Part of the problem is also my fault, because I'm getting sick of non-Americans pretending that just because certain aspects of European racism have a superficial similiarity, it justifies wholesale adoption of the same mentalities, especially when their arguments end up sounding exactly like European racists. (No, that's unfair to you. Sorry. I resent your implications, but I do think that there are very real and important differences at work, that I feel your arguments are bypassing).
Of course, that isn't actually a counter to your point, for which I'll resort to using people who support me, but are relevantly not me (in that they're black, British, living in America, and more than a bit famous in Race Theory). Oh, also, related point, the background to a lot of his race arguments is in Marxist theory, not Race per se.
"Even if today's unwanted settlers -- lately from Eastern Europe - - are not actually postcolonials, they can still trigger all the ambivalence of the vanished empire. The newest immigrants may be unwanted and abused precisely because they are the unwitting stimulus for the pain produced by memories of the vanished imperial and colonial past. Poles and Kosovars are "white," but they can still be held hostage by the racialized definition of immigration that sets them apart from the local working class because, until very recently, to be an immigrant was to be black.... The new concern about "whiteness" is important because it shows how readily the melancholic pattern of Britain's self-image dovetails with some recent cultural imports from the United States. Like many of Britain's cultural commentators, British politicians have been caught out by their inability to imagine any future for Britain's racial politics that is not deduced from American history. For almost four decades, the United States has exemplified the only racial future that the British punditocracy can imagine. That era should be declared over... Postcolonial settlement has not created a mosaic pluralism along American lines. Some self-segregation is under way, but the pleasures of clustering and enclave economies have had to compete against an unruly, untidy, and convivial mode of interaction in which differences have to be actively negotiated day by day because people share public spaces that bring their interdependency and their common citizenship sharply into focus... Civic life has been endowed with a vibrant multiculture. We Britons do not always value it, use it wisely, or celebrate it as we should. But it represents an alternative to Britain's postcolonial melancholy and to American recipes for racial identity circulating through McWorld on the backs of hip-hop, basketball, and MTV... Britain's political leaders have a lot of catching up to do. Their failures of imagination in this area will not be reversed by reaching for off-the-shelf solutions derived from American conditions that are now very different from our own. In the four decades that conviviality has emerged in Britain, the racial segregation on which American society is premised has been entrenched. It is no longer just spatial, but extends into the market, shaping consumer culture's dreams and desires so that they reinvigorate the most tired racial archetypes and imagery. America's racial groups do not even meet in the marketplace. Today American racial groups are more fixed, more absolutely separated than in the past." - Paul Gilroy
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Of course, that isn't actually a counter to your point, for which I'll resort to using people who support me, but are relevantly not me (in that they're black, British, living in America, and more than a bit famous in Race Theory). Oh, also, related point, the background to a lot of his race arguments is in Marxist theory, not Race per se.
"Even if today's unwanted settlers -- lately from Eastern Europe - - are not actually postcolonials, they can still trigger all the ambivalence of the vanished empire. The newest immigrants may be unwanted and abused precisely because they are the unwitting stimulus for the pain produced by memories of the vanished imperial and colonial past. Poles and Kosovars are "white," but they can still be held hostage by the racialized definition of immigration that sets them apart from the local working class because, until very recently, to be an immigrant was to be black....
The new concern about "whiteness" is important because it shows how readily the melancholic pattern of Britain's self-image dovetails with some recent cultural imports from the United States. Like many of Britain's cultural commentators, British politicians have been caught out by their inability to imagine any future for Britain's racial politics that is not deduced from American history. For almost four decades, the United States has exemplified the only racial future that the British punditocracy can imagine. That era should be declared over...
Postcolonial settlement has not created a mosaic pluralism along American lines. Some self-segregation is under way, but the pleasures of clustering and enclave economies have had to compete against an unruly, untidy, and convivial mode of interaction in which differences have to be actively negotiated day by day because people share public spaces that bring their interdependency and their common citizenship sharply into focus...
Civic life has been endowed with a vibrant multiculture. We Britons do not always value it, use it wisely, or celebrate it as we should. But it represents an alternative to Britain's postcolonial melancholy and to American recipes for racial identity circulating through McWorld on the backs of hip-hop, basketball, and MTV...
Britain's political leaders have a lot of catching up to do. Their failures of imagination in this area will not be reversed by reaching for off-the-shelf solutions derived from American conditions that are now very different from our own. In the four decades that conviviality has emerged in Britain, the racial segregation on which American society is premised has been entrenched. It is no longer just spatial, but extends into the market, shaping consumer culture's dreams and desires so that they reinvigorate the most tired racial archetypes and imagery. America's racial groups do not even meet in the marketplace. Today American racial groups are more fixed, more absolutely separated than in the past." - Paul Gilroy