Dr Ali Meghji: Critical race theory is essentially about structural racism
“It helps us to understand, for instance, that the reason why BAME people are dying from COVID is not because a ‘race gene’ but because their overrepresentation in factors such as air pollution, poverty, and un/underemployment. It helps us to see that around half of Black and Pakistani children are living in poverty. It helps us to see how BAME people continue to be disproportionately represented in elite higher education. It helps us, simply to see these structural factors of racism, and how this inequality is reproduced over time”
Dr Ali Meghji is a Lecturer in Social Inequalities, having completed a research fellowship at Sidney Sussex College, a visiting fellowship at Harvard’s Weatherhead Centre, and a PhD, MPhil, and BA in sociology at Cambridge. Currently, Ali’s predominant research interests lie in bridging the differences between critical race theory and decolonial thought, though which Ali aims to balance the study of national racialized social systems with the global process of coloniality.
Having completed your BA, MPhil and PhD in sociology from Cambridge with a visiting fellowship at the Harvard Weatherhead Centre, what drew you to the study of critical race theory and decolonial thought, particularly comparatively when it comes to British and American society?
I was definitely interested in critical race theory prior to 2016, but the Trump-Brexit double-whammy did send some sparks going. Both events were coupled with discourses around ‘increasing levels of racism’ in both the United States and Britain. As someone who was already interested in critical race theory, I thought it was quite odd that we think of society becoming ‘more racist’ - as if racism is something that can solely be measured through individual speech acts and hate crimes. For me, the Brexit-Trump phenomenon was more of a symptom of structural racism rather than a cause of it. The racist xenophobia garnered in the Brexit campaign, for instance, was not new by any means, and had indeed been mainstreamed through Thatcherism decades ago (as Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy write about very well). Similarly, the narratives of white victimhood and the devaluation of ‘ordinary whites’ which Trump built his campaign around also stemmed from a decades-old backlash against civil rights legislation - as Kimberlé Crenshaw and Derrick Bell have written about. So critical race theory was very much a way of entering into these topical events that did not reduce them to being isolated happenings but connected them to the workings of structural racism.
But as you say, I also have this interest in decolonial thought. Ironically, that very much stemmed from what I found to be the inability of critical race theory to really get into analytical depth when it came to transnational, historically embedded social processes. Critical race theory is very much geared towards studying racism and racial hierarchy as it becomes embodied at the level of the nation state, and it is great at looking at specific racial structures, ideologies, emotions, and grammars in that locale. But for all of these processes which are so connected to the logic of coloniality - from the climate crisis’ origins in colonial extractivist capitalism, through to the current global vaccine apartheid and division of global labour - I needed to turn to a style of thought which was built for the study of such transnational, historically embedded phenomena. Thus why I turned to decolonial thought, still with one foot in critical race theory, and attempted to develop a ‘both and’ approach to these two theories.
Concepts like critical race theory and decolonial thought are tightly woven into the fabric of modern society in the public and personal domain. Did you seek to satisfy any personal questions when delving into this line of work?
I would not say that I was drawn to critical race theory or decolonial thought due to personal reasons or questions. However, I do not think either of these paradigms are purely scholastic - they both stem from the world(s) that are being forged across the world and it is impossible for any of us to do research in a separate world to the one in which we live. I am descended from people who were colonized by the British, just in the same way that I live in a racial hierarchy where I am construed as racially subdominant. But at the same time, the questions I am interested in investigating in my research - namely, at the moment, world crises - I do not find myself using autobiography as a primary mechanism of analysis. People such as W.E.B Du Bois, however, have shown how autobiography can be a powerful tool for anti-colonial, anti-racist analysis, so I do not wish to demean this method.
Your proposal of theoretical synergy in your most recent article, Towards a theoretical synergy: Critical Race Theory and decolonial thought in Trumpamerica and Brexit Britain aims to merge various schools of social thought in order to derive more apt theories and conclusions about the makeup of society. What do you think is the intrinsic value of approaching such sociological questions from theoretically pluralistic standpoint?
