I’m sorry but that is just complete nonsense – the crowds who turned out to follow Jade Goody’s coffin from Bermondsey to Essex identified Jade Goody as one of their own. The newspapers who covered the event identified the crowds as white. As your examples confirm she was overwhelmingly only identified as “mixed-race” by those for whom the term was a derogatory one.

Many exemptions were signed by Hitler himself – it doesn’t follow however that he wasn’t still interested in the complete elimination of the Jews. The third reich lasted 12 years, was founded on racial ideas and had (theoretically at least) one single all powerful leader whose crazy views trumped all. The British empire lasted at least 400 years, had constantly changing leaders with different ideas about who was “worthy”- from the familiar “christendom in, non-christendom out” to the rise of the middle-classes. That (very simply is why the two are not analogous.) Cannadine certainly does not attempt the crazy historical comparison of matching up the British Empire with nazi Germany and let’s face it why would anyone?

Alas for her when the shit started flying the public identified her as white – that’s the problem with an apporach that identifies a power logos at the top from which emanates all cultural distinctions (it just does not exist.)

Her mixed-race identification wasn’t well known until the Shilpa incident. After it, she was clearly identified as mixed race: cue lots of loose comment about full lips. There’s a delightful Jade thread from 2007 on a well-known white-supremacist website: some commenters strive to prove that they had always known all along that she wasn’t white; others are simply relieved she’s no longer considered white.

Of itself, public opinion of her racial identity after the Shilpa thingy wouldn’t matter for my claim about racial identity; it matters only because it was the occasion for wide public attention about her recent biracial ancestry. Given my earlier claim, the prediction has to be that if there wide public knowledge of her recent biracial ancestry then she would be classified as white, not mixed race. Once it became widely known that she had recent nonwhite ancestry, she was identified as mixed-race. Give over: this was a genuinely terrible attempted example for your argument.

The stuff about power escapes me completely.

Your white officers excluding Sikh officers from the mess are much more likely to have been motivated by rank and whether they were Viceroy’s commisioned officers (with authority over Indian troops) or King’s commisioned officers (who had full authority over English troops.) Likewise the idea that because Hitler had Jewish generals (that he quite obviously did not know about) is not analogous to the British Empire having allies (given full aristocratic honours) Members of parliament and fully commisioned officers of Indian descent. The claim is that quite obviously the racial heirachy did not matter as much in the British empire as the class heirachy as no Indians (or British for that matter) of less than noble descent were ever recieved with full honours at court or even made officers in the army. I would have thought that unless you were ideologically wed to racial categories as an explanation for everything that this was fairly obvious.

Erhard Milch is your man: his exemption from the racial laws was issued by Göring himself. The example is directly analogous. Cannadine’s story is that there were hierarchies other than race, so race wasn’t the dominant hierarchical principle. He wavers, but that’s his conclusion — and yours too. It’s hardly unknown that Germany allied with Japan, despite Hitler’s views about Japanese. Nor is it unknown that once the General Government realised that the Wehrmacht had killed too many Poles for comfort, racial classifications were eased, to let count as Germans Poles who previously wouldn’t have qualified. Non-racial principles trumped racial ones; it doesn’t follow that race wasn’t the central organising principle of the German Empire. AFAICR, Cannadine doesn’t do any historical comparisons whatever in the book, so the reader is left completely unaware that there’s pretty strong evidence against his claim.

Indeed you only have to travel the routes of the British empire to see clearly that the issue was hierarchy not race.

Britain was also responsible for the transshipment of ethnic groups across its Empire.

Indians as browns or as Indoaryans may have had a higher status in scientific racalist theories over aboriginal peoples but not when the aboriniginals in question had a good class hierachy with a nobility and Royalty.

Thus the first Governer of Fiji (not that bothered about cannibalism) believed the Fijians (ethnically mixed Polynesian and very ‘Black’ melanesian) a ‘martial race’ (and of course martial race was another very important non colour coded class/race british imperial construct) who should never be alienated from their land (80% is still Fijian clan owned) so he transhipped south Indian indentured labourers (aka non free labour) to work the land, thus creating the race conflict dmaging Fiji to this day.

The contrast between Australia and New Zealand in the treatment of its aboriginal population couldn’t be greater.

Australia’s population was ‘acephalous’ literally without a head or monarchy considered ‘anarchic’ and’asocial’ and therefore incapable of being domesticated and incorporated into the Empire, they were hunted down in shooting party’s like vermin.

New Zealand on the other hand encountering a martial aboriginal people with slaves (blacker and so named by an indigenous light ‘Polynesian’ vs dark ‘Melanesian’ ‘colour/class’ hierarchy) commoners, nobility and Royalty, immediately concluded extensive treaties, incorporating chiefs into parliament as MPs, sent cannibal Kings to meet Queen Victoria and their children to sandhurst.

There are no appreciable institutional differences between Australia and NZ to explain this differential treatment in fact it is a provision of the australian federative constitution that NZ can join it did not do so in the early 20thC ss this would have meant disenfranchising the Maori.

While it is currently fashionable to talk of the iniquities of Waitangi this is an agenda pushed by ‘white’ Maori with names like O’Higgins who speak ‘Maori’ (essentially a dead language) while further disenfranchising the gheto Maori (much darker and the descendants of maori slaves) in auckland.

See the film ‘once were Warriors’ for a fairly realistic brutally graphic portrayal of the lives of the inner city Auckland maori.

