I’m sorry this title was a bit of a bait and switch. This isn’t an article about Robin Hood. Well not really. I’ve not uncovered some new evidence that suggests the legendary figure was actually from Ethiopia or China, or anywhere except the island of Britain. This is an article about the way we think and act on race and class. and the ways in which some practioners of ‘anti-racism’ are failing. Following the sociology of Stuart Hall, I instead draw out a view of race and class that sees combating hierarchy not as a battle of ideas, but as a practice.
Was Robin Hood white? Almost instinctively, most of us will say yes. Why would a 13th century English outlaw, one depicted in countless books and film adaptations, be anything other? What I want to do here is challenge the question of historical whiteness itself. Robin Hood was not ‘white’, because he did not live in a time where that meant anything. He was not white in the same sense that he was not a ‘British citizen’. He lived in a universe where these things did not exist.
Robin Hood was in all likelihood, not actually a real person, but a sort of old school meme, an amalgamation of tales and songs passed down through English bards and storytellers. While there are many, often contradictory stories about the boy Hood, let’s stick with a simple one: He’s an Anglo-Saxon noble turned outlaw fighting the Norman regime, stealing from the rich and distributing the profits to the poor. As we’ll see, this will help us draw out a theory of race as a historical phenomenon, and maybe even ways to dismantle it.
The Wedge of Race
The American sociologist and historian W.E.B. DuBois, was among the first in the West to clearly identify how ‘race’ divided the working class to the benefit of the ruling classes. Writing on the post American Civil War Reconstruction era of the 1860-70s, DuBois noted how the white and the black working classes came to be sutured by the ‘wedge’ of racism. On the whole, a united working class would have given both whites and blacks a much better political settlement, and yet racial ideology, in this case white supremacy, gave what DuBois would call the ‘wages of whiteness’.1 While being paid more than black labour certainly factored into this, these wages were primarily a public and psychological privilege. To buy into race theory meant that while you may not be a leader yourself, you would see your ‘race’ represented well in media and public offices, thus giving poor whites a sort of psychological boost that meant upholding white supremacy was about maintaining one’s status.
Around the same time, British workers were beginning to be folded into the imperial system, and over the next hundred or so years, a grand but flawed bargain was struck. The working classes would receive the benefits of Empire in return for taking up the flag of nationalism, which at certain points would come to be heavily intertwined with racism. The anti-migrant racism of the National Front and the British right from the 1970s onwards was not a regressive holdover from a pre-modern time, but a product of its time. Indeed in the post war period, the British Empire had granted full citizenship to all members of its colonies, yet the acts of citizenship in 1968 and 1971 that made postcolonials subject to a stricter regime of immigration were in effect attacks on British citizens by Britain, attacks that (re)racialised those subjects.2
In these examples, race functions as an idea that divides the working class both within and without national borders. ‘Class first’ activism suggests that progressives and radicals unite on issues of worker rights and democracy and, while not denying the evils of racism, sees it as a secondary issues that is easily overcome. The problem with ‘class first’ is that racism is not just an idea but what sociologist Stuart Hall called “a discursive system for the production of otherness”, one that stubbornly persists in contemporary society.
For Hall, race is a discourse: not just a free floating idea, but ‘that which gives human practice and institutions meaning’.3 Discourses are both the idea and the physical practice of that idea. To merely label race an idea is to miss its ‘deadly operations in the world’. So while Hall acknowledges the artifice of race as a bio-truth, in terms of anti-racist practice he did not believe it was possible to simply slew the jacket of race like a snake would shed its skin.
The limits of liberal anti-racism
The idea of being ‘colour-blind’ to race has become an increasingly controversial standpoint; to ‘not see race’ is often equated with denying racism. Certainly there is a truth to this and for those with the most privilege to say that they don’t see race can feel like empty gesturing. Yet acknowledging the reality of race can also swing too far the other way, with even an aspiration towards a colour-blind society being refused in favour of racial essentialism-the idea that race is a fixed identity.
