Reflections on race, class and multicultural entanglements

KEYWORDS:

• Multiculture
• racism
• race
• conviviality
• class

I am grateful to the contributors to this symposium for engaging with Fighting Identity in such good faith and with such generosity. I will use this rejoinder to respond to some of the threads that the contributors pulled upon, as well as clarifying some arguments I made within Fighting Identity, in addition to drawing out some wider reflections. I have ordered my response along three core themes; 1) embodied ethnographic reflections, 2) convivial clarifications and 3) anti-racist horizons, which I believe reflect many of the core comments kindly offered by Sivamohan Valluvan, Daniel Burdsey and Solinda Morgillo.

Embodied ethnographic reflections

I began Fighting Identity by foregrounding my methodological approach, as an immersive ethnography. In part, this approach was informed and encouraged by Loic Wacquant’s Body and Soul, an immersive ethnography of Woodlawn Boys Club, a Chicago-based boxing gym, wherein Wacquant justified his immersion and positionality vis-a-vis his respondents both in the book and beyond (Wacquant 2004, 2005). Wacquant, for instance, argued of the boxing universe, concerning his immersion, ‘native understanding of the object is here the necessary condition of an adequate knowledge of the object’ (Wacquant 2004, 59). Fighting Identity was an ethnography that was similarly mediated by my specific viewpoint as an active participant in this bodily sport, which I believed (and still do), gave me specific insights that would not otherwise have been possible to garner; not least the ability to draw out the nuances within inherently complex social situations, through virtue of understanding wider context.

In this spirit, Burdsey and Morgillo make specific reference to some of my claims regarding the virtues of such an embodied, immersive approach. Burdsey acknowledges the ‘conundrums’ I was grappling with as I muddled through my PhD, which is what Fighting Identity is born out of, as he notes ‘Fighting Identity provides a timely and thoughtful reminder of what can be complex and tricky situations for researchers’, particularly when difficult situations arise. Quite rightly, Burdsey queries my insistence on embodied ethnography and immersive approach, noting;

there is a danger that, if it becomes the normative course of action, it may create another practice of privilege by reinforcing hierarchies of ableness (in intersection with other subjectivities). This could impact who can access and belong in certain field sites, and limit what we value as knowledge, thereby further excluding the perspectives and insight of those whose analyses might be the most original, enlightening and valuable.

Partially, my insistence on the virtues of immersive ethnography related to it seeming somewhat marginal as an approach, which was reflected in some of the critiques levelled at Wacquant (see Wacquant 2005 for response). Perhaps this led to an over-emphasis on the importance of my approach, and with reflection, whilst I maintain a belief in the unique insights that can be offered through immersion, it is certainly not the only way to skin the ethnographic cat. Instructively, one of the most informative ethnographies that informed Fighting Identity, alongside Body and Soul was Lucia Trimbur’s excellent Come Out Swinging (2013), an ethnography of Gleason’s Gym, a storied boxing gym in Brooklyn, New York. Trimbur was not the immersive embodied ethnographic researcher, yet her book drew out some of the intricacies and nuances within Gleason’s Gym, that perhaps only an outsider can; someone with distance, who is less tied in with people already there.

On undertaking a PhD is that one is inclined to stake a position and then defend it, which in my case, perhaps resulted in an unhelpful either-or situation. To reiterate, there is no correct way to undertake ethnographic fieldwork and the pros and cons of different approaches have been debated ad nauseum elsewhere. Yet, it is of course true that immersion is not everything; it can be both an ethnographic blessing and a curse. Were I not immersed I would have done a very different ethnography, probably not as attuned to some of the complexities I witnessed, particularly vis-a-vis emergences of everyday racism and everyday anti-racist practices. However, perhaps the immersive ethnographer, committed to the space and the people, as Morgillio lays out, is more inclined to sanitize incidents, such as the everyday sexism and the use of ‘N-word’, to let things go that perhaps shouldn’t be let go, taking things for-granted that need greater explanation and interrogation. As Morgillo notes, ‘It would have been interesting here if he was reflecting more upon how it made him feel, and how he himself does or does not challenge the discursive binary of men and female in the space’. Many of my respondents dealt with such situations through brushing it off, explaining it away, due to their commitment, but what went under-examined in Fighting Identity, is how I likely subconsciously fell into the same traps. An outside observer would have likely, rightly or wrongly, come to different conclusions, which is why ethnography is always situated as inherently incomplete and imperfect.

