These generalisations of international scope are the bread and butter of social scientists who, because they are studying vast groups of human beings, cannot run properly controlled experiments. It would breach their subjects’ human rights! Instead, social scientists, take the crudest, summative national statistics and use them to create pleasingly coherent theories, narratives that fit the figures neatly, if not the situation. Then they impose these stories on the disparate behaviours of their communities, dismissing any contradictions as isolated anomalies. 

This lack of detailed, nuanced data makes their theories more secure (surprisingly.) Activists expect resistance and denial not because their ideas are flawed, but because the majority are conditioned by false consciousness. Most people hold the unconscious assumptions of a systematically unjust society, and they do not want to give them up, because they benefit from them. All white people can carry a brooding hatred of black people without even being aware of it and thus without demonstrating it, like an a-symptomatic virus in the blood. The bias in society, as shown in nationwide statistics, proves they are all complicit and can be shouted at.

Yet this is the very thought process that leads to prejudice and discrimination. Assumptions are being made about individuals’ motivations, attitudes and actions, based on their perceived skin colour or sexual orientation or gender. and they are being condemned and dismissed on the strength of those assumptions, accused of denying the rights and respect due to us all as individuals. 

My experience of human beings is that they cannot be neatly categorised in these ways. Definitions, labels, are abstract ideals or ways of organising thought. Nobody manifests them in totality or to the exclusion of other, contradictory influences and ideas. Our minds and behaviours are full of conflict, tension and inconsistencies. At most we have tendencies, habitudes, not reliable, completely predictable behaviours. 

Activists are appealing to the principle that we all deserve to be treated equally as individuals, acknowledging that we have far more in common than our differences. If they deny this depth and dimension to other people, on what grounds can they claim to be treated unjustly themselves? They are enabling white supremacist racism by accepting the principle of racial difference.

Social commentators will go to contorted lengths to explain this away. Robin DiAngelo mentions, in White Fragility (1), that there is no such thing as reverse racism. Actually, I would agree with her: It’s all the same racism. Any prejudice against any individual based on perceived race is the same: it opens the door to discrimination and oppression. 

1. 2018, London: Penguin, p20

We have been taught, by our Enlightened Liberal forebears, to value the individual. The internet has sold itself on its ability to give voice and value to every single user. This is what makes it egalitarian. Internet engineers and Social Media platform designers, with their talk of disruptors and hackers, have promoted their wares as being demotic grass-roots products, used by rebellious and anarchic individualists, who thumb their noses at faceless conformity. Each follower of a campaign, subscriber or contributor, each like, is a singular mind, drawn to the internet because it values their individualism, and for its potential for self-expression. 

The strongest mode of internet self-expression appears to be indignation. Perhaps users need the sharpness of its venom to penetrate the barriers that isolate us. The ghostly, uncertainty of the internet, where the very existence of your companions is doubtful (1), is no substitute for the physical presence of another living human being. 

In any case, users revel in their ability to challenge and confront in safety, and the leaders of political movements like to harness this energy. Invariably their projects are focussed on condemning affronts to that core ethic – the inalienable right to be valued equally as a unique, singular identity. 

But we have been connected to millions of people – a literally inconceivable, brain-dazzling number of separate consciousnesses. 

Certainly, that’s a great asset to internet-based campaigns. They can rely on this connectivity to generate truly enormous, powerful mass movements with little effort. To harness the power of the mob, campaigners identify an oppressed section of society which is being discriminated against by a prejudiced majority or ruling elite. It is an unusual crusade that gains traction by fighting for the rights of one specific bloke in one specific situation: “End Discrimination By Ursula Against Brian!”

However, because we’re unable to hold such variety, such plurality in mind, have resorted, once again, to generalisation, to typifying. This is hard-wired into our primitive brains, one of our ancestors’ most effective survival traits (2). Once again, we have started identifying groups or types of people and then treating them as if they were a single person, moving, thinking and speaking as one. This allows us to employ traditional, graspable narratives (“A wrongs B. B deserves retribution”) to make sense of the world.

So we arrive, once again, at tribalism. 

(1) Are they telling you the truth? Are they who they say they are? Are they a bot?

