Table of Contents
Michael Rainsborough
Michael Rainsborough is Professor of Strategic Theory and Director of the Centre for Future Defence and National Security, Canberra.
It has been more than a week since the appalling case of Henry Nowak erupted into public consciousness. During that time, the story has been analysed from every conceivable angle. The failures of the police have been examined. Questions have been raised about race, justice and the institutional culture of the police. Politicians have traded accusations. Commentators have denounced one another. Social media has performed its usual function of turning tragedy into tribal warfare.
There is little that another scribe, let alone one writing from 10,000 miles away, can add to the facts of the case. The circumstances speak for themselves.
The image that remains lodged indelibly in the mind, that of a frightened boy in his final moments, his deathly white hand clasped in handcuffs while a cluster of blue surgical gloves paw at him on police body-camera footage, requires no embellishment. It is difficult to imagine a more devastating symbol of state failure. Whatever subsequent investigations conclude, this will remain the defining visual indictment of everyone involved.
One striking feature of the reaction has been the sudden discovery of restraint by many of the same public figures who, following the death of George Floyd in 2020, regarded outrage as both necessary and admirable. We are told that the Henry Nowak case must not be “politicised”. Public anger must be moderated. Questions should not be asked too quickly. Conclusions should not be drawn prematurely.
Yet in 2020, Britain witnessed demonstrations, marches, attacks on public monuments, corporate declarations of solidarity, anti-racist action plans and institutional programmes dedicated to rooting out systemic discrimination. Politicians, journalists and public bodies competed to express their indignation.
Today the same voices appear considerably less enthusiastic about public anger. The inconsistency is obvious. But what interests me is something different, which is:
- Why do so many British institutions now appear predisposed to interpret public life through the language of race?
- Why do police forces produce race action plans that explicitly distinguish between racial groups?
- Why do public bodies increasingly define fairness not as equal treatment but as differential treatment in pursuit of preferred outcomes?
- Why does the language of anti-racism now occupy such a prominent place in the training materials, guidance documents and organisational cultures of institutions that once prided themselves on political neutrality?
The answer usually given is that these developments are simply an extension of the liberal project. Britain, we are told, has become more sensitive to discrimination, more conscious of historical injustice and more determined to create a fair society.
Yet if these ideas are merely the latest expression of liberal tolerance, why do they so frequently generate resentment rather than reconciliation? Why do they encourage institutions to think increasingly in racial divisive categories? Why do they appear to produce ever greater sensitivity to racial grievance while doing so little to foster social trust? And, why do they lead to grotesque injustices, like those of Henry Nowak?
To answer those questions, it is necessary to look beyond the immediate controversies of the present moment and examine how we got here. The anti-racist doctrines now entrenched throughout large parts of the British state did not emerge from nowhere. Nor did they emerge solely from the liberal tradition that their advocates routinely invoke, or simply from imported American social justice theory.
Their origins lie elsewhere. They are often obscured, rarely examined, and are more disturbing than is commonly understood.
The revolution behind the rhetoric
The Daily Telegraph recently carried the headline: ‘How race ideology captured Britain’s police.’ It was a useful formulation, but it leaves an obvious question unanswered: where did that ideology come from, and where does it ultimately lead?
Most discussions of anti-racism begin and end with good intentions. We are told that institutions adopted anti-racist frameworks because they wished to reduce prejudice, improve relations between communities and address historical injustices. No doubt many of the individuals who promote such programmes do believe exactly that.
The difficulty is that good intentions tell us very little about the intellectual origins of an idea. To understand those origins, it is necessary to examine the assumptions embedded within the doctrine itself.
Consider some of the propositions that have become commonplace in contemporary anti-racist discourse:
- neutrality is itself a form of complicity;
- it is not enough to refrain from discrimination, one must become actively anti-racist;
- society is divided into groups defined by power, privilege and oppression;
- disparities between groups are evidence of systemic injustice;
- institutions must be transformed rather than merely reformed.
These ideas are now so familiar that they often pass without comment. Yet they are not the natural language of the classical liberal tradition.
Liberalism, whatever its flaws, sought to establish common rules under which citizens could coexist despite differences of class, religion, ethnicity or political belief. Its instinct was conciliatory. It sought accommodation, compromise and coexistence.
