Minorities on the Right
The presence of members of minority groups on the right poses a challenge in both understanding how they got there and discussing the matter with due sensitivity.
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This post is part of the ‘Research and Reflections’ occasional series, consisting of pieces based on my ongoing academic research, as well as on my musings on and responses to current affairs and personal developments.
Content warnings: Homophobia; Antisemitism; Anti-Asian racism; Anti-Black racism; Islamophobia; Child sexual abuse.
I was listening just this week to an episode of the excellent American podcast, Know Your Enemy – which provides an insightful and witty left-wing analysis of right-wing thought – about the writer and political activist Midge Decter, who died just last year. Born into a Minnesotan Jewish family in the 1920s, Decter was an influential promoter in the 1970s and 1980s of neoconservatism, which advocated from a traditionalist, moralising basis for retrenchment of the welfare state at home and the aggressive pursuit of US interests abroad and became the dominant ideological pillar of the Republican Party and the wider mainstream American right between the 1980s and the 2000s. In this episode, co-hosts Matt Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell and guests Moira Donegan and Adrian Daub discussed Decter’s trajectory from a vaguely held liberalism to the New Right, and the interplay between her experiences as a Jewish woman, the wider intellectual contexts of mid-20th century America, and her evolving politics.1
What was particularly interesting were their discussion of the moments where Decter’s own life circumstances might have provoked a recognition of the legitimacy of the political developments she instead loudly and hostilely rejected, such as Affirmative Action programmes; second-wave feminism; and gay liberation. Instead, she championed gratitude as an ideal personal quality, as a basis for her own identification with what someone else in her position might have deemed to be structures of oppression and their architects. Complicating this was her own reception of and reaction to prejudice from her fellow travellers on the right and her critics on the left.
In response to her lengthy, homophobic 1980 article ‘The Boys on the Beach’ for Jewish conservative magazine Commentary, in which she railed against the permissive gay scene developing on Fire Island in the state of New York, Gore Vidal the following year wrote a scathing piece for progressive publication The Nation entitled ‘Some Jews & the Gays’. Vidal lamented what he deemed to be the specificity of Jewish interpretations of their persecution, inhibiting their capacity for identification with other marginalised groups, such as gay people, and likened the logic of Decter’s writing to that of Hitler’s worldview, or The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. In doing so, he himself drew upon antisemitic tropes, while using Jewish experiences of oppression as the basis for setting a higher benchmark for their conduct as an ethnic and religious group to adhere to.
Diasporic conservatisms in Britain
It is not hard to see some parallels in contemporary British politics. Ipsos estimated that 64% of ‘Black and Minority Ethnic’ voters plumped for Labour at the 2019 general election, compared to 20% for the Conservatives. Yet it is the Conservatives who have had the highest profile breakthrough in representation of minorities holding high office in recent years, especially since the last election. The families of Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, former Home Secretary Priti Patel, and current Home Secretary Suella Braverman came to Britain from India via spells in different former British East African colonies. Former Home Secretary, and Chancellor, Sajid Javid, was born to Pakistani migrant parents, while another former Chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, is of Ghanaian extraction, and Kemi Badendoch, who is both Secretary of State for Business and Trade and Minister for Women and Equalities, of Nigerian descent. What is striking about all these politicians is their right-wing ideological zeal, whether for free-market economics, hardline restrictions on immigration, and/or biologically essentialist definitions of gender.
![Rishi Sunak makes a speech outside 10 Downing Street (Gareth Fuller/PA). Rishi Sunak makes a speech outside 10 Downing Street (Gareth Fuller/PA).](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa2f63747-6ad9-4563-a8af-cab6fe84b7ae_4944x3296.jpeg)
It is impossible to understand these politicians’ leanings without reference to the intersection between ethnicity and socioeconomic structures that connect Britain with its former colonies, and furthermore the political polarisation both between but also within different ethnic groups. It is unsurprising given the deep structural inequalities connecting class and race that people of colour in Britain tend to vote for an historically left-of-centre party with a track record of redistributionist economic policies and of anti-racist legislation, even if both have left something to be desired. Yet British rule abroad depended upon the co-option of some indigenous groups, often racially subcategorised, into intermediary positions with political and economic structures, and those routes of social mobility have also existed both into and through Britain as its own economy evolved from industrial to post-industrial.
