who had been at the LSE before me.
Patterson was a social conservative – I wouldn’t describe myself that way. He looked at the idea of race in America through a different prism: he wasn’t trapped by the mythology, he wasn’t trapped by history. He was quite bold in his analysis, so much so that he ended up being called an Uncle Tom, and a sell out. I wanted to look at this, why he was called these things. If you dig down into his method, all he’s doing is providing empirical data to say that the debate should shift because, on the ground, things are shifting. That gave me the courage to look at things empirically and see that it was possible to share your analysis of the facts—which might get you into trouble with some people—but nevertheless wasn’t just repeating old claims.
“The remedy isn’t just to focus on a black condition, it needed to focus on the human condition.”
When you look through the literature on race and racism, the overwhelming majority of texts have been written by people of a Marxist persuasion. How useful is that if it’s all coming from that direction? We live in a pluralist society, so that’s not a good thing. We need people approaching this from different perspectives, looking at the problems our society faces, and giving their analysis of that.
What is the key theme of this book?
Patterson’s book looks at America’s racial crisis. It investigates the political emancipation of the period after the civil rights breakthroughs of the 1960s. Thing moved very quickly. The paradigm that emerged was that black people had to be helped all the time through state agency.
In other words, the state had got it wrong: they’d oppressed black people, or at least people within the state had oppressed black people, and the state had done nothing to help them be free agents in a free society. Then the civil rights movement had come along and given people that agency, but the purpose of that agency was to create a collective mentality, to fight oppression. You had black rights, black activism, the call to arms of black people, which of course, in adversity, was important to drive political changes.
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Then, as time passed, Patterson suggests, we got trapped in that new paradigm where success was failure: wherever there were failings in a black community, the solution was to bring in the state – as if whenever there were failings in a black community it simply has to do with their blackness. But inequality doesn’t just attack black people, it attacks people of all colours and all creeds: the remedy isn’t just to focus on a black condition, it needs to focus on the human condition. Patterson appreciated that. He gave the data to show this shifting territory.
The philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah’s book The Ethics of Identity is your final book choice. Appiah defends a kind of cosmopolitanism that both recognises that we are citizens of the world in some sense, but also celebrates difference. Why did you choose this book?
Appiah is a gay man of Anglo-Ghanian heritage living in the United States. He well understands the pressures of differences from those around him. He recognises that he has to reconcile those differences, and that we, as a community, have to recognise differences.
I think he’s right: we don’t all have to be the same, but we need to respect each other’s differences. At the same time, we need a common language so that we can explore who the enemies of the open society are, because if we don’t identify them, we are really going to struggle. These enemies are all about us and are constantly trying to undermine us and attack our differences. We have to find common ground, and a common language. Appiah offers an imaginative moral solution to that. I applaud him for having done so, and his work has helped shape the way I think.
“I’m more than the sum of my parts. That is what I told Enoch Powell when I met him in 1992.”
Appiah appeals to my sense of fairness, and appeals to my sense that difference does matter. I’m very conscious of the differences that have shaped me, but I’m more than the sum of my parts. That’s where the cosmopolitanism lies. That – by the way – is what I told Enoch Powell when I met him in 1992. I said, ‘Enoch, you were wrong. You said, in 1968, when those bovver boys in laced up boots were spitting in my face, that we had no place here. You were wrong. We have shaped a place for ourselves in Britain. If only you would embrace us, we would embrace you, and we can find a common place where we don’t need to shed blood in the River Tiber.’
How did Powell reply to that?
He was very quiet and thoughtful.
In your book, The ‘R’ Word: Racism and Modern Society, you talk about the possibility of going beyond racism, beyond ideas of race too. What do you mean by that?
We have to accept, first, that race doesn’t exist in any meaningful scientific sense. Most people have accepted that. What we’re still left with is cultural racism, that is, that people do still behave differently to other people because of the colour of their skin. In addition to that, black people themselves have become enslaved in the mythologies passed down from history. They need to unchain themselves from that slavery of language.