Class not race say after me emmanuel Class not Race

Alas for her when the shit started flying the public identified her as white – that’s the problem with an apporach that identifies a power logos at the top from which emanates all cultural distinctions (it just does not exist.) Your white officers excluding Sikh officers from the mess are much more likely to have been motivated by rank and whether they were Viceroy’s commisioned officers (with authority over Indian troops) or King’s commisioned officers (who had full authority over English troops.) Likewise the idea that because Hitler had Jewish generals (that he quite obviously did not know about) is not analogous to the British Empire having allies (given full aristocratic honours) Members of parliament and fully commisioned officers of Indian descent. The claim is that quite obviously the racial heirachy did not matter as much in the British empire as the class heirachy as no Indians (or British for that matter) of less than noble descent were ever recieved with full honours at court or even made officers in the army. I would have thought that unless you were ideologically wed to racial categories as an explanation for everything that this was fairly obvious.

I was just reading a book in which the exclusion of Sikh officers from a regimental mess was justified on the ground that that would be to treat them as white

This was racism at a comparatively low level. Indian Maharajah’s were constantly in and out of Queen Vic’s court and were treated as the equals of European royalty – no Prince Phillip-like comments about skin colour are reported as far as I know… (but there I go on about class and ornamentalism again…) I’ll be mentioning Jade Goody in connection with the statement: “Folk of known black descent — even if they’re indistinguishable from white folk — are also not white” next!

Jade’s mother and grandmother identified her as mixed race. She herself identified as mixed race. The Guardian had a piece as long ago as 2002 identifying her as mixed race: the line in it about her not being an English rose is your first clue that mixed race and white are exclusive. The semi-serious argument around the time of the Shilpa episode — that Jade’s bullying couldn’t have been racially motivated because she was an ethnic minority herself — is your second.

I thought (feared, actually) that you were going to call me out on the obvious hard case: folk who look white and are also of known but very distant black ancestry — like that guy who was profiled in the Telegraph magazine a while ago.

Hitler had generals of recent and well-known known Jewish descent, as well as Japanese allies. From which it really doesn’t follow that race wasn’t the organizing hierarchical principle. That’s the facile answer to your Ornamentalism thingy. The slightly less facile answer is that Ornamentalism is trivial or false: if the claim is that the Empire had non-racial hierarchies, it’s trivial; if the claim is that the racial hierarchy didn’t matter most, it’s false.

‘I noted that somebody online was referring to you as a dumbed-down right-wing populist ‘

Must have been a liberal misappropriating a radical mantel, as no establisment right winger has ever, liked anything much I have to say.

As for Populist well surely my disregard for simplistic soundbites would disqualify me from that.

Perhaps someone who spends their time looking and talking down the social hierarchy might mistake what I say as a talking down to reactionaries who resist the emancipation and freedom of others.

My concern has always been rather to conduct an ethnography of the centre of social and political power in order to breach its flanks permitting a diffusion in from the margins.

Or more prosaically because I was given a bunk up over the wall of the lords estate by my mates, I feel it my obligation to find the ‘traitors’ gate and let the Roundheads and peasants in

As for alternate discourses to show that I am not entirely closed to the liberatory possibilities such a form as venerated by post modernists (actually it is the i look in the mirror and chose whatever i want to be performativity types I have little time for)

I would stress a close attention to , as I pointed out, the religious syncretic movements of Latin America.

These mini but deep narratives belonging to oral history seem to speak to magic realism and to scientific history, to utter both metaphor, and metonym (which after all are often merely long repeated metaphors).

Syncretic religions speak in lyrical and epic terms telling the ‘big tell’ of a people as well as its transcendence.

Here is a great example of the strongest syncretic indigenous religion from Venezuela, the cult of Maria Lionza

http://www.google.co.uk/search?source=ig&hl=en&rlz=1G1GGLQ_ENUK336&q=Maria+Lionza&btnG=Google+Search&meta=lr%3D&aq=f&oq=

yes that’s a whole google return (a bilingual one at that I give it because there are also some fantastic images of Maria)

Though this is the Girardian analysis that you called down from the heavens by invoking Roland Barthes, that i would recommend if you are only going to read one thing on Maria Lionza (you can also listen to the Ruben Blades song)
http://anthrobase.net/Txt/A/Andrade_G_E_01.htm

Alternatively go on a pilgim to her mountain in Western Venezuela its an ethereal and extraordinary place (if after the divinatorary rituals through cigar smoke the cult mountains guardian spirits let you pass or you forge on tempting the fates)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/María_Lionza

This was racism at a comparatively low level. Indian Maharajah’s were constantly in and out of Queen Vic’s court and were treated as the equals of European royalty – no Prince Phillip-like comments about skin colour are reported as far as I know… (but there I go on about class and ornamentalism again…) I’ll be mentioning Jade Goody in connection with the statement: “Folk of known black descent — even if they’re indistinguishable from white folk — are also not white” next!

It is a much more general theory of liberation than the liberation-theologists that I was getting at Metta! I noted that somebody online was referring to you as a dumbed-down right-wing populist and just wanted to tease out the underlying quest for justice in what you have been saying.

Sshshs please don’t out me as a Liberationist of course I am (I even learned Portuguese in a convent stuffed with liberation theologians) I just don’t see myself or those people who turn up at Latin American solidarity events wearing those Peruvian pointy hats leading the vanguard that’s all.

I do think there is something tremendously insightful in an pedagogical approach to oppression, starting with and embedding the framing of this liberation within the direct and immediate lived experience of people (though interestingly a friend of mine who tried to apply Freirian pedagogical techniques in Mozambique said they were culturally inappropriate and seen as an alien imposition)