Moreover, as I stressed in my last post, the politics of minoritised peoples – as with anyone – are not a direct outcome of their circumstances, but a conscious reflection upon them. It is not inevitable that just because someone has experienced racial prejudice based upon a particular characteristic, that their response to this would meaningfully translate into a more consistent antiracism that reached out in solidarity to other minorities, especially when there are substantial variations between their respective experiences. Nor would they necessarily understand a particular bundle of economic and social policies as the principal route to the prosperity of their or other ethnic groups.
Ugandan Asians and ‘model minority’ politics
By way of a more concrete example, let’s look at the case study of Ugandan Asians. Tens of thousands of labourers travelled across the Indian Ocean to East Africa from the 1890s to work in railway construction, followed by a larger contingent of Indian migrants seeking to take advantage of the emerging economic opportunities in the region.2 Though denied opportunities in political administration dominated by White Britons, they were still able to form an influential commercial middle class who generally enjoyed a higher standard of living than the Black majority. However, their position was complicated by the break-up of the British Empire and establishment of new independent East African Asian states.3
In the case of Uganda, Africanisation policies pursued by Milton Obote during the 1960s curtailed their economic freedoms and privileges, and then in 1972 dictator Idi Amin forcefully expelled the country’s Indian minority. Some 28,000 refugees arrived in Britain, their reception eased – despite hostility from some elements of the press and political class – by their positive representation both as helpless refugees and as a solidly middle-class group with much to offer.4 They settled predominantly in London and the East Midlands, and demonstrated strong upward socioeconomic mobility, owing to the existing pool of skills and ambitions they drew upon, and the strong social networks they formed in their new country.5
![Ugandan Asian refugees, at Stradishall reception centre, near Newmarket, in Suffolk, September 1972. They are some of the 27,000 Ugandan Asians to... Ugandan Asian refugees, at Stradishall reception centre, near Newmarket, in Suffolk, September 1972. They are some of the 27,000 Ugandan Asians to...](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fedb682f8-e452-47dc-9de2-c304cefd0554_612x436.jpeg)
In some ways, this group’s story seems ripe for a right-wing telling of it: a model minority, grateful to the country – and its Conservative government of the time – who welcomed them in, and who succeeded by way of hard work and family values, in the face of trying circumstances; a story that works providing you erase the privileges they also enjoyed relative to other migrant groups. Priti Patel, whose family relocated to Britain from Uganda before she was born, is a case in point. In her three years as Home Secretary, she initiated plans for offshore processing of asylum seekers and routinely criticised the Black Lives Matter movement and associated gestures such as taking the knee. Writing for the London Review of Books in 2022, the lawyer and writer Sadakat Kadri accused Patel – and positive media profiles of her – of perpetuating a mythical version of her own family history, in which her parents had fled persecution and came to Britain with nothing, when they had in fact migrated over in the 1960s, before the expulsion order, and she herself had enjoyed a financially secure upbringing. He argued that Patel drew upon this myth to legitimise her own hardline policies towards migrants and refugees, and to discriminate between those ‘deserving’ and ‘underserving’ of being welcomed and supported by Britain.
Yet there have also been high-profile Ugandan Asians within British public life who have pursued very different politics, centred upon building connections between groups in the face of oppression, and challenging racism they perceive in their own communities. Rafaat Mughal arrived from Uganda in Britain in 1972 with her husband and two sons. She went on to become a Labour councillor in the North London borough of Haringey, and in 1989 formed the JAN Trust to provide minoritised women within the area with the skills and support they needed to redress their exclusion. Her son Fiyaz Mughal likewise had a spell on Haringey Council, albeit as a Liberal Democrat, and has established charities including the anti-Islamophobia hotline Tell MAMA, interfaith organisation Faith Matters, and Muslims Against Antisemitism. Another example is the journalist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, whose writing has criticised both the persistence of racism in Britain, but also the anti-Blackness and patriarchy she witnessed within Indian society in Kampala before 1972.6
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The challenges of critiquing minorities on the right
Critiquing minority ethnic politicians for their part in perpetuating racism comes with a set of challenges that brings us back full circle to Midge Decter and Gore Vidal. Politicians whose own families migrated to Britain and who now seek to exclude migrants seem guilty, on a very basic, almost pre-political level, of hypocrisy. Likewise, when they draw upon their own experiences as minoritised people in discussions around racism, when this seems to sit so uneasily with what they otherwise say and do, and to elide advantages they may have held, it is equally tempting to deride them as insincere, and acting in bad faith. As for their role in the broader right, we might question the real value of apparent growing diversity on the Conservative government’s front bench, when gaining representation is only achievable if you espouse and implement policies that ostensibly are neither in the interests of nor favoured by most minority ethnic Britons.