 (2) The “once bitten, twice shy” technique that allowed us to predict future threats and thus avoid repeatedly poisoning ourselves or wandering, repeatedly, into the Hell-Pig’s lair. 

Since its inception, investors in the internet have pursued the dream of pure profit. Their logic seems to be that, as the internet is a wholly insubstantial realm, if they could use it to get users to spend real money, they would be left without material costs. Every cent or penny spent would go directly into the investor’s pocket: something could be made out of nothing. (Does such word association drive all pioneering thought?) 

They soon discovered that there are costs, even in an immaterial world, but they are abstract ones: time, effort, ideas, peace of mind, so the profit margins are still enormous (1). 

This is pure capitalism, capitalising on every aspect of human existence, turning it into money. 

Internet natives have picked up and run with this idea: money for nothing. “Influencers”, vloggers, produce nothing, do nothing and can profit enormously from it. 

When I’m feeling uncharitable, it seems to me that some British Critical Race theorists have attempted a similar thing. (America is a completely different kettle of fish). I’m not talking about traditional campaigners for equality and mutual respect, who I wholly support. I mean the new breed of social theorists. They appear to be trying to profit from dissatisfaction, envy and dislike. They seem to want to generate further indignation, racial division, antipathy, by which they gain status, power, influence, tenure, publishing contracts, speaking engagements, and money. 

To do this, they assume a correspondence between American and British culture, because the internet knows no borders. They can import America’s uniquely toxic and dysfunctional racial hostility, a product of its unique history of slavery and injustice (2) and apply it, wholesale, to British Society, creating tribal suspicion, division and hatred for their own benefit, where before there were, at worst, personal attacks driven by individuals’ xenophobic fear of difference. (A much less deep-rooted thing)

They use the abstracts of theory as their weapons, bringing them to bear on their hapless opponents, which means anyone who questions them. 

And I know, I know this is unfair, and that everyone just wants a better, fairer world. I’m sorry. That’s how it feels, sometimes, because conflict and hostility are being actively promoted and praised and people are being pushed apart. But for that very reason we must resist such resentful brooding and reach out to each other as individuals not types. 

1. Money itself has always been simply a token of promissory trust. This truth has been emphasised in an age of electronic banking, where huge profits, losses, thefts and frauds – lives ruined – can be created by an algorithmic error or a bit of bandit coding. Bitcoin is a set of instructions.
2. Admittedly facilitated by British merchant-slavers, who creamed off the profits but outsourced the inevitable racial tension to their American colonies. Unfair but true: innocence is another sort of privilege. 

And that’s been one of my main points over the last few months: the injustice of imposing generalised theories on the lives, thoughts and feelings of individuals to dismiss and devalue them in person, in face to face (or, rather, screen to screen) debate. 

I like to down-play the degree the internet, and especially social media, may have changed human life, even human nature, because I hate the idea of it. Perhaps, however, this new way of living accounts for the strange change in how we think and conduct our affairs. People seem perfectly happy to promote a fundamental contradiction. Above all things, they value the individual, living in an equal, plural society. They honour and celebrate the vivid, varied, lived experience of consciousness. Yet to support this, they employ averages and aggregates, abstracted trends and tendencies that do not correspond with anybody’s lived experience and yet are used to undermine and deride. 

Kate Muir’s menopause article was relatively light-hearted, but any campaign that is “confrontational”, is confronting people, either blaming them for your problem, or accusing them of having it easy. 

But it is very unlikely to be the fault of the person you are confronting, and they won’t be luxuriating in their advantages. People don’t experience privilege. Instead, they simply don’t experience your particular disadvantage. It’s an absence, and absences are inferred not experienced. And that absence will be very quickly filled by some other anxiety not by the sunshine of euphoric happiness. Because everyone suffers. Not equally, perhaps, but uniquely. And what you are going through right now will always pre-occupy you more than a vague awareness of absence. It would be impossible to always bear in mind the infinite number of ways we aren’t suffering. 

It seems unfair, then, to get all blamey and martyred on these issues. We should be building consensus for change, not turning people against each other, dividing our communities into different factions and accusing other groups of having it easy. What is an accusation of “White Privilege” other than an expression of misanthropic envy that belittles us all?

