But is there more to it than that?

In the more conscious, ideologically motivated forms of racism, there is always an element of unconscious fantasy in play. As an example of some of these complexities, consider the police investigation into the Stephen Lawrence case. As part of their attempt to “nail” the five young white men widely regarded as having committed the murder, the police set up a concealed camera to film the suspects at home. In the footage that has been released, we see the group prancing about the living room, brandishing knives and chanting racist insults. These are young men deliberately getting off on the racial fantasies and rituals of violence that bond them together as a gang over and against black youth. But is there more to it than that?
Some observers have been struck by the histrionic quality of the play-acting, as if it were a pantomime performed for the benefit of an invisible audience, presumably made up of their white peers.

Such rehearsals are an intrinsic part of the culture of racial violence – a way of “psyching” oneself up to the deed. This element of premeditation, which belongs to the realm of racial fantasy, is a necessary condition for some contingent encounter to take place in the real world where an individual or group is singled out for attack. What is involved is an acting out of racial fantasies, and these have to be investigated to make the event fully intelligible.One often-ignored aspect of the whole performance is the desire to lay claim to an act of violence without being held morally or legally responsible for it. This position of omnipotence is often underwritten by a well developed culture of silence which ensures that many people in the neighbourhood ‘know who dunnit’, although no one will come forward to give evidence; instead rumour and gossip carry the vital messages, making everyone party to the secret except the police. Perpetrators thus have – from their point of view – the best of both worlds: local “fame” (or infamy), and immunity from prosecution.The rationales of racial attack are many and various. They include resentment at economic success, anxiety about losing local prides of place, panic at mere physical presence; yet across all these instances runs a common underlying desire to punish the target group for daring to exist at all.What we have to recognise in all acts of racial violence is not only the sadistic pleasure of the immediate perpetrators, but also the more subtle ways in which this becomes geared into collective feeling.What are the practical implications of recognising the importance of fantasy? In dealing with racial violence, moral and legal sanctions are important; they define the boundaries of official tolerance and hopefully deter would-be perpetrators; but by definition such measures do not engage with unconscious racism in the sense I have given it here.

Unless we attend to this dimension in its own right, anti-racist policies, with their overwhelmingly rationalist stance, will fail to engage with the deeper springs of the popular imagination. It is not enough to demonstrate the irrationality of racist sentiments and beliefs; we need to tackle the reasons why these feelings and ideas continue to have such an insidious hold over so many hearts and minds in so many different contexts.A start would be to recognise just how driven and obsessive many racist acts are. A good, if unlikely, example of this is Billy Connolly’s routine about the ludicrous lengths to which a racist has to go literally to shit on his black neighbours’ doorstep: first he has to spoon his own turd out of the loo, then he carries it in a paper bag down the road, maybe he gets stopped by someone who asks him what he is carrying, then he has to pick it out of the bag and drop it through the letterbox. No one who has seen the routine is left in any doubt as to how repugnant racism is, but also how absurd – and fantasy driven – are its rationales..