After writing about colonialism for a bit Abdel-Magied concluded that:
The kind of disrespect for others infused in Lionel Shriver’s keynote is the same force that sees people vote for Pauline Hanson. It’s the reason our First Peoples are still fighting for recognition, and it’s the reason we continue to stomach offshore immigration prisons. It’s the kind of attitude that lays the foundation for prejudice, for hate, for genocide.36
To its credit The Guardian subsequently published the full text of Shriver’s speech so that its readers could discern for themselves whether her Brisbane address had been a witty assault on a fad or a foundation stone of fascism.
Shriver survived the backlash in part because she has a reputation as a no-hostages truth-teller. But still there was an obvious incentive for anyone wishing to claim to be one of her victims. Had Abdel-Magied (who subsequently left Australia under a cloud of her own) chosen to write an impersonal and thoughtful critique of Shriver’s position, she would have been unlikely to draw attention to herself and have her work immediately taken up and republished in a major newspaper. Had she not felt the corners of her mouth turning down and explained to her mother that their mere presence in the hall ‘legitimized’ the hate, then her opinion would have been no more valid (or public) than anyone else’s. This is an important cog in the crowd-maddening mechanism: the person who professes themselves most aggrieved gets the most attention. Anyone who is unbothered is ignored. In an age of shouting for attention on social media the mechanism rewards outrage over sanguinity. As for Shriver, in the years since her Brisbane speech she has been one of the few authors to publicly object to publishing houses introducing sexual and racial quota systems to decide on anything rather than literary merit, when it comes to which books and which authors they should publish.
The Central Problem
The central problem underneath all of this is a colossal confusion, a confusion caused not by a misunderstanding but by the fact that as societies we are trying to run several programmes at once. On the one hand there is the programme which declares the world to be a place where a well-lived life consists of appreciating something from every culture and indeed making it easier to access those cultures. On the other hand we are running another programme at the same time which declares that cultural boundaries may only be crossed under certain conditions. Not only has this second programme not been finished, but the job of finishing writing it appears to be open to absolutely anybody who wants to take it over. There is also a programme which recognizes that race and culture are not the same thing. And yet another – running concurrently – that says they are so much the same thing that encroaching on somebody else’s culture is an act of racist aggression or ‘appropriation’.
Underneath this is a matter of such explosive danger that it is perhaps no wonder it is kept deeply submerged. It is a question we do not ask because we have already decided what the answers cannot be. That question is whether race is a hardware or a software issue. In the past of which National Geographic and other enterprises feel some rightful shame, race was thought to be the most hardware issue of all. What race someone came from defined them. Often to the exclusion and detriment of all else. As the twentieth century progressed a more enlightened realization grew – which was that race may be important but it was not unbridgeable. Indeed, people could be as much a part of another culture or people as they liked, so long as they wanted to be and immersed themselves in it in a spirit of gratitude and love. There were caveats in the later twentieth century, such as a recognition that this path could only allow traffic to move in one direction. An Indian may become distinctly British but a white British man could not become an Indian. The boundaries of what is or is not possible here shift subtly but continuously. They shifted in recent decades around attitudes towards inter-racial adoptions, and whether or not it was beneficial or appropriate for children of one racial background to be brought up by parents of a different race. But the problem for us is that this whole territory is on the move again. And the early signals this time are not just that they could shift anywhere but that they look like they are shifting in some of the worst imaginable directions.
Is black Political? the speech not the speaker
In 2016 when Peter Thiel endorsed Donald Trump at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland he immediately became a non-gay in the eyes of the most prominent gay magazine in America. To have gone to the right – and to the Donald Trump right at that – was such an egregious fault that Advocate excommunicated Thiel from the church of gay. Two years later precisely the same pattern played out among black Americans.
