The Comparative Alibi

One of the persistent difficulties in contemporary discussions of racism is that racial inequality is not obscured only through explicit denial or overt racial hostility. It can also be displaced through forms of reasoning that understand themselves as empathetic, egalitarian and even anti-racist. Among the most common of these is comparison. A Black person describes an experience of racialised suspicion, exclusion, professional disbelief, institutional mistreatment or hostility, and another person responds by identifying an apparently similar experience of their own: “that happened to me too.” The intervention may be intended to communicate solidarity. Yet comparison does not necessarily remain an act of recognition. Under particular conditions, it can become a mechanism through which the racial specificity of an experience is weakened, reclassified or removed from view.

The problem is not comparison itself. Comparative reasoning is indispensable to social analysis, and human beings frequently establish empathy by locating points of correspondence between their own experiences and those of others. Nor is the argument that suffering belongs exclusively to particular racial populations, that people racialised as white cannot experience racial hostility, or that every adverse encounter experienced by a Black person should be attributed to racism. Such propositions would substitute racial determinism for serious analysis. The question is instead what happens when similarity at the level of individual experience is treated as evidence of equivalence at the level of social meaning. An event may be available to people occupying different racial positions without being equally distributed, historically constituted or institutionally consequential across those positions.

This distinction can be expressed as one between phenomenological similarity and sociological equivalence. Two individuals may encounter experiences that resemble one another phenomenologically: both may be stopped by the police, questioned about their qualifications, treated with suspicion in a shop, excluded from an opportunity, subjected to hostility or mistaken for somebody else. They may even experience comparable emotions of humiliation, anger, fear or disbelief. Yet similarity of immediate experience does not establish that the encounters emerge from the same social processes. Sociological equivalence requires considerably more than resemblance. It requires attention to history, distribution, institutional pattern, social position, repetition, meaning and consequence.

This is particularly important in discussions of racialisation because racism is not reducible to an isolated interpersonal event. Racial meanings have histories. They are produced and reproduced through institutions, political formations, cultural representations, legal regimes, labour systems, policing practices, migration regimes and accumulated distributions of authority and vulnerability. An encounter therefore does not begin socially at the moment two individuals meet. The categories through which those individuals become intelligible may have been historically constituted long before either entered the interaction.

This is where the apparently innocuous phrase “that happened to me too” becomes analytically significant. The statement may be entirely true. The difficulty lies in the inferential work it is sometimes asked to perform. A Black person describes an experience as racialised. Another person identifies a superficially similar experience that occurred without an obvious racial dimension. The existence of the second experience is then treated as evidence that race need not be invoked to understand the first. Because the event can happen without racism, the reasoning suggests, racism cannot confidently explain its occurrence when experienced by a Black person.

The inference is unsound. The existence of multiple pathways to an outcome does not establish that one particular pathway is absent. Police scrutiny can affect people across racial categories while remaining racially disproportionate. Professional disbelief can be encountered by people from different backgrounds while racialised assumptions continue to shape perceptions of competence and authority. Exclusion from employment can result from numerous processes while racially patterned networks continue to affect access to opportunity. Demonstrating that an event can occur without racism does not demonstrate that racism does not structure its distribution, probability or meaning elsewhere.

The distinction is fundamental: universality of possibility does not establish equality of probability, frequency, distribution, meaning or consequence.

This proposition allows us to move beyond an unproductive competition over who is permitted to claim injury. The purpose of racial analysis is not to rank every individual experience according to a hierarchy of suffering. It is to understand how apparently individual encounters are situated within larger patterns. The appropriate analytical questions therefore concern not merely whether something happened, but to whom it happens, how often, under what conditions, within which institutional settings, against what historical background, and with what cumulative consequences.

Police stop and search illustrates the distinction particularly clearly. A white person may truthfully report having been stopped and searched by the police. That experience may have been frightening, humiliating, unjust or abusive. Nothing about racial analysis requires its denial. Yet the existence of such an encounter establishes only that police scrutiny is not exclusively experienced by Black people. Exclusivity is not the criterion required to establish racial disproportionality. If Black populations are disproportionately subjected to particular forms of police scrutiny, the existence of white individuals who have encountered the same police power does not dissolve the racial pattern. An anecdotal exception cannot, by itself, adjudicate a distribution.

