The far right in 2026 spends quite a bit of time arguing about what nationality people are. Suella Braverman, if I’ve grasped her ramblings correctly, thinks she is not English but could be British. Even further right varieties of ethno-nationalist fascists draw distinctions between who is and is not acceptable on the basis of race.
Catherine Hall has written in the current issue of Tribune on the long history of racial capitalism. I’ve extracted a paragraph
One of those methods, then as now, is ‘race’: the creation of naturalised differences between people, sorting them into unequal categories. ‘The White and the Negroe had not one common origin’, wrote the English slaveowner Edward Long in 1774, ‘there are extremely potent reasons for believing, that the White and the Negroe are two distinct species’. Flash forward to 2026 and we find similar sentiments among the circle of white nationalists who now sit in the White House; Somalis, says Donald Trump, have a ‘low IQ’. Thinking historically about how these ideas of race got made can help us to understand why forms of racialisation are so embedded, and so hard to shift.
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