Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race(24)
Some white people, all white people, or none – it wouldn’t have mattered in the end. The aim of these commentators – whether they knew it or not – wasn’t to have an honest discussion about British racism. It was to obscure, to derail, and to ardently avoid the wider issue. When it comes to looking at the numbers in the UK’s bastions of influence – those that shape national politics and set political agendas – the conclusions to be drawn are clear. The official numbers from the House of Commons show that 94 per cent of Members of Parliament are white.5 The visible difference of Diane Abbott, one of the few black women in Parliament, who said something very much outside the realm of white agreeableness, is glaringly obvious. She paid the price for rocking the boat.
That the news cycle changed so suddenly, though, was not about the imagined horrors of racism against white people. This multipronged takedown of one of Britain’s most prominent black MPs was much more cynical. This was about what academics Alana Lentin and Gavin Titley call ‘white victimhood’:6 an effort by the powers that be to divert conversations about the effects of structural racism in order to shield whiteness from much-needed rigorous criticism. The Stephen Lawrence trial was perhaps the closest Britain has ever come to a national conversation on the insidious nature of structural racism, and how it manifests as a collective mindset – partly through malice, partly through carelessness and ignorance – to quietly assist some, while hindering others. But by flipping the debate to one that focused solely on racism against white people, that national conversation was swiftly stopped. No longer was there potential for us as a nation to examine the impact of the legacy of Britain’s racism. Instead, we were reminded by lots of very important people that racism goes both ways. In snatching away the possibility of a long overdue conversation, the resulting warped debate revealed an obsession with stopping discussion about race in Britain. The effect was as old as colonialism.
Pointing out how this country has wielded divide and rule as a political strategy is then considered an attack on the very fabric of British sensibilities. The backlash against Diane Abbott wasn’t about defending an embattled group of people who are constantly maligned in the media we consume every day. Instead, this reverse-racism row was about the British press closing ranks around what was in its interests to protect – whiteness as a faux neutral, objective power. Whiteness in the press had positioned itself for too long as the self-appointed, self-referential arbiter of racial problems, in which it pondered why these black and brown communities were so prone to violence and poverty, without a shred of self-awareness.
In 2012, the conviction of two of Stephen Lawrence’s murderers could have sparked a national conversation about race. We could have had a conversation about the police’s failure of Stephen’s family as they fought for justice (in 2016, the results from an investigation by the Independent Police Complaints Commission found that while the police were bungling the investigation, an undercover officer was spying on the Lawrence family).7 We could have asked ourselves honestly, as a country, if taking two decades to convict just two of the gang who murdered an innocent teenager was acceptable. We could have asked ourselves if we were ashamed of that. Maybe we could have spoken about the fact that racism had only been a political priority for less than half a century. We could have had a conversation about riots and race, about accountability, about how to move forward from Britain’s most famous race case. We could have had a conversation about how to start eliminating racism. We could have started asking each other about the best way to heal. It could have been pivotal. Instead, the conversation we had was about racism against white people.
Racism does not go both ways. There are unique forms of discrimination that are backed up by entitlement, assertion and, most importantly, supported by a structural power strong enough to scare you into complying with the demands of the status quo. We have to recognise this.
In theory, nobody has a problem with anti-racism. In practice, as soon as people start doing anti-racist things, there is no end to the slew of commentators who are convinced anti-racists are doing it wrong. It even happens among people who consider themselves to be progressive.
In the Weekly Worker in 2014, socialist writer Charlie Winstanley wrote of his utter disdain at an argument about race that had taken place in his activist group. ‘As such,’ he wrote, ‘oppressed groups sit at the centre of every discussion, backed by the unquestionable moral weight of their subjective life experience, reinforced by an unaccountable structure of etiquette, which they can use to totally control the flow of discourse.’
He continued: ‘The total effect is to create an environment in which free discussion of ideas is impossible. Oppressed groups and individuals operate as a form of unassailable priesthood, basing their legitimacy on the doctrine of original sin. To extend the analogy, discussions become confessionals in which participants are encouraged to self-flagellate and prostrate themselves before the holy writ of self-awareness. Shame and self-deprecation are encouraged to keep non-oppressed groups in their place, and subvert the social pyramid of oppression, with oppressed groups at the top.’8
Upset by conversations about white privilege that were happening at the time, left-wing writers drew the conclusion that those affected by racism were actually the most privileged, because talking about the effects of racism somehow gave them the moral high ground. This left-wing writer was angrier at people’s reactions to racism than the racism itself. This was the beginning of a backlash against conversations about white privilege.