After almost a year of silence on Twitter, Kanye West returned to the medium in the spring of 2018. As is one of his gifts, he immediately began making news. In April he praised the black conservative commentator and activist Candace Owens. This was after a campus talk Owens had given at UCLA in which she castigated some people from the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement who were protesting against her and compared them with black students sitting in the front rows listening to her talk. In a clip that went viral Owens said:
What is happening right now in the black community . . . There is an ideological civil war happening. Black people that are focused on their past and shouting about slavery. And black people focused on their futures. What you’re seeing is victim mentality versus victor mentality.
She went on to accuse the protestors of being hooked on ‘oppression’.
After watching this video Kanye West tweeted out ‘I love the way Candace Owens thinks’. And for a moment it was as though there had been a glitch in the matrix. Or at least a glitch in the Twitter universe. There had been plenty of black conservatives over the years, including a Supreme Court Justice and some of America’s most prominent thinkers. But never before had a celebrity of the star wattage of Kanye West even implied that there was any party other than the Democratic Party for black Americans to give their political allegiance to. And here was one half of what is – for better and/or worse – one of the most famous couples on the planet willing to walk into this minefield.
It might be pointed out that Kanye West had several things going for him that allowed him to begin making this journey. The first was what used to be called F-you cash. Even if his dalliances into politics made him toxic among large segments of his audience base – both black and white – then he could always sit back on his and his wife’s cash. The other thing that made Kanye West able to do this was a widespread sense, which he doesn’t mind playing with: that he is slightly unhinged.
The praise of Candace Owens soon developed into open praise of Donald Trump. And by October 2018 West was in the Oval Office at a summit meeting and lunch, which was strange even by relative standards. This included West doing most of the talking, while the President sat on the opposite side of the desk, nodding carefully. West used the opportunity to talk about the black community, prison reform, how wearing a red ‘MAGA’ hat made him feel ‘like Superman’ and also about the presence of ‘alternate universes’. He complained that ‘People expect that if you’re black you have to be Democrat.’ He went on to say that he loved Trump.
From the moment that Kanye West began to go down this route a response could be predicted at some point. It was Ta-Nehisi Coates who aimed the shot of greatest length and with the greatest impact. In an essay in The Atlantic he wrote about his own upbringing and his fondness for Michael Jackson. He wrote about Jackson’s unarguably bizarre transformation from a young black boy with an afro to the almost translucent waxwork that he became in later life. And then Coates decided to compare Kanye with Michael Jackson.
‘What Kanye West seeks is what Michael Jackson sought,’ he wrote. ‘West calls his struggle the right to be a “free thinker”, and he is, indeed, championing a kind of freedom – a white freedom, freedom without consequence, freedom without criticism, freedom to be proud and ignorant.’ As the headline put it, ‘I’m not black – I’m Kanye: Kanye West wants freedom – white
freedom.’37 Kanye had tripped over the same wire as Thiel. At some point minority political grievances transformed into minority political activism and from there moved into being just politics. Claiming the existence of voting blocs along minority group lines benefits certain politicians looking for voter blocs and it can benefit professional middle men who present themselves as speaking for an entire community in order to gain their own forms of preferment. But this is an exceptionally dangerous juncture, and one that each rights issue in turn has arrived at.
It suggests that you are only a member of a recognized minority group so long as you accept the specific grievances, political grievances and resulting electoral platforms that other people have worked out for you. Step outside of these lines and you are not a person with the same characteristics you had before but who happens to think differently from some prescribed norm. You have the characteristics taken away from you. So Thiel is no longer gay once he endorses Trump. And Kanye West is no longer black when he does the same thing. This suggests that ‘black’ isn’t a skin colour, or a race – or at least not those things alone. It suggests that ‘black’ – like gay – is in fact a political ideology. This presumption goes so deep – and is so rarely mentioned – that it is generally simply assumed.
The London School of Economics is, as it boasts of itself, one of the world’s leading universities of the social sciences: ‘With an international intake and a global reach, LSE has always put engagement with the wider world at the heart of its mission.’ Over at its LSE Review of Books page in May 2012 a review appeared of a new book by Thomas Sowell. Intellectuals and Society had come out two years earlier, but in the world of academia intellectual drive-by shootings often happen at a more leisurely pace than in the rest of society.