The intellectual tradition from which contemporary anti-racist activism emerged took a markedly different view.
For many of the radical thinkers who shaped the New Left during the 1960s and 1970s, liberalism was not the solution. It was the problem.
This is where Mao Zedong enters the story.
The revolution in the East comes West
Among 20th-century revolutionary figures, Mao possessed an unusually intense hostility towards liberalism. In his 1937 essay ‘Combat Liberalism’, he attacked compromise, tolerance and peaceful coexistence. Liberalism, in Mao’s view, weakened revolutionary commitment because it encouraged people to avoid conflict and seek accommodation. It softened ideological struggle.
For Mao, politics was not about reconciling differences. It was about identifying contradictions, intensifying them and harnessing them for revolutionary purposes.
This logic reached its most destructive expression during the Cultural Revolution after 1966. Citizens were encouraged to identify hidden enemies, denounce existing authorities and engage in perpetual ideological struggle. Social conflict was not regarded as a regrettable by-product of politics. It was the engine of politics itself.
The Cultural Revolution coincided with a period of profound disillusionment among many Western radicals. Traditional Marxist predictions had failed. The industrial working class had not risen in revolution. Capitalist societies had become wealthier and more stable than revolutionary theory anticipated.
Mao appeared to offer an alternative model. Instead of waiting for economic contradictions to produce revolution, social divisions could be activated directly. Political consciousness could be cultivated. Grievances could be deliberately stoked. Existing institutions could be challenged through cultural rather than economic struggle.
For that reason, Mao’s appeal extended far beyond China. During the 1960s, particularly in the years surrounding the upheavals of May 1968, large sections of the Western New Left became fascinated by the Cultural Revolution. To many radical intellectuals, Mao appeared to have solved a problem that had long plagued revolutionary theory. If the working class in advanced capitalist societies showed little appetite for revolution, political consciousness could be cultivated through culture, identity and social conflict instead. The revolutionary struggle could be relocated from the factory floor to the institutions, the university, the media and the wider culture itself.
Mao’s influence can be seen throughout the radical literature of the period. One of the clearest examples is Prairie Fire, the influential 1974 manifesto of the Weather Underground in the United States. Drawing heavily upon Maoist concepts, this tract presented social conflict not as a condition to be resolved but as a force to be expanded and directed. Liberal society was not to be improved. It was to be delegitimised. Existing loyalties and identities, explicitly those around race, were to be subjected to relentless criticism in the service of revolutionary transformation. “The black struggle for self-determination,” to quote directly from the text, “is the strategic leading force for the US revolution.”
The struggle was not simply about this or that grievance. It was never solely race, class, inequality, gender or foreign policy. As former New Left activist David Horowitz memorably observed: “The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.”
That observation provides an important key to understanding many of the ideological currents that later emerged from the New Left. The purpose of grievance was not to remedy injustice. The purpose was political mobilisation. The purpose of mobilisation was social transformation. The purpose of social transformation was the creation of a revolutionary new order.
That lineage matters because many of the concepts now embedded in contemporary anti-racist doctrine emerged from precisely this intellectual environment.
The revolution will be managed
The objection to all of this might be that Mao’s China, the Weather Underground and the 1960s New Left belong to a different age. Whatever influence they may once have exercised, surely, they have little to do with the training manuals of modern police forces, diversity officers in local government or human resources departments in the 21st century.
People who might think this are gravely mistaken.
The language of contemporary anti-racism bears little resemblance to the rhetoric of revolution. Today’s vocabulary is managerial rather than militant. It speaks of inclusion, belonging, allyship, lived experience, unconscious bias and equity. The language is bureaucratic, therapeutic and procedural. It is designed to sound reassuring.
The language may have changed but the underlying assumptions are remarkably familiar.
The bridge between the revolutionary politics of the New Left and the institutional anti-racism of the present day was built gradually over several decades, primarily through universities. During the 1970s and 1980s, many of the Maoist ideas that had animated radical activism migrated into academic disciplines, where they were refined, professionalised and detached from their overtly revolutionary origins.