The analytical error occurs when an individual experience is made to carry evidentiary weight that it cannot sustain. A statement about structural pattern is answered with an account of personal experience, and the personal experience is treated as though it constitutes a counterexample to the structure. Yet social structures are not mechanical laws producing identical outcomes for every person assigned to a category. They operate probabilistically and cumulatively. They shape distributions of exposure, advantage, disadvantage, credibility, vulnerability and opportunity without determining every individual life in precisely the same manner.

The existence of a wealthy Black person does not establish the absence of racialised economic inequality. The existence of a disadvantaged white person does not establish the absence of racialised advantage. The existence of a Black professor does not establish that racialised barriers within academia have disappeared. The existence of a white person subjected to police mistreatment does not establish that policing cannot be racially patterned. Individual variation is not evidence of structural absence.

This is precisely why anecdotal equivalence can become a form of epistemic displacement. A racialised experience situated within a longer history and institutional pattern is extracted from that context and reduced to an isolated event. Once isolated, it can be placed beside another isolated event that superficially resembles it. History disappears. Distribution disappears. Institutional repetition disappears. Cumulative exposure disappears. Differential access to authority and resources disappears. What remains are two individuals who appear to have experienced approximately the same thing.

The equivalence is produced through decontextualisation.

This process can be understood as a comparative alibi. The comparison supplies an alternative interpretive frame through which racial specificity can be rendered unnecessary. It does not necessarily refute the racialised account directly. Instead, it changes the unit of analysis. A pattern becomes an event; a historically constituted experience becomes an interpersonal difficulty; a structural claim becomes an anecdote. Once the unit of analysis has shifted, the racial interpretation appears excessive because the context that made it intelligible has already been removed.

The mechanism can take several forms. Anecdotal equivalence occurs when an isolated personal experience is used to destabilise a patterned racial claim. Categorical substitution occurs when one form of discrimination is introduced as though it provides explanatory leverage over another: gender discrimination, class exclusion or another form of mistreatment is placed beside racism in a manner that renders their social genealogies interchangeable. Universalisation occurs when a racialised experience is redescribed as something that simply “happens to everyone.” Historical decontextualisation occurs when the contemporary encounter is detached from the histories through which its racial meanings were produced. Colour-blind preclusion occurs when race is excluded from the interpretive framework before its possible relevance has been examined.

These mechanisms are related, but they are not identical. Together, however, they demonstrate how comparison can move from being an analytical method to becoming a technology of displacement.

Categorical substitution is particularly important because different forms of injury may resemble one another without becoming sociologically interchangeable. Someone may be mistaken for another person because of gendered assumptions. Somebody else may be subjected to explicit racial abuse. Both experiences can involve misrecognition, humiliation or discrimination. Yet the fact that they share certain experiential qualities does not mean that one provides an explanatory substitute for the other. Gendered misrecognition does not invalidate racialised misrecognition; class discrimination does not explain away ableism; and an experience of general hostility does not establish that racial hostility is merely another instance of the same phenomenon.

Ethically and analytically responsible comparison must therefore preserve difference as well as identify similarity. Otherwise, comparison ceases to expand knowledge and begins to flatten it.

The distinction also exposes the limitations of a loosely universalised “me too” model of recognition. There are contexts in which collective identification around shared forms of injury has been politically powerful. Yet not every form of inequality becomes more intelligible by establishing experiential sameness. Racialised positions are historically constituted, and Blackness and whiteness cannot be treated as interchangeable locations occupied by otherwise socially identical subjects. The racial categories themselves have been produced relationally and asymmetrically through particular histories of power.

This matters when racial hostility directed towards people occupying different racial positions is placed into straightforward equivalence. Racial hostility towards a white person can be real, degrading and morally objectionable. Acknowledging that fact does not require us to conclude that every racially hostile encounter possesses the same historical or sociological meaning. Anti-Black racism enters contemporary life with accumulated histories of Atlantic slavery, colonial domination, racial science, segregation, imperial governance, racialised labour, exclusionary citizenship, policing and the cultural production of Black inferiority. These histories do not mechanically determine the meaning of every contemporary interaction, but neither do they disappear simply because the immediate encounter occurs between individuals in the present.