The reviewer, Aidan Byrne, was the ‘Senior Lecturer in English and Media/Cultural Studies’ at Wolverhampton University. In this capacity – his byline informed us – ‘he specialises in masculinity in interwar Welsh and political fiction, and teaches on a wide range of modules’. A perfect authority for the LSE Review of Books to put in judgement over Sowell.
For his part, Byrne was ‘unimpressed’ by the ‘highly partisan’ nature of the book. And so, two years after Sowell’s book had been published, Byrne took aim and attempted to fire. From his opening line he warned that ‘Intellectuals and Society consists of a series of outdated and sometimes dishonest shots at Sowell’s political enemies.’ Among other charges included in Byrne’s review was a claim that one line in Sowell’s book echoed the concerns of the Tea Party and constituted ‘a thinly-disguised attack on racial integration’.
An even odder allegation against Sowell came when Byrne warned readers that Sowell’s references to racial issues constituted little more than ‘disordered and disturbing “dog-whistles”’. In a similar fashion, Sowell’s arguments about the legacies of the past were also ‘a coded intervention’. Warming to his theme, Byrne explained that ‘To him [Sowell], slavery’s cultural legacy means that it shouldn’t be considered a moral problem, nor should amelioration be attempted.’ To this charge Byrne then added the devastating rider which turned out to be an act of unbelievable self-harm.38
To their credit, as it now stands the LSE site has an ‘amendment’ at the bottom of the piece online. It is one of the great corrections. It simply notes the deletion of a line from the original piece. ‘The original post contained the line “easy for a rich white man to say”’, admitted the LSE site. ‘This has been removed and we apologise for this error.’39 As well they might. For of course whatever the state of his income, Thomas Sowell is not a white man. He is a black man. A very famous black man – who LSE’s reviewer only thought to be white because of the nature of his politics.
It is a suggestion that has crept into an otherwise liberal debate with barely a murmur of dissent. And it has arrived from quite a range of directions. Consider for instance the reaction to the strange, and vaguely pitiful, case of Rachel Dolezal. This was the woman who became almost world famous in 2015 when, as regional head of the NAACP, she was suddenly ‘outed’ as white. During a television interview, Dolezal was memorably asked if she herself was black. She pretended not to understand the question. When confronted with the evidence of her birth parents the interview crashed into a buffer. For Dolezal’s parents were not merely Caucasians, but Caucasians of German-Czech origin – which is very far away from the black American identity that Dolezal herself had adopted. Eventually, while admitting that her parents were indeed her parents, she insisted that – nevertheless – she was black. Her identification with the black community in America seemed to have come about through her closeness to her adopted black siblings.
Nevertheless, as her adoptive brother said, ‘She grew up a white, privileged person in Montana.’ She had managed to pass herself off as black by little more than the careful application of bronzer and a somewhat stereotypical frizzing up of her hair. This – and the fact that most people were clearly too terrified to say, ‘But aren’t you white?’ – meant that Dolezal was able not only to ‘pass’ as black but head up the local chapter of an organization set up for black people.
The Dolezal case threw up an almost endless series of questions, and both it and the responses to it in some ways presented an opportunity to dissect a whole array of aspects of today’s culture. Not least among these moments was the divide that arose among prominent black people, spokespeople and activists.
On The View on ABC-TV, Whoopi Goldberg defended Dolezal. ‘If she wants to be black, she can be black’, was Goldberg’s view.40 It seemed that ‘blacking up’ was not a problem on this occasion. More interesting was the reaction of Michael Eric Dyson, who stood up for Dolezal in a remarkable way. On MSNBC he declared of Dolezal, ‘She’s taking on the ideas, the identities, the struggles. She’s identified with them. I bet a lot more black people would support Rachel Dolezal than would support, say, Clarence Thomas.’41 All of which suggested that ‘black’ was not to do with skin colour, or race. But only politics. So much so that a Caucasian wearing bronzer but holding the ‘right’ opinions was more black than a black Supreme Court Justice if that black Supreme Court Justice happens to be a conservative.