If I have a student of colour come into my university office, I’m not interested in his or her skin colour. I’m more interested in the quality of their mind, and their ability to apply themselves to a particular problem. If we can create a new cadre of people who get beyond the idea of race defining them, we can get beyond the mentality reproduced by cultural racism. It is a function of imagination. We have to learn to re-imagine ourselves. We have to get to a position where people are not defined by the colour of their skin, but by the content of their character and the contribution to the world they want to make.
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Jewish
2
Which book would you like to start with?
I gave you five books. I didn’t necessarily rank them in order of importance. If you asked me then the number one for me would be Constantine’s Sword. Anti-Semitism in Western civilisation was unfortunately grounded in religion, in Christianity, and that legitimised it and that gave it an OK, so Constantine’s Sword is, I would say, the most authoritative history, by a former Jesuit priest, as to the antecedents, the roots of anti-Semitism in Western society. I would consider that it’s the most significant book if you want to understand the essence of why and how it spread. It’s a big book.
Can you give me a picture of what that essence is?
The roots of Western anti-Semitism, going back to Christianity, is the charge of deicide – that the Jews, not the Romans, crucified Jesus, and therefore if the Jews killed the Lord then it’s OK to do whatever it is with them unless they convert. So you had expulsions, you had the Inquisition, and therefore everything was legitimate.
Then the thesis developed that Christianity superseded Judaism. That the promise from God to Abraham was superseded by the promise of Jesus. Somebody once wrote that first they came and said to the Jews, ‘You cannot live amongst us as Jews. You have to convert.’ Then somebody came and shortened that phrase to, ‘You cannot live amongst us,’ and therefore they were expelled. It was because of those antecedents that Hitler was able to shorten that to, ‘You cannot live.’
The reason I wrote my book, Jews and Money, was that it’s the other side of the coin in the roots of Christianity in terms of anti-Semitism. That’s the greed. Why is there such a preoccupation in anti-Semitism about Jews and money? That’s because when you go back to deicide, the other side of it is that Judas sold out Jesus not for theology but for 30 pieces of silver. So that becomes another fundamental basis for anti-Semitism: ‘The Jews are greedy, they’ll do anything for money, even sell out the Lord.’
When were the first expulsions and forced conversions?
Well, in Britain, York was the first one, in 1190. The conversions were in Spain with the Inquisition, when those who wouldn’t convert fled or were expelled or were burnt at the stake. In the Middle Ages you have all kinds of issues. Jews were blamed for the Plague, for example. So there wasn’t one version, but the most significant basis for anti-Semitism stems from the teachings of Christianity. That’s why the book is important and why what the Vatican did 45 years ago in Vatican II by Pope Paul, which was to, not forgive, but to remove the blame for the crucifixion from the Jews, was probably the most important modern-day message relating to anti-Semitism and the Christian church.
The War Against the Jews.
Lucy Dawidowicz is a very respected historian and philosopher. It’s a lucid, very well documented, easy to read and poignant history of anti-Semitism. It reads well, it’s done well.
When you talk about history books, I’d say that Anthony Julius’s book is the best on the list – the Wistrich is more detailed and more specific but Julius’s book is specifically England. England was important in the English-speaking world in terms of the Empire, and what happened there impacted the rest of the world. That’s why he’s one of my five because in order to understand anti-Semitism in the English-speaking world you need to understand its growth and development in the UK.
The reason I put in the Conor Cruise O’ Brien book is that so much of the modern day, new anti-Semitism related to Israel – criticism of Israel. It’s been said recently that Israel has become the Jew among nations, that a double standard has been applied to it, so I think it’s very important, in order to understand how anti-Semitism morphs into the political arena, that one understands the establishment of the state of Israel, the saga of Israel and Zionism. Of all the books on Israel and the Middle East, for me, Conor Cruise O’Brien’s book is a classic. So, this is not about anti-Semitism but it will inoculate a lot of people against the anti-Semitism which morphs out of the anti-Israel/anti-Zionism.
