The United States of Fear

 IN HIS BESTSELLING 2021 book Why We Kneel, How We Rise, legendary cricketer Michael Holding wrote: “I remember the summer in 1976, England, when letters would come to the dressing room for us players, with racist messages. ‘Go back home, crawl back to the trees.’”

The guilt in liberal societies today is palpable. So is the fear. What if power one day slips from the West to the Rest? Would brown and black people in Asia and Africa do to white people in America and Europe what white people did to them during centuries of slavery and colonialism?

Holding, widely regarded as one of the greatest fast bowlers of all time, was nicknamed “whispering death” for his silent run-up to the bowling crease. Holding played in 60 Tests, for the match-winning West Indies team in the 1970s and 1980s, ending his career with 249 Test wickets.

Growing up in Jamaica, a former British slave colony, Holding was shocked at the racism he encountered in England and Australia as both a first-time visitor and player.

Why are Holding’s views important today? Britain, historically one of the world’s most racist countries, has made a determined effort to reform. It takes pride in racial inclusivity. Dozens of mayors across Britain are brown, black, Muslim, Hindu, and Sikh. The leader of the opposition Conservative Party, Kemi Badenoch, is black. A former British Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, is brown.

Racism in today’s Britain is socially and culturally unacceptable. But of course, as everyone knows, racism had just gone underground, locked away from public view for the shame it brings upon racists in a liberal, progressive society.

But the racist genie can’t stay locked up in a bottle for long. In Britain and the rest of Europe, the influx of coloured immigrants has allowed the genie to leap out of hiding, helping Britain’s anti-immigrant Reform Party, led by Nigel Farage, to lead both Labour and Conservatives in opinion polls.

In Britain and most of Europe, you can’t be racist but you can be anti-immigrant. The fact that most immigrants, legal and illegal, are non-white is a minor detail that attracts no social shame.

Britain, France, Spain, the Netherlands and Portugal, Europe’s principal seafaring colonial powers, feel a sense of guilt for their role in slavery and colonialism. That is why a generation of Europeans at first welcomed non-white immigrants. It wasn’t only altruism. Blue-collar workers were needed for jobs white Europeans no longer wanted to do.

Britain, which built the world’s largest empire based on violence against indigenous people of North America, Australia and the Indian subcontinent, was the first to embrace inclusivity. Of London’s 8.5 million people today, just 37 per cent are white British. Cities like Leicester and Birmingham are already white-minority.

The guilt of Empire has given way to the fear: If they had the power, would they do to us what we did to them? The fear has not only consumed politics in Europe but has done so more violently across the Atlantic. In Western Europe, guilt still moderates extreme racist reactions.

Not so in the US. The Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement that propelled Donald Trump to the White House twice is code for Make America White Again. Unlike Europe, racism in America is open and violent. It carries no social stigma.

The surge in racist violence is driven by the fear among white Americans that their country will be swamped by non-white immigrants, making the US a white-minority country by 2050. They are right. By 2050, the population of non-Hispanic white Americans is estimated to fall below 50 per cent for the first time in 400 years since Europeans colonised America.

The Trump administration wears its racist, white-first policies as a badge of honour. It promises safe haven in the US to white South African Afrikaaners who are a throwback to the Apartheid regime. At the same time, it cuts aid to black university students and orders public institutions and libraries to scrub all reminders of the horrors of slavery and massacres of Native Americans.

For Trump and MAGA, the guilt for America’s founding barbarity is all but gone. But pockets of fear remain. Will they, if they have the power, do to us what we did to them?