This call for a synergy for me is tackling two things. On the one hand, I am speaking particularly around the conflation we have seen between critical race theory and decolonial thought in political, academic, and public discourse. They are, of course, both critical knowledge projects attempting to speak and go beyond sets of power relations, but they do so in quite different ways. Critical race theory is very much geared towards studying racism at a national level, as it appears in the here and now. To such scholars, reducing racism to being a legacy of colonialism downplays how it serves a contemporary function to benefit the racially dominant, and how this dominant group therefore maintains an interest in reproducing it. By contrast, decolonial thought is - foundationally - about studying how the power relations born in colonialism outlived the demise of colonial administrations. Decolonial thought is thus really geared towards transnational analysis looking at how the West continues to dominate the ‘rest’.
Secondly, for me, it is quite peculiar to think of theories as needing to be theories of everything. If you think of theories as maps, you can see that different theories can be more or less useful in particular moments, and achieve particular things. If one were to come to London and wished to travel around via the underground/subway, then they may want a map of the underground routes. However, if they wanted to travel around via a car, they may prefer a map of the roads. Perhaps they would like to walk around and see the sights - in which case a map of the walkways and main attractions would be appropriate. In each of these cases, it is not the case that any of the maps are ‘more true’, but they simply allow for different things to be known in a way that is more or less practical depending on the person’s objectives. This is the same logic that applies to theorizing. We can admit that a theory has limitations without saying that the theory is ‘false’ or not useful - and this is where the call for synergy between different traditions comes from. It very much stems from the practice of pluriversality, advocated by the Zapatistas, to create ‘a world in which many worlds fit’. There is room for more than one epistemology.
You write that “it is not necessary for the sociology of race to adopt [this] transnational or historical approach, nor decolonial thought’s focus on imperial and colonial relations” offering that CRT and decolonial thought actually suffer from some level of contention. How then do we derive any sociological meaning of race that is separate from transnationality? Is not the concept of race a social construction borne of transnational relations?
Yes, I completely agree that race was borne via transnational relations - specifically, those relations of colonial domination and enslavement starting in 1492. And importantly, I do not think that any sociology of race would deny that race was originally constructed as a transnational phenomenon. However, that quote you are asking about speaks particularly to the conflation between a general sociology of race with decolonial studies - the conflation I alluded to above. Decolonial studies necessitates a transnational analysis, a general sociology of race does not. Let me illustrate this with an example of one thinker - W.E.B. Du Bois. Du Bois co-founded the Atlanta Sociological Laboratory in the late 1800s. All of the sociological research it published was concentrated on problems facing inner-city Black Americans in health, education, religion, economics, and so on. All of this research was produced via sociological methods, and all of this research was certainly formative of a sociology of race. However, compare this to some of Du Bois’ other works. For instance, in The World and Africa Du Bois looks at the anti-colonial alliances between Haitian Revolutionaries and Black folks in the United States; in The status of colonialism Du Bois writes about how Western capitalism still exploits the Global South for labour and resources despite supposed ‘independence’ of former colonies; in Black Reconstruction, Du Bois ties the labour of the enslaved in the United States to the workings of the whole global economic system; and in Gandhi and American Negroes he ties links between Black anti-racism in the United States with anti-colonialism in India. These works all speak to transnational connections that are not necessarily apparent or investigated in that work in the Atlanta School; this is why it can remain important to separate out decolonial studies from a general sociology of race.
You write that there is “a belief in sociology that a theory must be a ‘theory of everything’, and that if a theoretical paradigm cannot explain something, then it either needs to be revised through synthesis or simply thrown away.” Why do you think there is a desire to have a singular sociological theories?