I’m always shocked by the way people hide their anti-Semitism in the way they speak about foreign affairs, Israel’s foreign policy and so on. Though, obviously, this is a view you could hold without being anti-Semitic, what would you say to people who would say: ‘I’m not anti-Semitic, I just don’t like Israel’s foreign policy’?
I would say that Israel is a democracy. You can criticise its policies. There is more criticism of Israel’s policies within Israel per square kilometre than any place I know of in the world. So, it’s not a question of not criticising the government. My question is when somebody applies a certain standard only to Israel, I would ask: ‘Why aren’t you applying the same standard to Saudi Arabia, to China, to Cuba, to Rwanda?’ If it’s only setting a standard for Israel that is not set for anywhere else, that’s anti-Semitism. On the issue of anti-Zionism, Zionism is the national liberation movement of the Jewish people. Now there are some people who are opposed to nationalism. So, if you are opposed to nationalism and you don’t like British, American or Palestinian nationalism, then it’s OK for you not to like Jewish nationalism. But if the only nationalism that bothers you is Jewish nationalism then you’re an anti-Semite. If in your mind Jews are the only people in the world who have no right to self-determination, to want their own home, their own state, their own flag – that’s racist. You’re a bigot.
I just want to go back to the Lucy Dawidowicz. Is this a history that focuses mainly on the Holocaust? Can you think of any anecdote that makes the book stand out?
The Holocaust for me is not something that’s anecdotal. The history of anti-Semitism is cumulative and the worst of it was the Holocaust. If you notice, I did not pick a book on the Holocaust and there are a lot. But the only way you can understand the Holocaust is to understand the history of anti-Semitism, rather than looking at what happened in the Holocaust. There are a lot of books on Nazism and anti-Semitism in Nazism but I think it’s more important to know where it came from, what were its antecedents, and for me Wistrich and Julius and Dawidowicz do that. I would say read all of them. With Dawidowicz it’s the way she writes. She’s analytical, sharp, insightful and she makes it relevant to modern times.
I’d like to hear about the history of anti-Semitism in Britain. A 65-year-old rabbi in London told me that things were worse now than he could ever remember, and he was telling his children and their children not to wear their yarmulkes to and from school for the first time in his life.
It’s not only in London, it’s the whole of Europe. It started in 2000; that’s when people started talking about the new anti-Semitism, linked to criticism and attacks relating to Israel. In Europe it’s rife. There are two more elements. One is the internet, which has spread anti-Semitism and even legitimised it because it’s an instrument of knowledge, and the other element is the growth of Arab Muslim communities, many of them fundamentalist and anti-Semitic, and they act as a human conveyor belt of the anti-Semitism of the Middle East. Anti-Semitism in the Muslim world in the Middle East is horrendous. It’s horrific. It only matches the rhetoric of Nazism, the cartoons, the books. That’s being brought to Europe on the conveyor belt of the fundamentalist imams. So, much of the anti-Semitism is expressed through them.
In Paris a young Jewish man, Ilan Halimi, was abducted for money, because all Jews have money, and killed. The kidnappers had been fed this anti-Semitism and it’s in the streets. The Chief Rabbi of France also advised Jews not to walk in the streets in yarmulkes. Spain is bad, Poland is bad, Norway is bad. The UK is unfortunately among the places where there are more anti-Semitic acts than in many other places. But the FBI just issued a report in the US saying that there are ten times as many attacks now against Jews than there are against Muslims. This is in the United States. We think we’re better but we’re not immune. Here too there are significant anti-Semitic public manifestations.
When you’re talking about attacks are you talking about verbal abuse or physical attacks?
I’m talking about attacks on synagogues, cemeteries, Jewish institutions and individuals.
Tell me about Wistrich.