Marxist, and again specifically Maoist, ideas about class conflict were adapted to questions of culture and identity. Postmodern theorists challenged the assumption that institutions could ever be neutral. Critical legal scholars argued that law itself reflected underlying power structures. Critical Race Theory emerged from this intellectual milieu, applying many of these assumptions to questions of race and justice.
What united these diverse schools of thought was the characteristic Maoist scorn for the liberal ideal of neutrality.
The traditional liberal view holds that institutions should strive to treat individuals equally irrespective of race, religion or ethnicity. The newer ‘critical’ perspective regards such principles not as safeguards of fairness but as instruments through which existing power relations are maintained. Formal equality is dismissed as a disguise for deeper structures of power, while colour-blindness is reinterpreted as a mechanism through which inequality is concealed and reproduced.
The grievance commissariat
Under the liberal framework, the task is to ensure that institutions do not discriminate. But under the anti-racist framework, the task is to ensure that institutions produce approved outcomes between groups.
Once institutions cease to judge themselves by whether they apply rules equally and begin judging themselves by whether different groups achieve comparable outcomes, racial categorisation becomes unavoidable. Administrators must continually monitor disparities. New bureaucracies emerge to identify inequities. Training programmes proliferate. Entire professional classes acquire a vested interest in the management of group differences.
The National Police Chiefs’ Council ‘Police Anti-Racism Commitment’ provides an instructive example. It explicitly states that: “It is not enough for us to not be racist or to claim not to be racist. … Anti-racism demands we are proactive.” Similar language appears throughout public-sector diversity programmes.
To refrain from discrimination is a liberal principle. To require active participation in a programme of ideological transformation is something very different.
The logic extends far beyond official policy documents. Institutions are increasingly encouraged to interpret social reality through racial categories and to regard group identity as the primary lens through which social relations should be understood.
Over the last three decades, Britain has witnessed an unprecedented expansion of anti-racist awareness programmes, diversity initiatives, race action plans, inclusion strategies and equality frameworks. Yet public debate about race has become more acrimonious, not less. Institutional trust has weakened. Accusations of double standards and two-tier justice have multiplied. Social cohesion appears increasingly fragile.
If an ideology encourages citizens to understand themselves principally as members of racial groups, racial consciousness will inevitably increase. If institutions are instructed to monitor and manage relations between those groups, public life will become increasingly organised around racial categories. If disparities are continuously presented as evidence of systemic injustice, grievances will accumulate faster than they can be resolved.
The point is not that every individual working within these institutions intends such outcomes. Most probably don’t and believe they are promoting fairness and inclusion.
The more important point is that the crucial assumption underpinning both worldviews is the same: society should be understood not as a community of equal citizens governed by common rules, but as a landscape of competing groups defined by power, privilege and oppression.
Once that premise is accepted, conflict ceases to be an unfortunate possibility. It becomes the organising principle of political life.
The politics of permanent division
The prevailing assumption is that anti-racist ideology exists to reduce the salience of race in public life. Its aspiration appears straightforward: to create a society in which racial distinctions matter less rather than more.
Yet when one examines the intellectual traditions from which modern anti-racist doctrine emerged, a different picture begins to appear.
For the Maoist inspired revolutionary currents that influenced much of the New Left, social conflict was not a regrettable condition to be overcome. It was a political resource to be exploited.
Division was useful.
Grievance was useful.
Polarisation was useful.
The purpose of identifying injustice was not merely to remedy it. The purpose was to transform political consciousness.
Seen from this perspective, the evolution of contemporary anti-racist ideology becomes easier to understand.
The search for racism can never truly end because its purpose is not simply the elimination of particular discriminatory practices. New forms of consciousness must continually be cultivated. New structures of oppression must continually be identified. New disparities must continually be discovered. The process has no obvious point of completion because completion would remove the rationale for further mobilisation.
The result is a politics of permanent dissatisfaction, and thus permanent revolutionary ferment. This is Maoism in action.
This tendency can be seen in the work of influential anti-racist writers such as Ibram X Kendi. In How to Be an Antiracist, neutrality is effectively abolished. One is either racist or anti-racist. The middle ground disappears.
