Postracial sentimentality and the validation of state racism

In Everybody’s Protest Novel, James Baldwin notably defined ‘sentimentality’ as ‘the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion… the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel.’ Drawing on Baldwin, this chapter examines the empirical example of strident UK Conservative governmental rhetoric on immigration control and race equality in the aftermath of the Brexit referendum as a form of postracial sentimentality. Given that the Conservative governments of the late 2010s and early 2020s were the most ethnically diverse ever, two key questions are addressed: Why did some senior Conservative politicians from minority ethnic backgrounds advocate policies and laws to severely limit immigration and weaken race equality? And why was their support for such a harsh agenda often so enthusiastic? To start, the chapter presents an overview of the ambivalent relationship between politics, rationality and emotion, followed by an account of their interplay within British post-war race relations and the paradigmatic case of Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech. Moving forward to the present, senior minority ethnic Conservative politicians’ anti-race equality and strong border control positions are then explained as indicative of an ‘actually-existing postracial society’ dialectic. The chapter argues that taken together, this dialectic presents an emotionally resonant ‘common sense’ that also forestalls criticism of the governmental agenda as racist. Overall, when spoken through postracial tribunes, the powerful affective appeal against race equality and immigration exemplifies a sentimentality that, in Baldwin’s estimation, amounts to a dispassionate antipathy towards human flourishing and is ‘always… the signal of secret and violent inhumanity.’