The point is not that historical suffering can be converted into a permanent scale through which every contemporary injury is ranked. That would transform structural analysis into competitive victimhood. The argument is instead that interpersonal similarity does not erase historical asymmetry. Two racially hostile statements may appear superficially symmetrical while emerging from different histories of representation, institutionalisation and social power. Recognition of one person’s suffering therefore does not require the declaration that the experiences are sociologically equivalent.

My own biography makes the contextual nature of racialisation particularly visible to me. I came to Britain at the age of thirty, having grown up in post-independence Zimbabwe. My early life was not organised through precisely the same racial formation that I would later encounter in Britain. This matters because racialisation is not simply an internal identity, nor is it reducible to a set of personal experiences accumulated from childhood and carried unchanged across geographical space. Racialisation is relational and historically situated. It is produced through the institutions, social classifications, cultural representations and distributions of power into which people enter.

Migration does not place a Black person outside the racial history of the society into which they migrate simply because their personal biography was formed elsewhere. On arriving in Britain, I entered a society in which Blackness already possessed historically accumulated meanings before I appeared within it. Those meanings had been shaped through empire, slavery, colonialism, racial science, migration, policing, labour, immigration control, citizenship and contested ideas of British national belonging. I did not need personally to have lived through every component of that history for its institutional and cultural afterlives to become part of the social environment through which I could subsequently be read.

This demonstrates something important about diaspora. A person can cross a geographical border and enter a racial field whose formation predates their arrival by centuries. The social world does not wait for an individual’s biography to correspond to its racial categories before assigning meaning to them. One may therefore acquire a different racialised social location without having undergone the same biographical trajectory as people born within that national context. Blackness in the diaspora is heterogeneous, but heterogeneity does not place Black migrants outside the structures through which Blackness has become socially meaningful.

This has consequences in ordinary encounters. There have been occasions when I have moved through public space alongside my husband and nevertheless experienced that space differently. In one shop, I experienced being followed in a manner that made me feel that I was being regarded as a potential thief. When my husband became visible, the social register changed and he was greeted warmly. The analytical significance of such an encounter does not depend upon proving that nobody who is not Black has ever been followed in a shop. That would be an absurd evidentiary threshold. The more revealing feature is the differential allocation of suspicion and trust within the same immediate social environment.

Such relational comparisons can be analytically valuable precisely because they do not introduce an unrelated anecdote to neutralise racial specificity. They enable us to examine how different bodies become differently legible within a shared setting. Who is readily available to suspicion? Who is granted ordinary trust? Who must demonstrate legitimacy? Who is presumed to belong? Who becomes visible as a potential threat, and who becomes visible as a customer, professional, citizen or authoritative interlocutor?

These questions extend beyond retail environments. In professional and intellectual settings, credibility itself can be unevenly distributed. If a Black professional speaks and another person is more readily treated as authoritative, the matter is not resolved by observing that everybody has, at some point, experienced being ignored. The sociological question concerns whether authority, competence and credibility are patterned: whose expertise is presumptively recognised, whose requires substantiation, whose account settles a question, and whose knowledge remains provisional until confirmed elsewhere.

This brings the argument into conversation with the politics of epistemic authority. Racialised people do not simply experience social conditions; they also produce knowledge about those conditions through repeated exposure to them. Such knowledge is neither infallible nor beyond criticism. Lived experience does not produce omniscience. Yet rejecting epistemic infallibility does not require treating all social positions as epistemically interchangeable. People repeatedly exposed to particular institutional practices may recognise patterns that remain less visible to those who encounter the same institutions from differently positioned locations.

The comparative alibi can interfere with this knowledge by substituting the outsider’s anecdote for the racialised speaker’s accumulated interpretation. One person says, in effect, that they recognise a pattern because they have encountered versions of it repeatedly. Another responds that something superficially similar happened to them once. Yet the second experience can acquire sufficient interpretive authority to destabilise the first. The isolated anecdote becomes capable of overruling accumulated situated knowledge.

This is not simply disagreement. It is a question about whose interpretation is permitted to define the phenomenon.