We are setting members of our communities against each other, and, if we are to change the world, we need to work together.

In the NHS, resources are always limited. Health services spend, rather than generate money, and so are always on a budget. Over the years, I have felt slighted and dismissed by some doctors and GPs (although many have been utterly lovely), not because they are particularly biased against me, but because they are required to average under 10 minutes per appointment. I suspect my medical notes suggest I am a whinging psychiatric hypochondriac, like so many other patients who have been consulting Doctor Google. If they can get me back out the door again quickly, they will make up time for patients who genuinely need their help. Presumably they have spent their careers facing a procession of clueless morons with phantom ailments and they have grown used to knowing best. Unfortunately, as a “White”, “Middle-Class” man, I can’t attribute their attitude to prejudice and oppression (Dammit!) In fact, they are entirely correct about me. 

Elites will concentrate on, and fund research into, issues that affect them most closely and directly: wars and famines at home before those abroad, for example; diseases that affect people like them: the Irish famine was not genocide, it was the result of a London-based government deciding to spend its money on other things than famine relief, because the victims were not dying on London streets.

In the case of treatment of the menopause, gender is a key issue, but there probably others – general ageism; mortality rates and so on. I suspect medical researchers who have prioritised other areas than the menopause have not done so (in recent times) because they hold to doctrines of women’s inferiority. Instead, they have inherited a legacy of medical training and thought that has focussed them on other areas, and set them off on other lines of enquiry.  

There are always queues for medical treatments and funding, and there will always be people at the back of them. I had Grave’s disease, also a hormone problem, for years, and my experience of endocrinology, the branch of medicine that deals with hormone therapies, is that it is a sleepy backwater of medicine with little funding and where little research is done. I suspect this is because patients do not die. They can carry on, even if their treatments aren’t quite right. Also, these patients present with symptoms of mind and mood, and medicine is a hard-nosed, empirical science, deeply suspicious of such self-pitying nonsense. 

Assumptions of privilege can also work against the individual members of elite groups. I wasn’t diagnosed as anorexic for ages, because it was an affliction associated with disempowered teenage girls, not men. The OxyContin/Opioid crisis has had less of an impact on Afro-Caribbean than white Americans, apparently, because doctors were less likely to treat pain aggressively in black people, and felt they were more likely to abuse pain-killers! (1) This is poetic justice for America as a whole, but is still pretty rough on the individual white addict who was assured their pain-killers weren’t addictive. 

1. BBC Radio 4, The Opioid Crisis and The Erosion of Trust, 10/05/21

This aggression and hostility has bled into all public discourse. For example, Kate Muir, writing about the historical neglect of the menopause as a serious medical condition^[1], talks about “Menopause Power” and compares it to the way “Period Power fought Period Poverty”. “There’s a huge menopause conversation, as confrontational as it is celebratory” she tells us (my italics). She mentions a designer and campaigner, Karen Arthur, who links attitudes to the menopause to the neglect of Black Caribbean/ African women^[2].

This is undoubtedly an example of patriarchal neglect of a condition that doesn’t affect men. The situation is clearly unjust and must be remedied, urgently. The menopause is a fundamental biological and chemical change. It profoundly affects ALL women’s bodies, and most women’s health and mental well-being. It is absolutely right to campaign, and using the language of battle and blame brings great energy to the struggle.

But by using such terms as “Medical sexism”, Kate Muir implies that medical practitioners and researchers, and by implication all men, are involved in a conscious conspiracy to oppress menopausal women, that they are people to be blamed and attacked. 

Anger and resentment directed towards them, invites resentment and resistance in response, from the very people who have chosen medicine as their profession, who we need to convince, to agree to, do and fund more research, and prescribe more effective treatments.

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^[1] The Observer magazine, 09/05/21

^[2] I think her point is that menopausal black women are doubly disadvantaged. This is probably an example of “intersectionality”.

Society, culture and language are incredibly complex structures that intersect and influence each other at an uncountable number of nodes and in a myriad number of ways, to influence our collective and individual thinking. Exactly because of the simple meaning the words “racism” and “racist” have in common parlance, they are completely inadequate to the task of describing the racial aspects of these systems. 