He’s one of the great historians of anti-Semitism. It is a heavy big book, scholarly, footnoted – several hundred pages of footnotes. It will be a classic for a long time, a book of reference. It’s probably a book one should consult. It’s hard to sit down and read it from cover to cover, although if one does one can become an expert in anti-Semitism. It will stand the test of time as the tome of history, and he brings it up to modern day times in terms of global jihad and attacks on the Jewish people. This book will be recommended as the best book on anti-Semitism in ten years’ time.
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Immigrants and Borders
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How did the concept of United States immigration being a ‘melting pot’ of diverse nationalities come to be? In this interview, Stanford historian Ana Raquel Minian explores America’s complex, highly racialized history of immigration and recommends five of the books on the subject that have most influenced her.
That America is “a nation of immigrants” was a point of patriotic pride in the latter part of the 20th century. Before becoming president, John F Kennedy introduced the phrase to common parlance in a 1958 book bearing that title. But the current president’s perspective is so different that his administration just struck the phrase from the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services’ mission statement. You’ve named five books which focus on the relationship between immigrants and the United States. Before we wade in, please preliminarily weigh in on whether the US is “a nation of immigrants.”
Immigrants have been fundamental to the United States. Their contributions should not be erased. Yet the term “nation of immigrants” expunges the histories of other groups from our national narrative. Not only does it ignore Native Americans and overshadows the history of settler colonialism but it also overlooks that not everyone who came to the United States did so willingly or as an immigrant. Slaves were forcibly transported to the United States; Mexican and Caribbean migrants were often brought as guest workers and allowed to labor here temporarily but were not considered immigrants who could remain in the country.
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It should be possible to talk about the importance of immigration to US history and the many contributions that immigrants made without erasing the histories of Native Americans, slaves, and migrant workers who helped build this country.
Undocumented Lives, your brilliant new book, details how 20th-century immigrants to America become caught between nations. I’d love to discuss it more at the end of our conversation but can you tell us about your research methods and approach before we begin?
In this book I was interested in capturing changes in polices and legislation in Mexico and the United States with regard to migration as well as the lives of migrants and their communities. Because traditional repositories still do not contain much pertaining to the experiences of undocumented workers, documenting their stories required creating and discovering new archives. I conducted over 250 oral history interviews with migrants and their communities on both sides of the border. I also examined the love letters, poems, and songs they wrote, the newspapers they published, and their organizations’ literature. Much of my research took place in private individuals’ garages and storerooms, as well as in the basement of the migrant-led welfare institution, La Casa del Mexicano. I explored the positions and policies of government officials by studying Congressional Hearings, conducting research at the US and Mexican national archives, and using the Freedom of Information Act to request files on US immigration policies and practices.
European Immigration to the United States is the subject of the book you recommend by Yale historian Matthew Jacobson. Tell us about Whiteness of a Different Color.
Whiteness of a Different Color explores how European immigrants who were considered to be of different races came to be understood as a “single, consanguine race of Caucasians.” Jacobson shows how the large influx of European immigrants that began in the 1840s led to internal divisions in the concept of ‘white people.’ New hierarchies emerged to classify distinct white races, which included Celts, Slavs, Hebrews, and Anglo-Saxons. In 1924, however, whiteness began to be reconstituted again with the passage of the Johnson–Reed Act. The new law dramatically curtailed immigration, which, in turn, led all ‘white people’ to be considered ‘Caucasian.’ This drift was further propelled by the Great Migration. As a growing number of black people fled the south and headed west and north, white people came to believe that they ought to focus on the black/white binary.
The idea that people of many nations meld together to become Americans—in just a generation—is almost as old as America itself. The Melting Pot, a 1908 play that celebrated assimilation, became the metaphor for America as a nation of amalgamated immigrants. Does Jacobson’s work extinguish this metaphor?