The same problem arises in the discourse of colour-blindness. The declaration “I don’t see colour; I see human beings” is often intended as a statement of moral equality. The ethical aspiration may be sincere. Yet there is a fundamental distinction between refusing racial hierarchy and refusing to perceive racialisation. The former rejects the proposition that racial categories should determine human worth. The latter can make it more difficult to analyse the ways in which racial categories continue to structure social experience.

There is, in other words, a difference between asserting that race should not matter and demonstrating that race does not matter. The first is a normative commitment; the second is an empirical claim. Commitment to equality cannot itself establish that equality has been achieved.

Colour-blindness can therefore generate epistemic error when it excludes a potentially relevant social category before inquiry has begun. If race is removed from consideration in advance, racialised patterns become difficult to recognise by definition. A Black person reports an experience that they understand within a broader racial pattern, while the colour-blind framework searches for race-neutral analogues: everybody experiences suspicion; everybody struggles to find employment; everybody gets questioned; everybody encounters rude people; everybody is sometimes treated unfairly. Each statement may contain truth, yet the accumulation of universal statements can render patterned inequality analytically invisible.

The problem is not that universal human experiences do not exist. It is that universality at one level does not negate differentiation at another.

Human beings share vulnerability to humiliation, exclusion, illness, bereavement, unemployment, institutional mistreatment and interpersonal cruelty. Yet human beings also inhabit histories. They enter labour markets, educational systems, neighbourhoods, professions, borders and social networks whose opportunities and risks have not been distributed randomly across generations. Common humanity and unequal social positioning are not contradictory propositions.

Indeed, taking common humanity seriously should require attention to the conditions under which supposedly equal human beings have been treated unequally.

Employment networks provide a useful example. People frequently obtain opportunities through somebody they know. A friend mentions a vacancy, a relative facilitates an introduction, a colleague recommends somebody, or an established professional explains how to enter a particular field. Viewed individually, these interactions may appear entirely neutral. There need be no explicit racial preference and no conscious discriminatory intent.

Yet networks themselves are historically produced. Access to influential professionals, familiarity with particular occupations, intergenerational knowledge, prestigious educational institutions, geographical mobility and relationships capable of opening professional doors are unevenly distributed. The important question is therefore not simply whether everybody can theoretically possess connections. It is who is positioned to know whom.

This is how unequal outcomes can be reproduced through interactions that appear individually ordinary. If access to opportunity is partly mediated through social networks, and if historically produced inequalities shape access to those networks, then thousands of interactions involving no explicit racial exclusion can cumulatively reproduce racialised advantage and disadvantage. Structural inequality does not require an openly discriminatory actor at every point in its reproduction.

This is also why individual exceptions cannot settle structural questions. The existence of Black people with extensive professional networks does not establish equality of access, just as the existence of white people without influential networks does not establish the absence of patterned advantage. Structural analysis concerns distributions across populations and institutions over time. It cannot be reduced to the search for an individual whose biography contradicts the average tendency.

The comparative alibi becomes particularly consequential when apparently progressive commitments are involved. People who understand themselves as liberal, egalitarian, anti-racist or simply committed to treating everyone as human may sincerely reject explicit racial discrimination while remaining uncomfortable with racial specificity. The insistence upon common humanity can then become a means of moving too rapidly from difference to universality before the difference has been adequately understood.

This may occur partly because racism is frequently imagined as the property of obviously hateful people. If racism is understood primarily as conscious animosity, then recognising racialised assumptions within ordinary institutions, progressive spaces or one’s own interpretive practices can appear to threaten one’s moral identity. The conversation therefore shifts towards declarations of innocence: I treat everyone the same; I don’t see colour; I would have behaved the same way with anybody; I have Black friends; something similar happened to me.

Yet a Black person describing a racialised experience is not necessarily making a judgement about another person’s entire moral character. They may simply be attempting to describe a social phenomenon.

A conversation about racism does not always require a defendant. Sometimes it requires a witness.

The distinction matters because comparison can easily become defensive when the listener experiences racial specificity as accusation. Instead of asking what the Black speaker is identifying, the listener begins demonstrating why the phenomenon cannot be racial because they themselves are not racist, because another explanation is possible, or because something similar has happened outside the racial group. The listener’s innocence becomes the centre of a conversation that originally concerned somebody else’s experience.

This is where comparison moves furthest from solidarity.