Yet when the assertion that Patel’s – and her successor Suella Braverman’s – parents would not have been allowed to settle in the UK under the rules they have implemented is offered as a gotcha (see below), it relies on the same value that Decter prioritised above others: gratitude. Should politicians from minority backgrounds be grateful that their families were able to come to Britain, and to have received the opportunity to rise through the ranks in British national life, and is it a sign of ingratitude if they do not reciprocate to newer arrivals? Is this not by its very nature a standard we cannot hold White British politicians to, and thereby demand a higher level of righteousness and tolerance from others on the very grounds of their own marginalisation, just as Vidal expected from Jews when it came to gay men? Does that risk further ensconcing the very racial hierarchies we are supposedly trying to dismantle?
There is also the matter of challenging the legitimacy they lend to a broader politics of exclusion and oppression. An effective critique of their role should demonstrate how they are ultimately serving the interests of White supremacy, but also stress the agency and expertise they deploy in doing so, however malignly, and not just paint them as tokens or pawns or dupes. Where an individual publicly espouses views that are not broadly held within an ethnic group they belong to and identify with, and are seemingly detrimental towards their interests, how do we delegitimise them as a political actor and as a representative of their ethnic group, without delegitimising their status as a member of that group? And perhaps even more difficult is when they do seem to represent a broader tendency within a particular diasporic community, towards another form of ethnic or racial supremacism (though often in alliance or overlapping with White supremacism) that features bigotry towards and persecution of another group as a core feature. How do we discuss this type of racism ‘problem’ in individual communities in a way that captures its specifics in each case but is also proportionate and does not stereotype or stigmatise the whole community in the process?
This all raises a further set of ethical questions: who gets to make what criticism and how, and in front of which audiences? Do left-wing members of ethnic majorities in Western countries have a right to be angry specifically at the hypocrisy of people from minority backgrounds punching down? Is there an obligation on peoples from minority groups to speak with nuance and restraint when discussing the individual or collective words and actions of members of other minority groups that are harmful to their own? Or does the imperative of communal self-protection trump caution over not speaking in ways that might foment or amplify racist stereotyping of those who have done it to them?
The challenges of critiquing racism from within minority groups
We may also recognise the right to and need for absolute candidness and by people from minority groups to talk about individuals or wider tendencies in their group that they consider do harm within and beyond it. Yet with that comes the risk of perpetuating and recycling tropes that stigmatise and invite the exclusion and oppression of sections of that group, or the group as a whole – especially when their audience stretches well beyond it. Indeed, this is often a tendency clearly visible in the rhetoric of minority figures on the right in addressing a broader audience. One might think of when Sajid Javid – then Home Secretary – described a Huddersfield grooming gang as ‘sick Asian paedophiles’ on Twitter in 2018, or the Jewish journalist and biographer Tom Bower calling another Jewish journalist Michael Segalov a ‘self-hating Jew’ on Good Morning Britain in 2019 for supporting Jeremy Corbyn.
Yet left- or liberal-leaning commentators from minority backgrounds can also run the risk of doing similar work when calling out examples of individual and collective prejudice among members of the groups they belong to. Last year, in a Guardian article marking the 50th anniversary of the expulsion of Asians from Uganda, Fiyaz Mughal contrasted the willingness of Ted Heath’s Conservative government to allow families like his own to escape to Britain with the far more restrictive approach of the current incumbents, singling out the culpability of Priti Patel and emphasising her own Ugandan Asian heritage as making her approach to refugees especially heinous. In writing such a piece for the Guardian, with its overwhelmingly White, middle-class audience, does Mughal potentially reinforce a dichotomy between grateful and ungrateful migrants in the White liberal imagination?
Furthermore, in his capacity as a founder of Muslims Against Antisemitism, Mughal has written regularly for the Jewish Chronicle on the role of some Muslims in peddling hatred of Jews and the complicity of others in ignoring or denying this component of their religion’s history and present – most recently here. Yet in writing articles like this, does Mughal present Jewish readers with an image of Muslims as especially prone to antisemitism, and as a threat to them, which he as a by contrast good Muslim is willing to be honest with them about? In the process, does he lend legitimacy to an unabashed Islamophobe like Melanie Phillips, who also writes for the Jewish Chronicle? Whatever his intentions of promoting interfaith dialogue and tolerance, can he be held responsible for the way his work is received by readers, or for the other writers and viewpoints platformed by the same publication?
