A Vote Leave rally in London, June 15, 2016. Britons on Thursday voted on a referendum to decide whether to remain in the European Union, or leave it. (Adam Ferguson / The New York Times)
An unexpected future in which the United Kingdom no longer remains a member of the European Union is suddenly, shockingly imminent. Moreover, it may no longer be the “United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland” for much longer.
The United Kingdom’s referendum on whether to remain in the European Union was non-binding, but its consequences have already been immediate, global and drastic. British Prime Minister David Cameron has announced he will step down before October, but those of us who would like to celebrate the departure of the man who took an axe to the National Health Service cannot, since he is likely to be followed to by someone even worse, from his party’s further-right wing. Meanwhile, leaders in Scotland and Northern Ireland, whose residents overwhelmingly voted to remain within the EU, are now openly calling for independence from the UK, which in the latter’s case could mean a united Ireland. And the British pound has sunk to its weakest value against the US dollar in more than 31 years.
Americans trying to understand the Brexit dynamic should know that there’s a very Anglo-Saxon form of racism at work here, in which the parameters of Anglo-Saxon whiteness exclude not only the refugees from the global South who are supposedly coming to the UK via Europe, but also continental Europeans usually understood to be white by Americans. The noxious continuum of this long-standing Anglo-Saxon racism is apparent in everything from The Sun’s coverage of any football match against “the Germans” to the fact that respectable liberal broadsheets offer a platform for pundits such as Julie Burchill to complain about immigrants from within Europe — specifically Albanians, Poles and other Eastern Europeans, whose whiteness is questioned.
This explains why the pro-Brexit rhetoric…