Genuine solidarity does not require experiential possession. One does not need to have experienced another person’s particular form of injury in order to recognise its reality. Indeed, the assumption that empathy requires an analogue within one’s own biography may itself deserve scrutiny. We often imagine understanding as an act of self-reference: I can understand you because I have experienced something similar. But this makes one’s own experience the measure through which another person’s testimony becomes intelligible.

A more demanding ethical position is possible. It might be described as non-appropriative solidarity: the capacity to recognise another person’s experience without requiring that experience to become equivalent to one’s own.

Such solidarity permits the listener to say, in effect: I have not experienced what you have experienced. I recognise that its full historical and social meaning may not be available to me through personal analogy. I do not need to possess an equivalent experience in order to take yours seriously.

This form of recognition does not prohibit comparison. It changes the ethical conditions under which comparison occurs. Comparison should expand understanding without dispossessing the original speaker of the specificity of their experience. It should generate questions rather than prematurely supply answers. It should identify points of connection while remaining attentive to historical and structural difference.

The distinction might therefore be formulated as one between comparative solidarity and comparative cancellation. Comparative solidarity uses similarity to approach another person’s experience while preserving its specificity. Comparative cancellation uses similarity to dissolve specificity. The first says, my experience helps me appreciate something of what you are describing. The second says, my experience demonstrates that your racial interpretation is unnecessary.

The words “me too” can contain either possibility.

What determines their meaning is not simply the speaker’s intention but the discursive work the comparison performs.

This is particularly important when Black people express disappointment in institutions, media organisations, political movements or public figures that regard themselves as progressive. If Black people say that they feel abandoned, betrayed or insufficiently protected, the immediate response need not be an inventory of that institution’s previous anti-racist credentials. Past solidarity does not confer permanent immunity from criticism, and good intentions do not determine how contemporary actions are experienced by those affected by them.

The compulsion to explain why Black people should interpret their disappointment differently reproduces the broader epistemic problem. Something external to Black testimony is introduced to modify its meaning before the testimony has been allowed to stand. What may appear to the listener as context or balance may function for the speaker as displacement.

Context is indispensable to intellectual inquiry. But context becomes something else when it is selectively mobilised whenever Black suffering approaches the centre of analysis.

There is a difference between complexity and displacement. Complexity enables us to understand the phenomenon more fully. Displacement changes the phenomenon under discussion while presenting the change as intellectual sophistication.

This is why anti-Black racism should be capable of being discussed as anti-Black racism without an immediate requirement to introduce every other population capable of suffering. Temporarily centring a particular racialised experience does not imply that other suffering is unreal or unimportant. Recognition is not a finite resource. The acknowledgement of Black-specific injury does not diminish the humanity of anybody else.

Nor must Black people establish collective innocence before racism directed towards them becomes worthy of examination. The introduction of Black criminality, Black family structures, Black political behaviour or other forms of Black culpability in response to accounts of racial injury can operate according to the same comparative logic. The original phenomenon is displaced by a new question: not what happened to Black people, but what Black people themselves have done.

Again, the substituted topic may be capable of legitimate analysis in its own context. Its factual possibility does not establish its relevance to the question being discussed.

The recurring demand for such comparison reveals how difficult it remains for Black experience to occupy the analytical foreground without qualification. Black suffering is frequently required to reassure the wider conversation that it will not claim too much interpretive space. Another group’s suffering must be acknowledged, another explanation introduced, another form of discrimination placed alongside it, or an individual counterexample supplied.

The result is not necessarily the explicit denial of racism. It can be something subtler: the gradual dissolution of racial specificity through comparison.

The comparative alibi therefore names more than an irritating conversational habit. It identifies a mode of reasoning through which structural claims can be transformed into anecdotal disputes, historical asymmetries can be flattened into interpersonal similarities, and situated racial knowledge can be displaced by apparently neutral counterexamples. Its power lies precisely in the fact that it need not announce itself as denial. It may arrive as empathy, fairness, universalism, balance or common sense.

For this reason, the alternative cannot simply be a prohibition on comparison. The task is to develop a more rigorous ethics and methodology of comparison. Such an approach would ask not only what experiences share, but what differentiates their historical formation; not only whether an event can happen across groups, but how its probability and consequences are distributed; not only whether two people experienced similar emotions, but whether the institutions producing those emotions operate similarly upon them; and not only whether an analogy is possible, but what knowledge is lost when the analogy becomes the dominant interpretive frame.

