Book of the Week: White Identities: An Historical and International Introduction

Alastair Bonnett, Routledge, 1997

Reviewed by Scott Hamilton

Jimmy Corry lives, or rather lived, on Lendrick Street, in Protestant East Belfast. On the night of June the 9th a mob waving Union Jacks and Loyalist paramilitary banners ran down the street, smashing the windows of homes and cars. Corry's car was parked outside his house. Someone broke its windows, poured petrol in, and dropped a match. The fire grew quickly, then leaped the gap between the car and Corry's broken front window.

The next morning Corry gave an interview outside the black shell of his home. He pointed out that the rioters had gone onto the streets after an African migrant had stabbed a white Protestant man. They had targeted the homes of a series of non-white Belfasters. But Corry was upset the rioters had destroyed his house. The mob was, he said, 'picking on its own'. Some locals commenting on social media alleged that Corry himself had been on the street with the mob hours before his house was attacked.

After Corry's interview began to circulate something interesting happened. He lost his racial status. Instead of admittedly the thugs had made a mistake, many far right accounts on twitter and facebook denounced Corry as non-white. Some claimed he looked Middle Eastern. Others said he deserved what he got because he lived amongst migrants. Still others reverted to a nineteenth century prejudice. They claimed he looked like a 'degenerate', who lived on welfare and was addicted to drugs.

Jimmy Corry's 'demotion' from the white race was a reminder of how irrational racial categories are, and how porous the concept of whiteness has always been. For decades Alastair Bonnett of Northumbria University has been studying the evolution of the concept, and the reasons for its instability. His book White Identities was published in 1997, but it is essential reading for anyone wanting to make sense of the populist, far right politics that have been such a feature of the second and third decades of the twenty-first centuries.

Bonnett has supplemented White Identities with a series of papers and articles, many of which can be accessed via his account at Academia.edu. 

Bonnett explains that, in Britain, whiteness was once a quality associated only with the aristocracy. The term blue-blooded harks back to the time when royals were believed to have especially pale skins. The term white was only slowly extended to other groups. Throughout the nineteenth century many racial thinkers considered not only 'Celts' but working class Britons to be non-white. 

John Beddoe's pseudo-scientific but very influential book The Races of Britain insisted on the mental as well as physical differences between the 'Celtic' and 'Anglo-Saxon' races. For Beddoe and many others, groups like the Irish and Highland Scots had more in common with Africans than English.

The new working class crowded into squalid parts of Britain's cities was also frequently contrasted with an Anglo-Saxon ideal. 'I did not know the working class was so white!' the aristocratic George Curzon exclaimed when he was making a tour of the trenches during World War One. Soldiers had hung out their washing during a lull in fighting, and were going about topless.

One of Bonnett's arguments touches painfully on Aotearoan history. He claims that the new 'scientific' racism of the nineteenth century found its fiercest form in British colonies like Australia and New Zealand. Confronted by militant indigenous opposition to their claims on land and resources, settlers turned to misreadings of Darwin and to nakedly racist texts like the Races of Britain to reinforce their belief in their own superiority. Their polemics were reproduced in newspapers and books in the home country, helping radicalise racial views.

Bonnett's argument about racial militancy on the frontier fits with what we know about the worldviews of nineteenth century settlers. While a minority of those settlers—missionaries like Octavius Hadfield, campaigning journalists like 'Carbuncle Jack' Williamson, and Fenians like Michael O'Connor—opposed racism and land theft, and paid a price for it, the dominant faction amongst the settlers was loudly and proudly racist.

For nineteenth century premiers like Alfred Domett and Harry Atkinson, Darwin's Origin of Species offered a 'scientific' justification for conquest and theft. When Domett proclaimed that Māori needed to be 'ruled with an iron rod' he believed that he had Darwin on his side. And many settler leaders had influential friends back in Britain, with whom they corresponded enthusiastically. Domett, for example, was a friend of Robert Browning, and remained in contact with him during his decades in New Zealand. His letters denouncing Māori and upholding colonialism as a right and duty circulated amongst England's literary elite.

Bonnett shows how the eugenics movement that flourished in the early decades of the twentieth century was motivated partly by a belief that degenerate, non-white qualities continued to lurk in the British 'race'. Disabled, alcoholic, mentally ill, and indigent whites were likened to members of 'inferior' races.

In the twenty-first century a number of Aotearoan scholars have documented the strength of the eugenics movement here. Eugenics gave us the Mental Defectives Amendment Act of 1928, which aimed to prevent the pollution of the national gene pool by isolating those deemed defective in mental asylums. Sir Truby King founded the Plunket Society because he wanted to protect the 'health of the race' by improving antenatal and postnatal care for babies and mothers. Cora Wilding's Sunlight League was inspired by her two favourite societies, Nazi Germany and ancient Sparta. It tried to 'strengthen' working class kids from the cities by putting them in barracks-like camps and giving them sunburn and endless exercise.

The instability of racial categories meant that entire nations could suddenly become non-white. After the beginning of World War One, New Zealand newspapers began to refer to Germans to 'Mongolians' 'Hun', and the 'Red Indians of Europe'. On the last night of 1914 a Gisborne crowd rioted, attacking businesses whose proprietors had German-sounding names. 

The recategorisation of Jimmy Corry and New Zealand's Germans shows not only the absurdity of racism but also the potential danger it poses to every group and individual in a society. Anyone can be excluded, othered, and targeted.

We can use Bonnett's research to show that one of the far right's most common claims is blatantly ahistorical. In Britain and in Aotearoa, advocates of the 'remigration' of non-white groups like to claim that, until recently, their societies were racially homogenous. Activists for the Restore Party have insisted that, as recently as 1900, Britain was '99% white'. The neo-Nazis who have founded a group called New Zealand Remigration say that this country has only two 'founder populations'—'British' and Māori. 

But if you had told Britons in 1900 that Irish and English belonged to the same ethnic group, many would have been bemused. Many of the Britons of 1900 did not believe their society to be racially homogenous—quite the opposite. Groups like the Irish, Welsh, Romany, Highland Scots, the indigent, and Jews were perceived as alien, and often as threatening. The 'Anglo-Saxon race' was defined by its difference from these groups. 

In the same way, the 'British New Zealander' of the early twentieth century was defined by what he or she was not. Groups like Chinese, Dalmatians, 'Hindoos', Jews, 'Assyrians' and—for a few years—Germans were cast as threats to the safety and economic security of the British New Zealander. 

Māori were sometimes adjudged British, and at other times contrasted with British New Zealanders. The Kauri Gum Industry Act of 1898 set up a series of Gum Reserves, for the exclusive use of 'British New Zealanders', a category that included Māori, but excluded the Dalmatians who had had great success in digging for gum in Northland. On the other hand the Native Schools where most young Māori were educated in the early twentieth century were often contrasted with the public schools where 'British' New Zealanders attended. Like all racial categories, 'British New Zealanders' is unstable and fundamentally irrational.

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