Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race(32)
A national debate about whether the statue should fall ensued. The black student protesters were accused of being undemocratic. ‘Cecil Rhodes was a racist,’ read one headline, ‘but you can’t readily expunge him from history.’ That was a strange conclusion to draw, because campaigning to take down a statue is not the same as tippexing Cecil Rhodes’ name out of the history books. The Rhodes Must Fall campaign was not calling for Rhodes to be erased from history. Instead they were questioning whether he should be so overtly celebrated. The campaign’s opponents – who included Lord Patten, the Chancellor of Oxford University – said that by exercising their democratic right to protest, the students were actually impinging on freedom of speech. By making a fuss, disrupting the everyday, and pointing out the problem, they had become the problem. Somehow, it wasn’t believable that Lord Patten simply wanted free and fair debate and a healthy exchange of ideas on his campus. It looked like he just wanted silence, the kind of strained peace that simmers with resentment, the kind that requires some to suffer so that others are comfortable.
To insist that Rhodes Must Fall campaigners were restricting discussion was simply a lie. The work of the protest movement brought little-known aspects of Britain’s colonial involvement in Africa to prime-time news, exposing the facts to audiences who almost certainly wouldn’t have learnt about it on the national curriculum. What student protesters achieved was the opposite of shutting down debate. That the campaign was misrepresented revealed the passive-aggressive anti-black sleight of hand that so many British conversations about race are guilty of indulging in.
This ‘freedom of speech’ fight can hardly even be called a debate. Instead, it is one-sided, with the powerful side constantly warping the terms of engagement. Couching opposition to anti-racist speech and protest as a noble fight for freedom of speech is about protecting white people from being criticised. It seems there is a belief among some white people that being accused of racism is far worse than actual racism. If Rhodes Must Fall’s detractors really believed in freedom of speech, they would have let the debate happen without throwing around disingenuous accusations that black people were stopping them from speaking freely. They would have engaged with the ideas being put forward rather than using intellectually dishonest tricks designed to circumvent taking the protesters seriously. I think that there is a fear among many white people that accepting Britain’s difficult history with race means somehow admitting defeat.
Rhodes Must Fall was a small-scale example of what racial injustice looks like in Britain. It looks normal. It is pedestrian. It is unquestioned. It’s just a part of the landscape, you might walk past it every day. For people who oppose anti-racism on the grounds of freedom of speech, opposition to gross racial disparities is about ‘offence’, rather than the heavily unequal material conditions that people affected by it carry as burden. Being in a position where their lives are so comfortable that they don’t really have anything material to oppose, faux ‘free speech’ defenders spend all their spare time railing against ‘offence culture’. When they make it about offence rather than their own complicity in a drastically unjust system, they successfully transfer the responsibility of fixing the system from the benefactors of it to those who are likely to lose out because of it. Tackling racism moves from conversations about justice to conversations about sensitivity. Those who are repeatedly struck by racism’s tendency to hinder their life chances are told to toughen up and grow a thicker skin.
Free speech is a fundamental foundation of a free and fair democracy. But let’s be honest and have the guts to unpick who gets to speak, where, and why. The real test of this country’s perimeters of freedom of speech will be found if or when a person can freely discuss racism without being subject to intellectually dishonest attempts to undermine their arguments. If free speech, as so many insist, includes being prepared to hear opinions that you don’t like, then let’s open up the parameters of what we consider acceptable debate. I don’t mean new versions of old bigotry. I mean, that if we have to listen to this kind of bigotry, then let us have the equal and opposite viewpoint. If Katie Hopkins, with help from the Sun newspaper, publishes a column describing desperate refugees trying to travel to Britain as cockroaches,9 then we need a cultural commentator that advocates for true compassion and total open borders. Not the kind of wishy-washy liberalism that harps on about the cultural and economic contributions of migrants to this country as though they are resources to be sucked dry, but someone who speaks in favour of migrants and open borders with the same force of will with which Hopkins despises them.
It’s about time that critiques of racism were subject to the same passionate free speech defence as racist statements themselves. Freedom of speech means the freedom for opinions on race to clash. Freedom of speech doesn’t mean the right to say what you want without rebuttal, and racist speech and ideas need to be healthily challenged in the public sphere. White fear tries to stop this conversation from happening.
Fear of a black planet exists not just in the real world, but also in the fictional. After four-year-old me came to terms with the fact that I would never turn white, I found refuge in white fictional British and American characters that I could relate to. For so long, that fictional heroic character loved by so many has been assumed to be white, because whiteness has been assumed to be universal. It is in film, television and books that we see the most potent manifestations of white as the default assumption. A character simply cannot be black without a pre-warning for an assumed white audience. Black characters as leads are considered unrelatable (with the exception of a handful of high-profile, crossover black Hollywood stars). When casting for film and TV does take the step to cast outside of whiteness, fans repeatedly reveal their ugly side, voicing their upset, disgust and disappointment. Fear of black characters is fear of a black planet.