It would also require greater epistemic humility. People need not have experienced an injury in order to recognise that another person possesses knowledge about it. The absence of personal equivalence need not create an empathy deficit. On the contrary, acknowledging that one’s own biography does not provide the measure of another person’s reality may constitute a more serious form of recognition.

The appropriate response to racialised testimony is therefore not always to search for sameness. Sometimes it is to remain with difference long enough to understand what difference means.

This does not require accepting every interpretation uncritically. Black people, like all human beings, can misunderstand encounters, disagree about racism and interpret the same circumstances differently. Critical inquiry remains necessary. But criticism becomes more rigorous, not less, when it distinguishes between individual event and social pattern, between possible cause and patterned mechanism, between interpersonal injury and historical structure, and between similarity of experience and equivalence of social position.

The central proposition remains deceptively simple: an event can happen to everybody without happening equally to everybody.

From this follows a broader methodological principle. The social significance of an experience cannot be established solely by demonstrating that an analogous event exists elsewhere. What matters is the relationship between event and structure. An anecdote is not a distribution. An exception is not a pattern. Similarity is not equivalence. Universal possibility is not equal probability. Common humanity is not social sameness.

Once these distinctions are restored, “that happened to me too” no longer settles the racial question. It may begin a conversation, provide an empathetic bridge or identify an unexpected point of correspondence. But it cannot, by itself, determine what another person’s experience means.

The more consequential questions are different. What does this experience become when situated within its history? Who encounters it repeatedly? Which institutions reproduce it? What assumptions make it intelligible? How are credibility, suspicion, authority and belonging distributed within those encounters? What forms of cumulative knowledge emerge among those repeatedly exposed to them? And what disappears from analysis when an individual counterexample is permitted to stand in for the social structure?

These questions lead towards a conception of solidarity that does not require sameness. They permit recognition without appropriation and empathy without equivalence. They make it possible to acknowledge that another person’s experience may contain dimensions one cannot access through one’s own biography and that this limitation does not prevent serious listening.

Perhaps one of the most important responses available in conversations about racialised experience is therefore also one of the simplest: I have not experienced what you have experienced, and I do not need to have experienced it in order to believe that you have.

Such a response does not abandon intellectual scrutiny. It refuses only the assumption that scrutiny must begin by translating somebody else’s experience into one’s own.

The problem with the comparative alibi is ultimately not that it compares. It is that comparison can become cancellation. The isolated anecdote can become an alibi for the structure; common humanity can become an alibi for refusing racial difference; colour-blindness can become an alibi for not examining racialisation; and one person’s superficially analogous experience can become an alibi for not listening to what another person is actually attempting to describe.

A more adequate racial analysis must resist this movement. It must be capable of holding commonality and difference together without allowing one to erase the other. It must recognise that human beings can experience similar injuries while inhabiting differently structured worlds, and that acknowledging those differences does not divide humanity but makes possible a more truthful account of the conditions under which humanity is lived.

The question, therefore, should not simply be whether the same thing has ever happened to somebody who is not Black. In many instances, the answer will be yes, and that answer may tell us almost nothing about the racial pattern under examination.

The more intellectually serious question is what it means that a particular experience keeps happening to particular people, with particular frequency, through particular institutions, against particular histories and with particular cumulative consequences.

Until that question is allowed to remain in view, comparison will continue to possess the capacity to masquerade as recognition while functioning as displacement. And Black people will continue to find that even when describing experiences generated through racialised histories and institutions, the conversation can be redirected towards somebody else’s biography before their own account has been fully heard.

The challenge is not to eliminate comparison but to refuse its use as an alibi against history. It is to develop forms of listening and analysis capable of recognising that another person’s experience does not become credible only when we can locate ourselves within it. Solidarity need not begin with me too. Sometimes its more ethically and intellectually serious beginning is the recognition that this did not happen to me in the way it happened to you, and that difference is precisely why I need to listen.

Definition: The comparative alibi describes the use of an apparently analogous experience to displace the historical, structural or racial specificity of another person's account, thereby converting patterned inequality into anecdotal equivalence.