Convivial clarifications

Whilst, as Valluvan captures, I imagined Fighting Identity as ‘ostensibly a Bourdieu meets Butler treatment of kickboxing’, at its core, it is a book about conviviality and convivial possibilities, drawing heavily on the work of Paul Gilroy, whose seminal After Empire still remains as politically salient 20 years since publication (2004). A major aim was to tease out the complex and everyday ways in which people attempt to build lives alongside one another through the pursuit of a shared passion that exists outside of ostensible, overt politics. Yet that is in some ways subtly political in the bonds and practices that are enacted, or at least pointed subtly to political possibilities often ruled out amidst the intoxicating allure of identity politics and liberal anti-racism. Of particular note, was what Les Back has described as the ‘metropolitan paradox’ (Back 1996) to refer to instances of how rich multicultural exchange can be proximate to emergent racism, which is a way to work through some of the complexities inherent within ‘convivial encounters’, which are often messy and wrought with friction.

There are two main points to pick out from the reviews here. Firstly, Burdsey notes

why and how does hitting and being hit (to simplistically characterize this activity) produce multicultural bonds and outcomes which contrast with other moments and measures of performance, such as a goal assist, covering for a teammate’s mistake, enabling a catch or running a preceding relay leg, let alone the components of non-sporting activities?

All team sports elicit a level of camaraderie and togetherness. However, a key distinction within the combat sports sphere is the two-fold realities of fighting as both inherently dangerous – which with it brings vulnerability between training partners – and the related sense of sacrifice, that is less extreme in other sports. This, as I argued in Fighting Identity, and in expanded arguments (Singh 2023), creates a unique condition not otherwise occurring within team sports. In my limited school football career as a roving left-winger pushed back to left-back (as all terrible wingers are forced to retreat), it was clear that we were trained differently depending on position, with higher status attributed to some over others. A left winger is not trained the same as a goalkeeper or as a centre-back, nor do they sacrifice the same way a fighter does; through rigorous diets and weight cuts. We also did not ostensibly train each other (e.g. through holding pads or sparring). Additionally, the risk of physically injuring a training partner (though it does exist) is not as accentuated in football or non-combat sports. Here, once more, I turn to Wacquant who poignantly argues;

The fleshly companionship that arises in the course of years of daily training and suffering side-by-side, and especially sparring together—which implies entrusting one’s body to the other, and an other increasingly like oneself—is conducive to developing such carnal connections.

(Wacquant 2005, 451)

It is this sense of ‘entrusting one’s body to the other’ that, to my mind, does not occur within other sports that are non-combat focused, as fighters literally lend their bodies to one another in pursuit of their fighting goals. Trimbur similarly observes how training to fight ‘engenders and enacts the practice of kinship’ (Trimbur 2013, 60).

Secondly, Morgillo remarks, Why is it accepted that the burden of being convivial together is distributed unequally among the members of the space? And, why is conviviality in this case study limited to a narrowly confined place such as the Muay Thai Gym? On the first question, I am not sure the burden is always distributed unequally in every multiracial encounter, even if within my fieldwork the disproportionate burden did fall on non-white fighters. There were also instances where ostensibly white fighters attempted to live convivial lives and demonstrated a remarkable capacity to be ‘at ease with difference’ (Rogaly 2020) in ways that ‘makes a nonsense of closed, fixed, and reified identity and turns attention towards the always-unpredictable mechanisms of identification’ (Gilroy 2004, xi). On the second question, I do not believe that the conviviality fostered by fighters was confined solely to the space, even if it was first cultivated and birthed on the gym floor. These experiences led people to live convivial lives outside of the gym, which were mediated through experiences within it, though these encounters were only given fleeting reference, due to the focus specifically on the extent to which bodies could be deracialized on the gym floor. More broadly, leading on from scholars like Gilroy, conviviality is an increasingly ordinary, everyday feature of urban encounters, even non-urban encounters, such as in a Smethwick-based desi pub (Singh, Valluvan, and Kneale 2024), wherein people demonstrate an unremarkable ability to co-exist, share space and overlap in different social settings that speak to the emergence of Gilroy’s ‘Little England[s]’ (Gilroy 2004).

Race, class and anti-racist horizons?