Furthermore, as everyone keeps saying, racial divisions are recent constructs, created by elites to justify and maintain their privilege and exploitation of others. Why, then, do social theorists try to apply them in the same way as their arch enemies? Why don’t they just come up with new terms? They’re good at that. (I thought “White privilege” could be “Gruntligfunken”; “White Supremacy” could be “Slurgenjiblic”^[1].) 

I suspect that campaigners are keen to harness the potency and emotional punch of these old terms because they have been so successfully vilified by previous anti-racist drives, campaigns that have built on the even deeper foundations of Liberal Humanism and its celebration of the value of the individual. People are resistant to change, so to put pressure on them, activists challenge their complacent assumptions, make them feel uncomfortable and ashamed. Activists need their language to be forceful and direct. 

Activists also need to make these challenges personal or their targets will simply shrug off injustice as the fault of “The Government” or “Society” and do nothing. 

The problem with such an approach is that it becomes relentlessly aggressive. Again and again, activists exhort each other to be angry; they celebrate it, even though anger is an expression of hatred and disdain. These are unhealthy and unhelpful emotions even when directed at faceless institutions. When, conditioned by the internet’s atomising influence, they become personal, directed at another individual with the intention of crushing them, they become drivers of destruction and persecution, sectarianism and alienation. 

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^[1] Am I being influenced by the joys of the German language – all compound nouns and deep throaty noises? Of course, my neologisms wouldn’t do. There needs to be a link to known language to make these terms accessible.

Critical Race Theorists are intentionally repurposing language. It’s worth noting the activities that Robin DiAngelo says her colleagues are indulging in. Each “uses the metaphor…”, “coined the phrase…”, “describes whiteness as…” or “Critiques the concept of…”

Language is (possibly) humanity’s only inherently democratic impulse. Language is the currency of human communication; words are its coinage, and, like money, they have exactly the value we agree, as a community, they should have. Unlike money, though, words are collectively owned, by everyone. Equally. 

This is such a fundamental truth that setting it down like this seems idiotically self-evident: if most people believe the meaning of “racist” is “mean people who intentionally dislike others because of their race”^[1], well, I’m afraid that is what it means.

The theorists’ high-handed attitude, enabled by superior social position, seems an uncomfortable fit for people who are attempting to critique traditional power-structures and the inequalities and oppressions they lead to. 

However, their approach appears to be working. The Cambridge dictionary online now has the following definition as its first entry: “policies, behaviours, rules, etc. that result in a continued unfair advantage to some people and unfair or harmful treatment of others based on the belief that their own race makes them more intelligent, good, moral etc. than people of other races.”

Merriam Webster has amended its definition to include “the systemic oppression of a racial group to the social, economic, and political advantage of another”, after a request by an African-American woman, in the wake of the murder of George Floyd (BBC News 10^th June 2020, “Racism Definition: Merriam-Webster to make update after request”) This is an admirably constructive bit of social campaigning by Kennedy Mitchum, who has done something, rather than simply protesting, but it is also a worrying example of a publication that is supposed to objectively describe language usage in a community, intentionally interfering with, and trying to influence, that usage.

It is Newspeak. The Capitalists are stealing the commons, AGAIN – our most precious communally owned assets. 

Because, surely the central principle of social justice is equality of opportunity, that what is allowed to one, must be allowed to all. And Merriam Webster is an American publication, and America is a country where the far right holds such power it can win a presidency^[2], where the Republican administration in Florida can openly enact legislation explicitly designed to supress minority (and thus democrat) voting – to dismantle their own democracy. What could they do with dictionaries? 

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^[1] See my previous post.

^[2] Albeit in a deeply flawed and only partially democratic system

Early on in White Fragility, Robin DiAngelo admits that the common definition of racism is “intentional acts of racial discrimination committed by immoral individuals” (p9), and that racists are “mean people who intentionally dislike others because of their race; racists are immoral. Therefore, if I am saying that my readers are racist or, even worse, that all white people are racist, I am saying something deeply offensive” (p13) “One of the greatest social fears for a white person is being told that something we have said or done is racially problematic.” (p4) 

However, she and her comrades do not abandon the terms in favour of ones more suited to their purpose^[1]. This may seem an odd decision. After all, if I am trying to untighten a nut and my spanner turns out to be the wrong size, I change it for one that better fits my task.  