I think this desire for a theory to be a theory of everything is not typical to sociology, but is a symptom of the desire for Western universalism more broadly. Born in colonialism from 1492, Western social thought has regularly attempted to produce theories that are supposed to be theories of everything. Indeed, the systems of racial classification (themselves created to legitimise colonial rule), for instance, introduced from 1492, were all indicative of the Western desire to have knowledge of all the world’s populations. This desire for the theory of everything accelerated through the scientific revolution and European Enlightenment, and swept in its movement not just the natural science but the social sciences, human sciences, and arts and humanities more broadly. The 19th century got a series of ‘universal’ theories of world history and development - from Hegel through to Marx - but all of these theories tended to exclude any analysis of the worlds that did not fit into the developed theoretical models (for Hegel - Africa, for Marx - ‘the Asiatic world’). So I think when we are criticising the ethics of a ‘theory of everything’ we are not just criticising sociology, but a general spirit of Western universalism. This spirit of Western universalism often boils down to a belief that if some kind of theory can understand ‘Europe’ or ‘The West’ in a particular way - often bifurcated from its colonial connections - then the theory simply is universally true. Critiquing the notion of a ‘theory of everything’ is thus critiquing the possibility of having universal theories, while also critiquing how that universalism has always been applied in parochial ways when it comes to Western universalism.
In your article you focus on Brexit Britain and Trumpamerica’s “reference to imagined national histories”. What do you think that these nostalgia-centred campaigns appeal to specifically?
These nostalgia campaigns both make reference to these imagined histories where Britain and the United States - respectively - were leading super-powers, praised in all corners of the globe for keeping world order and maintaining democracy. It is the kind of portrayal of history that has led to Boris Johnson recently claiming things like: ‘Our country is a freedom loving country […] if you look at our country over the past three hundred years, virtually every advance, from free speech to democracy has come from this country.’ A similar logic was seen in the Trump campaigns, indeed, with his first successful election itself being based around evoking a historical past in saying ‘Make America Great Again’. Trump’s rhetoric in such campaigns built around this idea of the United States going from a superpower to a dumping ground, in his own words: ‘Our country is in serious trouble […] We don’t have victories anymore […] They’re laughing at us, at our stupidity […] The US has become a dumping ground for everybody else’s problems.’
What these imagined histories do - and people like Meghan Tinsley write about this very well - is they garner emotional bonds between particular social groups, while excluding others, through forging quite clouded narratives of what the past really involved. When Boris Johnson claims that Britain was at the forefront of developing free speech and democracy, this is diametrically opposed to - from the many examples I could pick - British use of concentration camps in the Boer war and suppression of the Mau Mau rebellion. When Trump declares that the US is the ‘the greatest fighting force for peace, justice, and freedom, in the history of the world’, this overlooks all of those in US imperial territories where the US is seen as opposite to that same vision Trump is advocating! But despite these productions of history actually being very false accounts of history, they manage to bind people together nonetheless in a shared sense of belonging to this great imperial ‘superpower’.
Why do you feel that some ethnic minorities resonate with these ‘imagined history’ narratives?
Without a doubt you see some minorities go along with these productions of history which portray imperialism and colonialism as relatively ‘good’ things. But this is by no means a new phenomenon. As people like Stuart Hall have pointed out, hegemony - and the maintenance of power - requires the dominant group to make some concessions and to incorporate some of the subdominant into the ‘power bloc’ in order to make their rule seem more democratic. That is why, for instance, you currently see a very diverse cabinet in British parliament, while that same government are deepening structural racism more than any other government in my lifetime. Even in the colonial era itself, in India, for instance, the British empire were central in producing the myth of caste and Brahmin supremacy, so there was already an alliance between an ‘interior elite’ and an exterior colonial power that was formed there. The Brahmin experience of colonialism was thus very different to other Indians’ experiences of the same social process.
In a lecture you gave on January of 2019, the Reflections on the History of Sociology, you mentioned that in the 19th century, US sociology schools were already quite well-established by the time that the sociological intelligentsia was forming in the UK. Do you think that this has any bearing on how race is approached both socially and politically in both countries?
