The difficulty of talking about race, or even mentioning it as Cumberbatch did, points to a deep procedural problem which all public discourse is struggling to find a way to speak to. Hitherto any politician, writer or other public figure could proceed fairly well along one pre-agreed line. That line was that you should attempt to speak, write and even think aloud in a manner which no reasonable person could reasonably misinterpret. If somebody did unreasonably misinterpret your words then it reflected badly on them. Anyone claiming that Benedict Cumberbatch was clearly a virulent racist who had just exposed himself could expect to be laughed off the scene and dismissed without further thought.
But in recent years – overlapping, not coincidentally, with the years of social media – this rule has changed. Today a politician, writer or other public figure is in the same position that all members of the general public are in. We can no longer trust that our listeners are honest or are searching towards similar goals. An outburst of insincere claims from members of the public may be made as eagerly as sincere ones. And so the collective ambition of public figures must become to ensure that they write, speak and think out loud in such a fashion that no dishonest critic could dishonestly misrepresent them. It should go without saying that this is an impossible, and deranging, aspiration. It cannot be done. It cannot even be attempted without going mad.
The obvious thing is to survey the options available. One would be to say nothing, or at least say nothing of any substance in public, which is a choice that many politicians have adopted – a path that leaves the door open to people who are willing to say absolutely anything. Another option is to try to work out what the game going on here really is. To do that it is worth comparing cases: cases where nothing of significance has been said but where great offence has been claimed, versus cases where truly terrible things have been said and claims of offence were dismissed. A fine example of the latter came in August 2018 with the case of Sarah Jeong.
Sarah Jeong
That was when The New York Times announced the appointment of a 30-year-old writer on tech issues to join the paper’s editorial board. Like all such appointments, Jeong’s promotion to such a position at a young age attracted a considerable amount of attention. And attention in the age of the internet obviously includes online rakings of everything the person has said. In Jeong’s case the raking turned up tweets with a particular focus – which was a sustained and pretty crude abuse of white people. Jeong’s tweets included ‘Are white people genetically predisposed to burn faster in the sun, thus logically being only fit to live underground like grovelling goblins?’; ‘I dare you to go on Wikipedia and play “Things white people can definitely take credit for”, it’s really hard’; ‘White men are bullshit’; ‘CancelWhitePeople’ and in one stream of tweets ‘Have you ever tried to figure out all the things that white people are allowed to do that aren’t cultural appropriation? There’s literally nothing. Like skiing, maybe, and also golf . . . It must be so boring to be white.’43 It is fair to say that her Twitter feed showed an obsession with this theme. She even committed the basic error of comparing those people she didn’t like with animals. ‘Dumbass fucking white people marking up the internet with their opinions like dogs pissing on fire hydrants.’44 Another tweet said, ‘Oh man it’s kind of sick how much joy I get out of being cruel to old white men.’45
Jeong was also a keen user of the phrase ‘Kill all men’. But under the circumstances this took a second order of priority for her critics. It was the incessant racism expressed towards white people which drew some ire towards Jeong and against The New York Times for hiring her. For its part the newspaper stood beside its latest recruit. There was to be no throwing to the internet wolves on this occasion. The official statement from the paper of record said that it had hired Jeong because of her ‘exceptional work’ on the internet. It went straight on to claim that ‘Her journalism and the fact that she is a young Asian woman have made her a subject of frequent online harassment. For a period of time she responded to that harassment by imitating the rhetoric of her harassers. She sees now that this approach only served to feed the vitriol that we too often see on social media. She regrets it, and The Times does not condone it.’ The paper finished by saying that having learned this lesson it was confident Jeong would be ‘an important voice for the editorial board moving forward’.46
In fact the ‘period of time’ during which Jeong had engaged in her more controversial tweeting activities was from 2014 until just a year before The New York Times hired her. But her new employer’s defence worked. The use of Jeong’s gender, youth and race along with the modern reprieve which comes from claiming victimhood got her off. Again, if Jeong had said that she had never been particularly insulted online, or didn’t check Twitter with enough care to know what people were saying about her, or (most implausible of all if a round needs to be won) claimed that online insults didn’t remotely bother her, then her alibi would have been less useful.
But the Jeong case revealed one other fascinating insight. A writer at the website Vox called Zack Beauchamp had come to Jeong’s defence by tweeting ‘A lot of people on the internet today confusing the expressive way anti-racists and minorities talk about “white people” with actual race-based hatred, for some unfathomable reason.’47 There was no elaboration about what is or is not ‘expressive’ in racial epithet terms, nor any guide for how to judge the difference between ‘actual race-based hatred’ and these ‘expressive’ forms of language. But an even more interesting defence of Jeong was mounted by another writer at Vox. Ezra Klein opened his defence of Jeong by dismissing the furore as being ‘about actually racist alt-right trolls weaponizing old tweets in bad faith to get an Asian woman fired’. This brought in not just the racial identity of Jeong that The New York Times had also deployed but also the alleged political motivations of any (and perhaps all) people who had found anything to object to in her tweets.