Classical liberalism depends upon the existence of such a middle ground. It assumes that citizens can disagree without becoming enemies and that compromise is not a betrayal but a necessity.
The Maoist revolutionary tradition rejects precisely these assumptions. Mao regarded liberal compromise as weakness. The Cultural Revolution sought to eliminate neutrality. Revolutionary movements prosper by forcing individuals to choose sides. The distinction between friend and enemy becomes politically decisive.
This same tendency increasingly characterises contemporary anti-racist discourse. Silence becomes complicity. Disagreement becomes evidence of prejudice. Neutrality becomes impossible. The individual is pressured to choose between competing moral camps.
At this point the irony becomes difficult to ignore. An ideology ostensibly dedicated to overcoming racial division increasingly encourages people to think of themselves in racial terms. It claims to promote inclusion while sorting individuals into categories of privilege and oppression. It constantly speaks of diversity but exhibits remarkable hostility towards intellectual diversity.
Citizens who once regarded themselves primarily as members of a common political community are encouraged to understand themselves through narrower identities. Public institutions become increasingly preoccupied with the management of group grievances. Political legitimacy becomes tied to the recognition of competing claims of victimhood.
Under such circumstances social harmony ceases to be the goal. Perpetual struggle becomes the condition of politics.
The outcome is the intention
The tragedy of Henry Nowak did not create these realities, but it has illuminated them.
For decades, British institutions have absorbed a body of ideas that ultimately encourages them to think less in terms of equal citizenship and more in terms of competing racial groups.
The ‘liberal’ promise was to make race matter less. The Maoist inflected intention is to make race matter more. It is, in fact, intended to make social conflict worse. In the words of Jung Chang, who lived through China’s Cultural Revolution, in her book Wild Swans, the purpose is precisely to “create a land of hatred”. This is why the debate surrounding Henry Nowak has proved so explosive, because this is exactly what anti-racist ideology is all about.
People may only be dimly aware of Mao, the Cultural Revolution, the New Left or Critical Race Theory. But you can see the outcome: institutions that speak the language of equal treatment whilst behaving as though different groups should be treated differently; a society that talks endlessly about diversity whilst becoming steadily more fragmented; a governing class that responds to obvious contradictions not by confronting them but by demanding that others stop noticing them.
This is how a liberal society begins to resemble Mao’s land of hatred.
The politics of separation
Let me end on a brief anecdote, which I hope illustrates the point. For years I wondered about some of my former colleagues at King’s College London. Several were white South Africans. One was a genuinely principled man. A couple of others were rather less so. Progressives down to their last pronoun. Always droning on about ‘the patriarchy’. Convinced of their own moral and intellectual superiority, and never shy about reminding the rest of us. And of course they had shown their commitment to South Africa’s rainbow future by leaving the country at the first hint of the ANC coming to power.
The contradiction always struck me as curious. Now it seems less mysterious.
The attraction of this ideology is not simply that it allows its adherents to occupy the moral high ground. It also allows them to assume the role of arbiters, administrators and managers of competing communities. Like colonial officials of an earlier era, or the self-appointed custodians of South Africa’s racial order after 1948, they acquire authority by interpreting, categorising, supervising and regulating relations between groups.
This is the point at which the journey comes full circle. The road from Mao’s assault on liberalism, through the Cultural Revolution, into the radical politics of the New Left, across the American academy and into the anti-racist doctrines that now shape public institutions in the United Kingdom was never intended to culminate in a colour-blind society of equal citizens.
The drive was to replace the liberal understanding of society altogether. Mao understood that liberal societies depend upon compromise, restraint and a shared civic identity. Those habits had to be destroyed because they stood in the way of political transformation.
That is why Mao would have regarded contemporary liberal progressives with a mixture of amusement and contempt. They imagine themselves to be defending tolerance, inclusion and social harmony. In reality, they have spent decades embedding an ideology that treats social division as a political resource and racial consciousness as a governing principle.
The result now stands before us: a society increasingly organised and administered through racial categories, one that has travelled a very long way from the liberal aspiration of equal citizenship and ever closer to the politics of permanent division.
The accurate description for such a condition is not diversity.
It is liberal apartheid.
This article was originally published by the Daily Sceptic.