I do not think that it necessarily influenced how race was approached in both countries. Indeed, early US sociologists - like Fitzhugh - were using sociology to justify racism, whether that be to justify the policy of segregation in the South or to justify the idea that there were different hierarchically organised races which were distinct in terms of biology and civilization. But this very idea of race that US sociologists were reproducing itself stemmed from European (including British scholarship). Charles Darwin, in The Descent of Man, for instance, explicitly tied his theory of evolution to human populations when he said that the savage and civilized races were inherently at different stages of biological and cultural development. On the flipside, critical sociologists of race in the US - such as Du Bois - also travelled internationally, as did critical sociologists of race elsewhere. So Du Bois came to the UK just as Claudia Jones went to the US. This meant that there was a critical engagement of sociologists of race between different international contexts which greatly benefitted anti-racist, anti-colonial social movements.
What do you think are the motivations behind the rejection of critical race theory by political bodies as an apt way of understanding race relations particularly in the UK?
I think there is a mixture of things going on in this rejection of critical race theory. On the one hand, there is simply a misunderstanding of what critical race theory actually is! So when the equalities minister, Kemi Badenoch, claimed that the government stand unequivocally against critical race theory, she described it as a Marxist ideology which holds that all white people are racist and all Black people are victims. But this is not what critical race theory says, and neither is there a definitive relation between Marxism and critical race theory (indeed, many of the critics of critical race theory are themselves Marxists who say it is not grounded enough in historical materialism!).
Similarly, commentators such as Laurence Fox stated: ‘Let’s call Critical Race theory by its real name. Modern Racism. It’s organised and it’s scary’ while journalist Guy Birchall exclaimed that ‘The type of people that whine about endemic white supremacy, critical race theory and “decolonising” things fundamentally dislike Britain and Western culture.’ So in all these understandings of critical race theory, there is in fact an absence of any understanding at all. Critical race theory is essentially about structural racism, and the way racial inequality is built into the very way that society works. It helps us to understand, for instance, that the reason why BAME people are dying from COVID is not because a ‘race gene’ but because their overrepresentation in factors such as air pollution, poverty, and un/underemployment (where they are consequently unable to work from home during a pandemic where staying at home is the only social policy the UK have really enforced). It helps us to see that around half of Black and Pakistani children are living in poverty. It helps us to see how BAME people continue to be disproportionately represented in elite higher education. It helps us, simply to see these structural factors of racism, and how this inequality is reproduced over time. Nowhere is there a mention in critical race theory that all whites are evil. So it does seem like the attack on critical race theory from the UK-right is very much stemming from a clamping down of critical speech which unearths that Great Britain is not really that great after all.
For those who want to get started on critical race theory and decolonial thought, what are your top book/resource recommendations?
For critical race theory, I love the work of Eduardo Bonilla-Silva. He has written very many accessible books and papers, and I would recommend his book ‘Racism without racists’. For decolonial thought, I would of course like to recommend my recent book Decolonizing Sociology, but one of the texts that inspired me in this area would be Walter Mignolo’s The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options.
How would you describe the role of sociology in today’s increasingly globalised society?
A lot of the world’s leading revolutionaries were social scientists; most of them were intellectuals. There is a rising anti-intellectualism which paints academia as this space cut off from the rest of the world, where academics are isolated in ivory towers. Yes, this picture is quite accurate for some pockets of academia. But the fact of the matter is that it does not have to be this way, and that there is great potential for the academy to be at the forefront of social movements for equality and justice just like it was in the past. Even BlackLivesMatter was first tweeted by a sociologist - Professor Marcus Anthony Hunter at UCLA - before the term became popularised. Sociology encourages us to think about social structures, how they are formed and reproduced, and it is a discipline that is therefore well geared to tackle social inequalities. This should not be taken for granted - sociology has indeed played a role in reproducing inequalities itself - but there is potential for this discipline to be transformative and we should focus on that potential. There does not have to be a binary between good scholarship and socially engaged scholarship.