But it was the defence Ezra Klein made from there that was most interesting because it precisely mirrored the argument that Salma El-Wardany had deployed in defence of people tweeting that ‘All men are trash’ and the argument Klein had made that ‘#KillAllMen’ was just another way of saying ‘it would be nice if the world sucked less for women’. In defence of Sarah Jeong making repeated racial slurs against white people, Klein similarly explained that when Jeong uses the term ‘white people’ in her ‘jokes’ it does not mean what it says. As Klein put it, ‘On social justice Twitter, the term means something closer to “the dominant power structure and culture” than it does to actual white people.’48
Here is a magnificent spur for madness. If Benedict Cumberbatch and Sarah Jeong can both end up in ‘race rows’ it would ordinarily mean that they would have been guilty of similar provocations. And yet they were not. Cumberbatch got into a ‘race row’ because he used an outmoded term. Jeong got into a race row because over a period of years she had repeatedly used the same racial epithets in a derogatory way, and appeared to have enjoyed doing so. What is worse is that motive can be assigned without reference to the severity of the words. Whereas a term that one person may use unwittingly can in some cases be levelled against them (Cumberbatch), in other cases extreme terms which people are using knowingly do not in fact count as being the words they have used. This is the explanation that Klein, El-Wardany and others have given. Whereas some people unwittingly use the wrong term and can be castigated for it, other people use terms that are so wrong and so extreme and yet no especial castigation is due. Because of something.
There are really only a couple of possibilities for what that ‘something’ might be. The first is that there is a scrambling device over all public pronouncements in relation to sex, race and much else and that an unscrambling device is required, but that not everybody has it. Klein and El-Wardany obviously do, but it is not clear how many others have the correct unscrambling equipment to work out what words are meant and what are not. Do we always have to rely on them to tell us which words mean w
hat we hear and which ones we are mishearing? How exactly will this work?
The other explanation for this is that there is a far simpler scramble going on. Which is that it has nothing to do with words and nothing to do with intent, but solely to do with the innate characteristics of a particular speaker. So Cumberbatch is starting off from a place of the greatest unsafety. He is white, heterosexual and male. It probably seemed like a good idea at the time to stress his anti-racist credentials on Tavis Smiley. On the other hand, somebody making disparaging comments for years about another ethnic group might ordinarily be thought to be in serious trouble. Unless their identity happens to be correct. Had Cumberbatch spent years tweeting about Asian people living in holes like goblins and how much he enjoyed making elderly Asian people cry he might not have got away with it. Jeong did but only because of her own racial identity (although Asian privilege is currently being weighed up in the social justice scales) and because of the race she was attacking.
It is impossible to unscramble the different standards being applied simultaneously by the content of speech because speech itself has become unimportant. What matters above everything is the racial and other identity of the speaker. Their identity can either condemn them or get them off. This means that if words and their contents do still matter then they have become deeply secondary orders of business. It also means that rather than managing to ignore the issue of race we are going to have to spend the foreseeable future constantly focused on it, because only by concentrating on people’s race can we work out who we ought to allow ourselves to listen to.
The raising of the rhetoric
Some of it will be in the form of shouting. For there is something in the pitch of what has been happening in recent years in the discussion on race that is strikingly close to the move that occurred in feminism around the same time. A similar acceleration of rhetoric and accusations appears to have revved up just around the point which might have been regarded as victory. As with the debate within feminism, this is not to say that racial disparities and racist opinions do not exist – any more than it could be claimed that no women are ever held back anywhere because of their gender. But it is a curiosity of the age that, after the situation appears at the very least to be better than it ever was, it is presented as though it has never been worse.
Movements that have become political or are in the process of becoming political need thinkers to ignite them rather than just represent them. And just as Marilyn French and others became celebrated for the extremity of their claims, so in recent years the prize for being regarded as the most celebrated writer on race has not fallen to the most ameliorating or pacifying voice, but to the writer who more than perhaps any other has presented race in America in particular as being at a stage of unprecedented awfulness.