The school of ‘afro-pessimism’ is one of the most well known of these. Its key principle is that black bodies are uniquely oppressed within global society and overcoming racism is thus an impossibility. For afro-pessimists, separatism is the only practical answer and, as Jose Sanchez notes, both afro-pessimism and zionism ‘mock multiracial coexistence and integration as mere fantasies.’
Liberal anti-racism, the type you might encounter in corporate settings, has similar problems. Activists such as Peggy McIntosh and her article on the ‘invisible knapsack’ of white privilege quite rightly talk about the often hidden aspects of systemic racism, and yet simultaneously, by framing race in terms of representation of ‘my race’ and ‘your race’, McIntosh naturalises race.4 Along the same lines, the National Museum of African American History & Culture in Washington, DC recently published, and swiftly removed, a chart that aimed to define ‘white culture’ through various traits. These included things such as individualism, the nuclear family, the scientific method, rationalism, work ethic, conflict avoidance and writing. We do not have to look far to find examples of white people who do not hold those traits and non-white people who do. The argument made by the museum was that people of colour who exhibit these traits had merely ‘internalised’ white culture. The university, in a misguided attempt to counter racism, had taken the racist claims of white supremacy at their own word.
Somewhat awkwardly then, both far-right racism and certain strands of anti-racism can come a bit too close for comfort in their representation of race as an eternal truth of humanity. While racists may look to pseudo-science to justify their view of biological essentialism, is cultural essentialism any better? For Hall, cultural movements of ethnicity were always in danger of ‘sliding’ back into the ‘blood, inheritance and ancestry’ of racial discourse5. Discourses on ‘white culture’ or ‘black culture’ reflect this dynamic, for how else are we to define the human objects that make up these cultures than reverting back to physiological traits?
Yet Hall was no pessimist. While he rarely laid out a manifesto for change, his work his infused with a guarded optimism. The key strategic issue, for Hall, when it came to pushing things forward was, unlike liberal and regressive anti-racism, to question the very social and psychological building blocks of society. In order to prevent a slide back to the dead end of genetics, ‘new ethnicities’ would come into being through a ‘struggle around positionalities’6. That is, an ethnicity unchained to race or nation and instead rising up from the margins of society.
In terms of theory, it is no surprise that the word ‘work’ permeated Hall’s writing on what needed to be done. Race is not something that can be wished away, but needs to be dismantled with struggle. On the other side of things, if the practise of anti-racism is to dismantle race, then the work of racism is to maintain through continual reworking of the discourse, just as the British Empire did in 1971. The success of the right wing populism works not because politicians are ‘conjuring demons’ but because “they are practising on real contradictions within and inside the class, working on real effects of the structure”. These ‘real contradictions’ are the ways that working classes experience hardship, the practice of the right is to use those real hardships as the basis for new fictions.
Anti-racist work, if it is to be successful, cannot simply attack racism as a pathology of the mind, as a ‘bad idea’ that must be trained away, but build movements and practices of solidarity on the level of real life. The western ‘progressive’ scene routinely pushes itself into trading off between class and race, as if they are two wholly different forms of oppression. I plan to explore this idea in detail in future articles, but for the time being, I’ll lay my cards on the table and say that class and race are two expressions of the same dynamic, what Hall called “a discursive system for the production of otherness”7. Go back far enough and these same discourses of genetics, of ‘breeding’, of ‘high' and ‘low’ cultures were deployed against the working classes and peasantry of Europe. The ruling classes built their power on “fictional histories, positing distinct racial origins for rulers and the dominated”8
Making History
So where does Robin Hood fit into all of this? Really it’s a somewhat arbitrary choice of a person who lived in time before what we now call race was a thing. To call him white is not just historically inaccurate, but following Stuart Hall’s theory of race as continual work and reworking, action and action, to make such a statement is to perpetuate racial discourse, to put history in the service of the ugly present.
