House Negroes, White Supremacy And Mass Deportation

Last week the probable next prime minister of the UK, Nigel Farage, announced that if he wins power he will deport hundreds of thousands of people living legally in the UK.

In response the Labour government said the plans were “unworkable and unfunded” and that Farage was lying about how much money it would save.

None of the responses from the liberal political or media class labelled the plans a moral abomination, an afront to basic humanity or ideas of fairness. Instead they critiqued it in narrow, technocratic terms encased in the language of financialised neoliberalism.

Farage isn’t talking about deporting those without papers, so-called ‘illegal’ immigrants (a misnomer in itself, as no human being can be illegal on the Earth). He’s talking about deporting those who have done everything right, who are fully legal, who have all their papers, paid their taxes, and have made the UK their home. This is beyond the proto-fascism of Trump and moves squarely into the pure-fascist realm.

Keir Starmer responded by saying that he was going to stand up to the hate promoted by Farage. Yet just just a few days later, his government, I shit you not, announced that immigrants would be forced, like criminals, to do community service to prove their worth to society.

And who announced this plan? A brown woman called Shabana Mahmood, the much-vaunted first female Muslim home secretary of the UK, a twist that truly underscores the grotesquery and bankruptcy of liberal identity politics.

You could run an Earth simulation a thousand times and struggle to spit out a country as disgusting as the UK. In many ways Britain is the foundational evil, the colonial monster that dominated and subjugated a planet and in its dying years blamed the brown and black people it exploited for its own downfall.

A large proportion of British whites simultaneously revere the glory days of the British empire while raging with their tomato faces at all the black and brown people the age of empire left them with.

Which is to say, a large proportion of British whites are racists. They liked it when the UK could project power and dominance over the coloureds for their own profits and ends, and hate that the descendants of those blacks and browns have any claim at all to the country that tormented them.

And now Britain inevitably is tearing itself apart over immigration. 150,000 attended a far-right march in London the other week to demand Britain be more racist. They got their Brexit and made it so no one could come to the UK without a work visa, but it wasn’t enough. It will never be enough. Farage’s mass deportation won’t be enough. Every immigrant in the UK could tattoo their face with the Saint George’s Cross and crawl on their knees to Buckingham Palace while professing their undying loyalty to God and the crown and it wouldn’t be enough.

Because you cannot placate white supremacy.

You cannot appease fascists.

They want scapegoats. And if you’re not one of them, you’re the scapegoat. What you actually do or believe or even where you’re born doesn’t matter.

The only thing that matters is you aren’t one of them.

But this is nothing new.

White nationalist societies like Britain or the USA are schooled in mass deportation.

The UK has a long history of deporting non-whites who, once they had served their purpose, were treated like scum and discarded like rubbish. The most high-profile case in recent years was that of the so-called Windrush generation, people who arrived on boats from the Caribbean between 1948 and 1971 under a government scheme to plug labour shortages. Many of those people, having been inadequately documented when they arrived (despite arriving at the request of the British government), were subsequently targeted for deportation. Hundreds of people, despite living their whole lives in the UK, despite in some cases being born in the UK, were deported back to Caribbean countries they’d never lived in and had no connection to. This went on right up to the 2010s. An off-the-scale level of inhumanity. For the administrators of Britain, however, it was just another day of good old white supremacy.

The truth is, in Britain, if you are non-native you are not safe.

And the Windrush generation proves that if you are born and bred British but non-white, you are still not safe.

Britain is the undiluted essence of white supremacy.

And in the US, Trump’s white supremacy is simply attempting to beat Obama’s white supremacy. Because yes, Obama was black, but he was a white nationalist who deported more people than Trump. He was what Malcolm X defined as the house negro. The black man who excuses, absorbs and finally embraces the mannerisms and politics of the master. The outsider who strives so hard to prove their worth to their adopted society that they emulate and reinforce the structures of that society.

In the UK, people like Shabana Mahmood are the equivalent of the American house negro. They are the non-whites who, so desperate to fit in and devoid of true self-respect, they come to espouse and embody the white nationalist politics of their masters.

In the end, very little separates centrists, or liberals, from the far-right. At least with the far-right you can fight them on honest grounds. White, brown and black liberals claiming to fight racism while being racist and embodying white nationalism will always fool decent people and inch a country closer to fascism under the guise of progressivism.

And if Farage does win, Starmer will have left him (just as Obama left Trump), a perfect deportation machine.

This week the Labour government made a big deal of the fact they’d signed a multi-billion contract with the data-mining leviathan Palantir. Palantir, which is run by Jewish American Zionist Alex Karp and provides the AI technology that underpins the Israeli genocide of Gaza, will play a key role in reinforcing white nationalism in Britain.

UK defence secretary John Healey sitting next to Alex Karp signing the Palantir deal

Because last week, just before the deal was signed, Starmer announced plans for every British citizen to be issued with mandatory digital ID, with immigration control, of course, being a key justification. And Palantir, like it has done in the US, is going to help the UK build the data systems that will sit behind the new digital ID. In the US, Palantir provides ICE with the software that enables agents to identify, track and ultimately deport immigrants. It will do the same in the UK.

So if, and when, Farage does take power, the centrists and the house negroes will have left him with all the tools he needs to do frictionless mass deportation.

And no one should be in any doubt about whether these systems will be confined to immigrants. As we’re seeing in the US, white nationalism targets every kind of other. If you don’t fit the narrow white Judeo-Christian ideal, they want you fucking gone.

I suppose this is the point at which I give you some counter-balance, some hope, as we slide towards the darkest social futures.

The only hope, as trite as it sounds, resides in resistance.

I mean resistance not in theoretical terms, but in practical, literal terms.

The sort of resistance that is required when the law is no longer there to help you but is instead used to target you.

The sort of resistance that draws on anarchist and communitarian ideas of defensive structures and protocols within communities to guard against the state.

The sort of resistance that learns from the experiences of those who have long been othered and targeted for failing the tests of white nationalism and white supremacy.