A lot can be surmised about the cultural expectations of publishers when they sign up authors whose first book is a memoir. Such an honour was afforded to Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose first book, The Beautiful Struggle (2008), describes with admirable honesty not just his upbringing in Baltimore but his own attitude towards every aspect of it. In the book he admits that when he sees white people in the Baltimore Arena he views their caps and clothes and junk food with disdain: ‘I thought they looked dirty, and this made me racist and proud.’49 He describes how his father – a member of the Black Panthers – had seven children by four different women. It is a world of gun violence, of rival groups of blacks threatening other groups of blacks. And while Coates admits that he talked through his Latin classes and threw away much of the chance of learning, his mother taught him about slavery and the slave revolts. He describes his disdain for the mainstream civic nationalism that his father at one stage felt. His son dismisses his father as being ‘of that era, an acolyte of that peculiar black faith that makes us patriots despite the yoke. So he worshipped JFK, got amped off old war movies.’50
Later his father comes ‘to consciousness’. The ‘years of slumber pass’ and Coates senior ‘stood with those who had come to believe that our condition, the worst of this country’s condition – poor, diseased, illiterate, crippled, dumb – was not just a tumor to be burrowed out but proof that this whole body was a tumor, that America was not a victim of great rot but rot itself’.51 Coates has an English teacher (‘a small man with a small voice’) about whom he writes, ‘I accorded him all the esteem of an anthill and expected great deference in return’. The young Coates ends up in a fight with this teacher one day because he has been yelled at ‘and I could not back down’ and he finishes by ‘mushing the teacher in the face’. Later he describes, with no remorse, his role in a racist attack on a white boy.52 Yet it is only ever Coates and members of his community who are the fated ones.
‘We know how we will die,’ he says. ‘We are the walking lowest rung, and all that stands between us and beast, between us and the local zoo, is respect, the respect you take as natural as sugar and shit. We know what we are, that we walk like we are not long for this world, that this world has never longed for us.’53 The book was a huge success, highly praised and superlatively puffed. In its wake Coates received a ‘genius’ grant from the MacArthur Foundation, and having broken through with a memoir, in 2015 he wrote his second book (Between the World and Me), in the form of a letter to his then 15-year-old son. Two memoirs before the age of 40.
In Between the World and Me Coates describes his own reactions to the events of 11 September 2001. Coates had arrived in New York only a couple of months before, but he is admirably honest about his own reactions to 9/11. He records that as he was standing with his family on the roof of an apartment building watching the smoke billowing across Manhattan Island ‘my heart was cold’. He reflects that ‘I would never consider any American citizen pure. I was out of sync with the city.’ A year earlier a schoolmate of his had been killed by a Maryland police officer who had mistakenly thought that the man – Prince Jones – was a drug dealer. What this leads Coates to write about, the firemen in another state risking – and giving – their lives to save the lives of Americans of all races and backgrounds, is shocking. ‘They were not human to me,’ writes Coates. ‘Black, white, or whatever, they were the menaces of nature; they were the fire.’54
So seamless has Coates’s career been that even the mildest criticism of him has been either withheld or – when it has come – been responded to with shock. When Between the World and Me was published, Toni Morrison wrote in the blurb that Coates had filled ‘the intellectual void’ that had plagued her since the death of James Baldwin. At least one person – Dr Cornel West – took exception to this, though West’s reasons for doing so were typically, and admirably, idiosyncratic. ‘Baldwin was a great writer of profound courage who spoke truth to power,’ wrote West. ‘Coates is a clever wordsmith with journalistic talent who avoids any critique of the Black president in power.’55 Coates reacted badly to this, because he was wounded that somebody could be saying that he was not the equal of James Baldwin. But aside from the privilege that it demonstrates there is also a useful reminder of something.
For aside from being one of the great writers and moral forces of the late twentieth century, Baldwin grew up at a time where a rage against the injustices in America was not just justifiable but necessary. Aside from the grave injustices that the communities he grew up in were still living through, Baldwin had also experienced those injustices first hand. As he recounts in The Fire Next Time, at the age of ten he had been beaten by two police officers. His grievances were if anything understated. And yet Baldwin always wrote to find a way to communicate the divides that existed in America, never to widen them. Coates, by contrast, has made a career enlarging the differences and widening the wounds.56 In matters big and small he is willing to perform this task: willing to demand that America make reparation payments, even after all these centuries, to Americans today who are black; and willing always to wield the biggest tool against the smallest sin. In 2018 when The Atlantic magazine (for which Coates is ‘national correspon
dent’) announced that they were hiring the conservative writer Kevin Williamson, a raking of Williamson’s past articles began. He was found to have had very anti-abortion views, which already riled many of his critics, but an article of his from National Review on Illinois was dishonestly claimed to contain a reference to a young black boy which was derogatory.
Williamson was relieved of his new position at The Atlantic less than a fortnight after his hiring had been announced. But after the hiring and firing there was a staff meeting at which the editor – Jeff Goldberg – sat on stage with Coates. Although no one demanded that Goldberg adopt the hand postures demanded of the President of Evergreen, it was clear that he was fighting for his professional life and that Coates was his life raft. At one point Goldberg pleads, ‘Look, it’s very hard for me to disaggregate the professional Ta-Nehisi from the personal Ta-Nehisi because . . . I mean, I want to say that. I just feel the need to say this. I mean he’s one of the dearest people in my life. I’d die for him.’ Many contributors to such a magazine would consider this fealty enough, and reason to perhaps spread around a certain amount of the love. Coates did no such thing
The Madness of Crowds Page 20