Valluvan rightly picks up on some worrying trends within mainstream discourses, noting the ‘populist tendency where working-class is read-only as a proxy for nationalist Englishness’, going on to note ‘inversely, mainstreamed anti-racism is increasingly presented on terms divorced of any classed bearings but also via a defensive, grievance-oriented suspicion of the everyday realities by which multiracial conviviality is in fact forged in ways receptive to collectivist and solidaristic openness’. In popular anti-racist parlance, class analysis is often stripped from view, which in turn allows nefarious political actors and pundits to easily disavow empty posturing about White privilege and so-on.¹ Yet, contrary to popular beliefs, a convivial disposition is not some ‘luxury belief’ of the ‘affluent left’, as Matthew Goodwin blindly argues.² Conviviality is far less glamorous and far more mundane, it is about everyday working-class multicultural bonds that are forged from below (Rogaly 2020) by those thrown together on the margins (Massey 2005). For instance, in my current research project, a British-Pakistani teenager I interviewed in the de-industrial North-Western town Rochdale told me how her Dad, who works in a factory in the town, takes great pride in being referred to as ‘uncle’ - a term of respect and endearment for an elder – by his Polish colleagues, hardly the posturing a ‘woke elite’. Perversely, her Dad, a Pakistani factory worker, is not someone who is spoken about by those championing a ‘left behind’ working-class in towns like Rochdale.

What is so often forgotten by those criticizing multiculturalism for political purposes, is that the majority of ethnic minorities in towns and cities across the UK are, in fact, working-class, living amongst the very ‘left behind’ white communities Goodwin and his ilk champion. Again, in places like Smethwick, where white and non-white residents experienced the sharp end of deindustrialization, we see in the desi pub, the everyday flickers of working-class multiculture that do not descend into an identitarian race to the bottom (Singh, Valluvan, and Kneale 2024).

Additionally, there is a tendency to disavow potential anti-racist openings vis-a-vis a retreat to racial enclosure, the very racial enclosure that Gilroy warns against. In this light, I am acutely aware that my respondents at times ‘messy and clumsy … political attitudes’ and subsequent ‘turns to crass normative reflexes’ would be scoffed at in different settings where politics is often framed around saying the right things, more than doing the right things. If we know that such ‘crass normative reflexes’ are inculcated as part of our common sense (or the common sense of many), why should we shun people for turning to such reflexes from time to time? And why should we be surprised? A focus on the convivial is not a focus on perfection but rather is about embracing the messiness, or at least being comfortable amongst the messiness and complexity that characterizes social life. Because as Valluvan remarks,

it is in fact the terms by which people engage each other in ordinary life that will be the conduit of subsequent anti-racist hopes and possibilities. Put differently, there is something about didacticism and politics qua politics that is often prohibitive, only appealing to self-confessional progressives – a confessional style that is largely moulded in a classed and often forbidding lifestyle liberalism. And indeed, what comes through in the book, and the gym it documents, is precisely the absence of didacticism and more an enchantment with a particular cultural form, and an enchantment with each other, and an enchantment with a sense of dignity and practical shared purpose that comes through being in the gym, and across such disparate social backgrounds.

It is too often the case that popular anti-racisms do not project a vision of a society that is warm, or joyful, with instead a suspicion of the other, rather than ‘an enchantment with each other’. My respondents did not come to conviviality as any lifestyle radicalism or a ‘luxury belief’, they came to it because they bonded over a shared pursuit in a shared setting, which led them to see the falsity of the logic of race as an organizing category. Instead, they saw people as akin to themselves, irrespective of pre-defined differences, embracing the radical potential of seeing the human in the other (Rogaly 2020). The aforementioned ‘metropolitan paradox’ attunes us to how social life is complex and amidst the ruins of racism, alternative modes of togetherness are manifest that can offer hope in hopeless times. People can live convivial lives but enact wider societal racism. People can live segregated lives but believe themselves to be anti-racists for tweeting about Black Lives Matter, looking down on those they see as saying the wrong things.

In the times we are in, to see ourselves in the other is a political necessity. Perhaps the most powerful recent iteration of this has been the pro-Palestine protests that have swept the UK, wherein a multi-racial working-class coalition (and cross-class coalition) has taken to the streets in demand of justice.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. https://www.politicshome.com/thehouse/article/its-time-to-give-white-working-class-boys-a-fair-shot-in-life

2. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12605653/MATTHEW-GOODWIN-hypocritical-mindset-woke-elite-exposes-huge-ideological-gulf-Labour-Tories.html