Jacobson’s work shows how despite the proliferation of anxieties about the Anglo-Saxon race being decimated because of the influx of inferior white races, in the years between the 1870s and the 1920s, US courts minimized the differences between “distinct white races.” Jacobson eloquently holds “whereas for some the phrase ‘white persons’ became the instrument of exclusion, for others it became a powerful crucible whose exclusions based upon distinctions of color blurred other potentially divisive physical distinctions, This, indeed, is the melting pot.”
“Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America” is the subtitle of Columbia University historian Mae Ngai’s Impossible Subjects. Please tell us about it.
Impossible Subjects explores the origins of the concept of the ‘illegal alien’ in the United States. Ngai begins her book by exploring the passage of the Johnson-Reed Act in 1924. While most historians have focused on how this law discriminated against Eastern and Southern Europeans, Ngai focuses on its effects on immigration from Asia and Mexico. The law, she argues, furthered the already existing process of Asian exclusion by barring East and South Asians from immigrating. Although the Act placed no limits on immigration from the Western Hemisphere, the US government enhanced immigration enforcement by also introducing the Border Patrol that same year. Because the Border Patrol was meant to police the entrance of migrants, its creation gave significance to the act of crossing the border illegally. As such, Ngai argues, Asians and Mexicans became impossible subjects “whose inclusion in the nation was at once a social reality and a legal impossibility.” Because Asian Americans and Mexican Americans were identified and treated as aliens despite their citizenship, they too experienced lives as impossible subjects.
Ngai focuses on immigration during the middle decades of the 20th century, when the American civil rights movement was coalescing. What is the relationship between the American civil rights movement and the American immigration system, if any?
The book concludes with the passage of the Hart-Celler Act. Although the Act has been long heralded as one of the liberal victories of the 1960s because it helped to repeal the system of national origins quotas, Ngai sheds light on another aspect of it: the law introduced for the first time numerical caps on the Western Hemisphere without taking into consideration Mexico’s longstanding migration to the United States. Thereafter, Latin Americans would find it much harder to migrate legally to the United States.
You’ve listed a book about the Japanese-American immigration experience. Please tell me about Between Two Empires and why it’s made your list.
Eiichiro Azuma’s book explores how before the Second World War, Japanese in the United States lived in a racialized in-between space, pulled by forces from both the United States and the empire of Japan. While most histories about Japanese migrants and Japanese Americans focus on Japanese internment, Between Two Empires explores the complicated loyalties, racial understandings, and national alliances that Japanese in the United States experienced. I consider it one of the most important histories of immigration because of Azuma’s chosen framework. Rather than focusing only on the pressures and experiences Japanese people faced in the United States, he also examines how they felt about and related to their homeland.
Eiichiro Azuma’s work seems to belong to an emerging field of academics – transnational history. What should we know about this field and its relationship to immigration?
Azuma’s work was one of the first to extend US migration history beyond the confines of the US nation-state. By being fluent in both Japanese and English and using archives located in both countries, Azuma is able to provide a compelling analysis of the lives of Japanese in the United States and to show how they were caught between two empires. Through this book Azuma modeled how to do this type of cross-border history that is associated with the transnational turn. Still, Azuma himself describes his work as “inter-National” rather than transnational so as not to lead readers to assume that Japanese immigrants were “free-floating cosmopolitans” who could “enjoy a postmodern condition above and beyond the hegemonic structures of state control.” The term “inter-National” Azuma argues, shows how interstitial structures affected the lives of immigrants.
David Gutiérrez traces one hundred years of the cross-pollination of Mexico and the United States. What will readers take away from reading it and why do you recommend it?
Walls and Mirrors is an exemplary book not only because it provides readers with a longue-durée of the history of Mexican migration, which most such studies do not provide, but also because of the author’s brilliant insights about the complex relationship between Mexican migrants and Mexican Americans. While many Americans see these groups as interchangeable, Gutiérrez demonstrates the complex and often hostile relationship that existed between them. Mexican Americans’ attitudes towards Mexican migrants, he shows, “often reveal more” about Mexican Americans’ “own sense of ethnic and political identity than about their feelings concerning the immigration debate.”
