Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race(41)

I think it’s easy to see how those who espouse white nationalist politics could take these figures and run with them, and insist that the year 2066 will mark Britain’s doomsday. It looks like there is a subtle ethno-nationalism in this discussion, almost worthy of The Handmaid’s Tale. It seems to be a racialised misogyny that is preoccupied with wombs, and urges white British women to fuck for their country while accusing women who aren’t white British of breeding uncontrollably and destabilising the essence of Britain.

Despite this pernicious narrative, there are quarters of British society who maintain that misogyny is somehow the reserve of foreigners. Never in a million years did I think I’d hear former Prime Minister David Cameron call out the ills of a patriarchal society. When, in 2012 and 2013, British women’s groups such as the Fawcett Society and the Women’s Budget Group did the laborious maths to argue that the government’s austerity agenda was hitting women the hardest, David Cameron and his party barely responded. It was interesting, then, that when Mr Cameron finally uttered the words ‘patriarchal society’ almost three years later, it was to lay out government plans of an ultimatum policy that demanded Muslim women who were living in the UK on a spousal visa either learn English, or face deportation.

‘Look, I’m not blaming the people who can’t speak English,’ he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. ‘Some of these people have come to our country [from] quite sort of patriarchal societies, where perhaps the menfolk haven’t wanted them to learn English, haven’t wanted them to integrate.’ He continued, ‘What we’ve found in some of the work we’ve done is . . . [a]? school governors’ meeting where the men sit in the meeting and the women have to sit outside, [and] women who aren’t allowed to leave their home without a male relative. This is happening in our country and it’s not acceptable. We should be very proud of our values, our liberalism, our tolerance, our idea that we want to build a genuine opportunity democracy . . . where there is segregation it’s holding people back, it’s not in tune with British values and it needs to go.’12

Speaking on national radio, Cameron let it be known that alongside dedicated funding for Muslim women in what he called ‘isolated communities’ to learn English, the plans would also come with compulsory language tests for these women within two and a half years of them arriving in Britain. As surreal as it was to hear David Cameron challenging a patriarchal society, it wasn’t surprising that his idea of patriarchy was described in direct opposition to our own advanced, so-called egalitarian and meritocratic British sense of self.

When we tell ourselves that misogyny is simply an import from overseas, we are saying that it’s just not a problem here. David Cameron probably shouldn’t be too quick to insinuate that extreme misogyny is a foreign import to the British Isles. When the Office of National Statistics shows that, on average, seven women a month in England and Wales are murdered by a current or former partner,13 and 85,000 women are raped in England and Wales alone every year,14 we know that this is simply not the case. Misogyny is not a problem that can be solved with closed borders, nor a crash course in Received Pronunciation. It exists in the psyche of what it means to be a man in every country.

Despite this truth, it was the idea that multiculturalism brings with it a corrosive sexism and misogyny that was touted after mass sexual assaults took place on New Year’s Eve of 2015 in Cologne, Germany. The same angle emerged when a child sexual exploitation ring run by Asian men was uncovered in Rotherham, south Yorkshire, in 2013. In 2012 and 2013, the phrase ‘Asian sex gang’ occupied what seemed like a million headlines. The far right loves this Asian sex-gang angle. To them, the women are their property, the women are ‘ours’. But the reality is that if every Asian man left the country, child sexual exploitation on British Isles would not go away.

There is a race aspect to these incidents that can’t be ignored, and acknowledging this doesn’t invalidate any condemnation of grooming, abuse and misogyny. A lot of the time, being a black feminist situates you between a rock and a hard place, challenging the racism you see targeted at black and brown people and also challenging the patriarchy around you. And while the endless tug of war of political debate demands clear rights and wrongs, this topic desperately requires nuance.

What is undeniable is that Western beauty ideals and Western objectification of female flesh focuses heavily on whiteness and on youth. White female flesh is commoditised in the public eye all the time. If black and brown flesh is ever included in these forums, it’s often considered a novelty – perhaps described as ‘ebony’, ‘chocolate’ or ‘caramel’, sometimes approached as taboo. Amid the No More Page 3 campaign was the little-referenced point that black Page 3 girls rarely exist, presumably because some media didn’t believe that black and brown women are beautiful enough to bother objectifying. There are, of course, exceptions to this rule, often in entertainment and media in which creative control is designed to pander to the needs of black and brown men.

Let’s look at how racialised bodies sit inside an understanding of sex and sexual abuse in a world drunk on overwhelming whiteness. Racist beauty ideals encourage a culture of certain types of female flesh being considered publicly available. After two Pakistani men were jailed in 2011 for raping and sexually abusing young white girls, it seemed like Jack Straw, former MP for Blackburn, took on the language of the abuser when he said that white girls were seen as ‘easy meat’ for Asian rapists. Speaking on BBC Newsnight, he said, ‘These young men are in a Western society, in any event, they act like any other young men, they’re fizzing and popping with testosterone, they want some outlet for that, but Pakistani heritage girls are off-limits and they are expected to marry a Pakistani girl from Pakistan, typically.’15 There was pushback on his comments from other politicians, but the objections started and ended with indignation that Straw was stereotyping an entire community.