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These are vital questions to bear in mind when discussing and analysing instances of racist politics deployed by members of minority groups, whether as renegade individuals or potentially more representative samples. To return full circle again, it is why I particularly like the character study as an approach to addressing the apparent paradox of members of otherwise oppressed groups nonetheless reinforce the language and structures of oppression more generally, as in the example of Know Your Enemy’s episode on Midge Decter. It is an invaluable tool for posing those questions and getting some answers to them. It enables us to understand how reactionary ideologies evolve over the course of the lives of those who hold them. It allows us to see the complex interaction between someone’s contexts and experiences and the agency they still have in developing their worldview, without falling into the trap of reductive generalisations about wider groups they belong to. It requires that we recognise people’s humanity as well as their prejudice, not for the sake of excusing the latter, but rather paying attention to and guarding against our own common fallibility.
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Donegan and Daub are themselves co-hosts of the Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University’s podcast, In Bed with the Right.
On migration from India to East Africa and more broadly, see: David Northrup, ‘Migration from Africa, Asia, and the South Pacific’, in Andrew Porter (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire: Volume III: The Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 88–100; and Stephen Constantine, ‘Migrants and Settlers’, in Judith M. Brown and Wm. Roger Louis (eds.), The Oxford History of the British Empire: Volume IV: The Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 163–187.
On the Asian experience in East Africa, and in Uganda more specifically, see: Meir Amor, ‘Violent Ethnocentrism: Revisiting the Economic Interpretation of the Expulsion of Ugandan Asians’, Identity: An International Journal of Theory and Research, Vol. 3, No. 1 (2003), pp. 53–66; Holger Bernt Hansen, ‘Uganda in the 1970s: A Decade of Paradoxes and Ambiguities’, Journal of Eastern African Studies, Vol. 7, No. 1 (2013), 83–103; John Mattausch, ‘From Subjects to Citizens: British ‘East African Asians’’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Vol. 24, No. 1 (1998), pp. 121–141; Chrispas Nyombi and Ronald Kaddu, ‘Migration and Economic Development: The Case of Ugandan Asians’, SSRN Electronic Journal (2015), DOI: 10.2139/ssrn.2645079; Edgar Curtis Taylor, ‘Asians and Africans in Ugandan Urban Life, 1959–1972’ (PhD thesis, University of Michigan, 2016).
On the British government’s response to the 1972 expulsion, and Ugandan Asian refugees’ reception in Britain, see: Sara Cosemans, ‘Undesirable British East African Asians: Nationality, Statelessness, and Refugeehood after Empire’, Immigrants & Minorities: Historical Studies in Ethnicity, Migration and Diaspora, Vol. 40, Nos. 1–2 (2022), pp. 210–239; Yumiko Hamai, ‘‘Imperial Burden’ or ‘Jews of Africa’?: An Analysis of Political and Media Discourse in the Ugandan Asian Crisis (1972)’, Twentieth Century British History, Vol. 22, No. 3 (2011), pp. 415–436; Becky Taylor, ‘Good Citizens? Ugandan Asians, Volunteers and ‘Race’ Relations in 1970s Britain’, History Workshop Journal, Vol. 85 (2018), pp. 120–141; Chibuike Uche, ‘The British Government, Idi Amin and the Expulsion of British Asians’, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Vol. 19, No. 6 (2017), pp. 818–836
On the longer term Ugandan Asian experience in Britain, see: Jake Anders, Simon Burgess, and Jonathan Portes, ‘The Long-Term Outcomes of Refugees: Tracking the Progress of the East African Asians’, Journal of Refugee Studies, Vol. 34, No. 2 (2021), pp. 1967–1998; Vaughan Robinson, ‘Marching into the Middle Classes? The Long-term Resettlement of East African Asians in the UK’, Journal of Refugee Studies, Vol. 6, No. 3 (1993), pp. 230–247; R. R. Valeny, ‘From Pariah to Paragon?: The Social Mobility of Ugandan Asian Refugees in Britain’ (PhD Thesis, University of Wales Swansea, 1999).
See Felicity Hand, ‘‘Picking up the Crumbs of England’: East African Asians in Yasmin Alibhai-Brown’s Autobiographies’, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Vol. 53, No. 1 (2018), pp. 61–77.