What is the metaphorical freight of its title,Walls and Mirrors?
Walls and mirrors refers to the “differences that divided and the commonalities that bound” Mexican Americans with Mexican immigrants. As I noted earlier, Mexican Americans often tried to distinguish themselves form Mexican migrants—they often tried to build walls between the two communities—but they sometimes saw mirrors.
What does Havana USA add to this conversation?
María Cristina García’s Havana USA shows how, as a result of Cuban migration, South Florida came to constitute a borderland area. García focuses on the first three great waves of Cuban migration to the United States following the Cuban Revolution. In doing so, she exposes the vast diversity in the Cuban community residing in the United States—a community that is often portrayed as monolithic. While Walls and Mirrors reveals how the Mexican and Mexican American communities were often divided, Havana USA demonstrates how the Cuban community faced internal divisions among exiles themselves.
What can we learn about the experience of Cuban exiles in the United States?
Havana USA demonstrates how Cubans were able to assimilate structurally into the United States while simultaneously forging a distinctive cultural identity. García demonstrates that unlike other immigrant groups, Cuban exiles received vast support from the federal government and nongovernmental organizations. This support allowed them to succeed economically and politically while creating a vibrant Cuban enclave in south Florida. In other words, the Cuban experience could provide a model of how federal and other support could help other migrants to incorporate into the nation and ensure their success.
What does your work reveal about how immigrants become caught between two nations with competing interests and how they can get out of the pincer of transnational politics?
Undocumented Lives: The Untold Story of Mexican Migration examines how unauthorized migration from Mexico to the United States became entrenched in the period between 1965 and 1986. At the outset, I argue, Mexican officials discouraged emigration, but by the 1970s, those same officials were encouraging the departures of working-class men as a solution to high unemployment and population growth. Simultaneously, the US government attempted to address these same problems by further fortifying the border and conducting more raids in Latina/o communities. Men from migrant communities also saw their permanent residence denied at the local level. When they resided in their hometowns in Mexico, their families and friends pressured them to head north to make money. Conversely, when they lived in their new cities and towns in the United States, their communities insisted that they return home.
“Migrants sought to affirm their own cartographies of belonging”
Migrants described their diminished capacity to belong in local and national spaces by describing themselves as being “neither from here nor from there” – “Ni de aquí ni de allá.” In this context, migrants sought to affirm their own cartographies of belonging. They unwittingly resisted the idea that they were superfluous in Mexico by becoming indispensable economic agents in their hometowns through the money they sent from abroad; they countered their illegality north of the border by establishing that undocumented migrants deserved constitutional rights; and they diminished the pressures enacted by their communities by reconfiguring the very meanings of community life. These actions provided them with partial inclusion in the multiple locales they lived, but only as migrants who lived, at least some of their time, in the United States. For their part, elderly Mexican men, along with women and queer men, commonly responded to dominant gender and sexual ideologies by remaining in Mexico and depending on foreign remittances to survive.
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In 1986, the US Congress passed the Immigration Reform and Control Act, making it more difficult to cross borders. By then, however, undocumented migration had already become a self-perpetuating phenomenon. In light of the new hardships of migration, many Mexican families decided to settle together in the United States and dared not return to Mexico for fear that they would not be able to get back into the United States. Rather than feeling “pushed” from all the spaces in which they resided, they now felt entrapped in the United States, which they referred to as the “Jaula de Oro,” or the Golden Cage.
Five Books aims to keep its book recommendations and interviews up to date. If you are the interviewee and would like to update your choice of books (or even just what you say about them) please email us at editor@fivebooks.com
Ana Raquel Minian is an Assistant Professor at Stanford University in the Department of History and the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity (CCSRE). Her latest book, Undocumented Lives: The Untold Story of Mexican Migration, explores the late-twentieth-century history of Mexican undocumented migration to the United States, the growth of migrant communities, and bi-national efforts to regulate the border.