The work against this, however, is not just a statement, but active engagement in politics. ‘Choosing against whiteness’9 must be equal to the sacrifices of one’s own class position in service of true equality10 and be more than just rhetoric but a political act.
Britain, the political centre of world capitalism and Empire for so many years, never really had a revolution. Sure, there were many attempts, but unlike many other countries there is no native hero of independence, especially for England, which to many has become the default culture of the Anglosphere. One crude proxy for the potent symbols of English nationalism are the costumes that football fans wear on away days. In recent decades fans have taken to wearing Crusader costumes, complete with chainmail and red St George’s crosses.
As those who have seen many Robin Hood adaptions know, one of the key subplots is that ‘good’ King Richard is away crusading, leaving the kingdom in charge of his cruel brother John. Why has the crusader costume become the fashion of choice among English football fans and not the Lincoln green of Hood’s Merry Men? Perhaps it is easier to put the Crusader in service of modern nationalism, easier to rework the story of Christian knights going on a plundering jihad to football fans on holiday. No need to do much more than recast the characters.
Everyone knows Robin Hood, everyone likes Robin Hood, but he’s never really become the image of English nationalism that you would expect. To be sure, his name has been used to launch countless businesses, Council initiatives and even airports, but no one really connects to these artifices in a sentimental way. If you live in Nottingham, you’ll see the brand of Robin Hood everywhere. But it doesn’t work, not really. These appropriations may look like Robin Hood and his Merry Men on a superficial level but how can we really take seriously any attempt by the establishment to appropriate and claim for their own a band of outlaws? The real Hood lies elsewhere, in the interstices. Even just as a potential.
Robin Hood, the mythical historical person, lived in a time where there was a discursive system for the production of otherness, not race as we know it, but a class-race system between peasants and nobles, Anglo Saxons and Normans. Robin, so the legend goes, was a noble who let go of his privilege to break the rules and serve the poor. And this is perhaps why he has endured as a myth, one that cannot easily be appropriated by capitalism or racial ideology, but one that has all the potential in the world to be reworked in service of new commons and new ethnicities. The story of Robin Hood is one of sacrifice, of choosing the difficult path, of work against difference.
If you’ve got this far, well done! I’m still fairly new to blogging out these articles and finding my voice as a writer. I’m certainly trying to find that uneasy balance between a more personable down-to-earth style and the need to introduce academic concepts and theory, which often leads to the more abstract way of writing. What did you think about the writing, does it shift too much or would you prefer it to be more informal, or more formal?
Would love to know your thoughts on the subject too. One thing I’m trying to do with ExMultitude is draw connections between social phenomena that no one else has before. In this case, race and Robin Hood. The idea is that by juxtaposing things we end up seeing them in totally new lights. Did this work for you here? Or did it feel too gimmicky.
Thanks again for subscribing, the more subscribers I have the more I feel compelled to write!
Warmly,
Ewan.
DuBois. W.E.B. (1935) Black Reconstruction. An Essay Towards A History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880. New York. Harcourt Brace and Company.
Sanjay, I. (2021) How imperial hopes for the Commonwealth led to British citizenship being redefined along racial lines. Available from https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/commonwealth-hostile-environment/
Hall, S. (2017) The Fateful Triangle. Race Ethnicity, Nation. Mercer, K. (ed) Cambridge. Harvard University Press.
Stephen Campbell & Elliott Prasse-Freeman (2021): Revisiting the Wages of Burman-Ness: Contradictions of Privilege in Myanmar, Journal of Contemporary Asia
Hall, (2017) p.126.
Hall, S. (1996) New Ethnicities. In Morley, D. Chen, K. (eds) Stuart Hall. Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies. London. Routledge.
Hall (2017), p.83
Robinson, C. (1983) Black Marxism. Chapel Hill. The University of North Carolina Press