The speaker, not the speech
Here then is another cause of our current crowd madness. On occasion, as in the case of Rachel Dolezal, Candace Owens and Thomas Sowell, it appears as though a consistent attitude can be located. The speaker and the speaker’s own innate characteristics do not matter. What matters is the speech they utter and the ideas and sentiments that they give voice to. Then with no forewarning and no obvious means of prediction, a precisely contrary scale of values kicks in. Suddenly the content of a speech becomes of absolutely no interest or becomes of tertiary interest at the very best. On these occasions, running in tandem with those times when the speech not the speaker matters, suddenly only the speaker matters, and the speech can go hang.
This development is almost certainly connected to one of the great gifts that the social media age has brought us, which is the opportunity to publish uncharitable and disingenuous interpretations of what other people have said. When such attention is focused on someone famous the media can then seize the opportunity to give far greater attention to a handful of such interpretations than any number of honest or forgiving ones. The effects can be read in any day’s news. A headline might describe someone famous being ‘lambasted’ for something they have said only for it to turn out – when reading down the story – that the ‘lambasting’ came from a couple of members of the public who the journalist has spotted on Twitter. It is the reason why politicians look so terrified when anyone tries to lead them on to any rocky terrain. Not just because the price of thinking out loud is so high, or a fear that the rules of the game may have changed since they last looked, but because even one negative response (from anybody in the world) can be turned into a storm. This fear now engulfs almost all public figures, for even when they think that they are treading deftly – or heroically –
they can come off air and discover that the sound ringing in their ears was not applause but career explosion.
In January 2015 the actor Benedict Cumberbatch was interviewed on the Tavis Smiley Show on PBS. He used a part of his time to protest that friends of his in the UK who were actors from ethnic minority backgrounds seemed to find it easier to get work in the US than they did in the UK. It was clear from the point he made in these and all his other remarks that he was on the side of black actors rather than taking, say, the position of the Ku Klux Klan in responding to questions. Nobody had any serious reason to believe that Cumberbatch was a secret racist who was unwittingly revealing himself to Tavis Smiley. Nevertheless the actor slipped up not on an issue of intent or motive, but – as so often when there is no other evidence available – on a crime of language. In the course of his remarks Cumberbatch referred to ‘coloured actors’. This is a term which would have been commonly used with no negative connotations in his home country. Until a very short time before, it was also a common enough term in the US. But shortly before Cumberbatch’s interview the protocol had slightly shifted there. The new correct way to refer to ‘coloured people’ in January 2015 was as ‘people of colour’. Linguistically this may be said to be a distinction without a meaningful difference.
Nevertheless the outcry was almost as great as if he had used the ‘N’ word. Indeed, the actor was forced into making an immediate and grovelling public apology. In a swiftly issued public statement after the show he announced ‘I’m devastated to have caused offence by using this outmoded terminology. I offer my sincere apologies. I make no excuse for my being an idiot and know the damage is done.’42 Nevertheless headlines in the media reported that the actor was ‘under fire’ (The Telegraph) and the subject of a ‘race row’ (The Independent). Throughout this episode nobody seriously claimed that Cumberbatch was a racist. And there was no serious way in which anybody could have interpreted these or any other remarks as racist. But his name could now be linked to a ‘race row’. If people had listened to the point Cumberbatch had been trying to make perhaps a small amount of good could have come from it, and more casting opportunities in the UK might have emerged for his friends. But the easier route appeared to be to pick up a few social media claims made by language patrollers and turn these into a real-life ‘row’. This is the sort of thing that everybody in the public eye, and then everybody in the public, begins to learn a lesson from. And most people will never have banked the popular goodwill that comes from playing Sherlock Holmes and other popular characters that might allow them to come back from that precipice.
The Madness of Crowds Page 19