Instead, the social theorists set about altering the definition. Firstly, Professor DiAngelo derides the common understanding of the term, suggesting we have been mis-taught the meaning of a pre-existing term. She tells us that “we are taught to think about racism only as discrete acts committed by individual people” (p3) and “we are taught to define racism…”(my italics). She calls this definition of racism “simplistic” (p9), as if the concept of “racism” was a thing that existed before and outside language, and that the words “racism” and “racist” were generously gifted to us by a higher language authority, but we ignorantly misuse them or are intentionally misguided by the forces of evil.  

Then activists provide their own definitions. White Fragility is full of statements like, “To understand racism, we need to first distinguish it from mere prejudice and discrimination…” (p19), “when a racial group’s collective prejudice is backed by the power of legal authority and institutional control, it is transformed into racism.”(p20), “Racism is a structure, not an event”(p20), or “Racism is a system” (p21), “Racism is a society-wide dynamic that occurs at the group level.” (p22) and so on. 

It is unclear what gives her and colleagues the right to impose their new definitions on us and on our commonly owned language. I never agreed to it. Presumably it has something to do with being a former professor who is asked to speak at prestigious events and whose books are published by major publishing houses. In other words, they are exercising exactly the sort of hegemonic power that they are in the business of condemning. And, I suspect, they are being financed and thus enabled by sponsors who maintain and benefit from the most fundamental hierarchies of power and privilege, ones that underpin the statistical inequalities of race^[2]: Business and Finance: Capitalism.

As an unconscious bias trainer, Professor DiAngelo was presumably paid by corporate interests to provide training to their staff, so that management can claim to have tackled the problem of bias in their organisation and thus can shift the blame entirely to their workforce.

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^[1] of identifying racialized assumptions and biased social structures that their readers are unaware of.

^[2] Although not the individual incidences of race based personal antipathy.

Social Theorists hijack word meanings. The most obvious example is their repurposing of the words “Racist” and “Racism”. Dictionaries tend to define this as something like, “prejudice, discrimination or antagonism by an individual, community or institution against a person or people on the basis of their membership of a particular racial or ethnic group, typically one that is a minority or marginalised.” This is the Oxford dictionary definition, on Lexico, but very similar definitions are to be found on Merriam-Webster^[1], Dictionary.com^[2], and Wikepedia^[3].

This is not how Critical Race Theorists, and some Unconscious Bias trainers, wish to define racism. They point out that most people sincerely believe, from the depth of their humanist-liberal-conditioned souls, that all humans are, fundamentally, of equal value, yet racial inequality is rife in our societies. Traditional definitions of racism imply that to be racist you must actively participate in intentionally discriminatory acts, motivated by a conscious acceptance of an explicitly racist doctrine. 

This simply doesn’t apply to most people, who therefore assume racial inequality has nothing to do with them. They carry on as normal, tutting at the injustice of the world and doing nothing about it. 

In fact, many nations have been successful in making racial discrimination illegal, and denouncing racism as evil, probably because doctrinaire racism is relatively modern, developed as a way of excusing exploitation in the ages of slavery and then of emancipation^[4]. Progressive educators can appeal to our underlying humanism to condemn these superficial beliefs. Yet inequality and prejudice persist, with the added complication that now people feel extremely offended if you suggest they are complicit. 

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^[1] “a belief that race is a fundamental determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race”

^[2] “a belief or doctrine that inherent differences among the various human racial groups determine cultural and individual achievement, usually involving the idea that one’s own race is superior and has the right to dominate others or that a particular racial group is inferior to others.”

^[3] “Racism is the belief that groups of humans possess different behavioural traits corresponding to physical appearance and can be divided on the superiority of one race over another. It may also mean prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against other people because they are of a different ethnicity. Modern variants of racism are often based on social perceptions of biological differences of peoples.”

^[4] See just about every commentator on race, for example, Robin DiAngelo, 2019, White Fragility, London: Penguin, p16, or Robert P Baird, “The Invention of Whiteness” in The Guardian 20/04/21.