We all have multiple identities, so there are many ways we can all be othered and excluded, and most people have both minority and majority experiences pretty frequently. There are times when even affluent, well-educated heterosexual white boys find it necessary to hide that they vote Conservative or have a Scottish accent or are Christian or Jewish (or have a train set, or like musicals or don’t find that joke funny.)

The triviality of some of these examples should remind us that not all minority transgressions are treated equally. People who don’t watch Gogglebox still get asked for interview; lovers of Wicked rarely get murdered for it; Hornby enthusiasts aren’t over-represented in the prison population^[1]. Certain people encounter far more venomous prejudice and discrimination than others, and far more frequently. Minority groups that are large enough to be perceived as a threat to the majority, or the status quo, encounter much more trouble.

I discovered, recently, that kids in England can get bullied just for having red hair^[2]. This surprised me, but it shouldn’t have: kids are experimenting with power and will pick up on any possible weakness or difference to practice on.

Online trolls are replicating this childish behaviour (or they’re actually children) so they seek out your weaknesses. This means Black activists attract racist abuse at an even higher rate and intensity than the base level in society; outspoken women attract violent misogyny with such frequency that it must appear that the country is crawling with would-be rapists. In other words, the trolls confirm your worst fears. It’s a Satanic inversion of confirmation bias. 

On top of this, I think, as a species, we are particularly attuned to threat. It’s a survival trait. So, majorities see group difference as dangerous, but there’s safety in numbers, while, for minorities, a hundred gestures of welcome, inclusion and respect are outweighed by one utterance of hostility. This makes minority experiences of society qualitatively different from, and much worse than, majority experiences. 

Ours remains an unequal and unfair society. So, yes, there is still great injustice in the world and we need to work to end it, because the struggle is never-ending and gains made can very soon be lost. Things fall apart; schisms widen unless an effort is made to bind us together. That is the entropic law of the human experience.

But to do this we need unity, despite our differences. And that demands empathy and understanding, an emphasis on what we have in common. 

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^[1] As far as I’m aware.

^[2] You couldn’t do that in Ireland, where I come from. You’d exhaust yourself getting everyone bullied. It’d be a full-time job!

The most prominent feeling I have, on setting down my reservations, is one of shame. I feel I am doing something wrong yet I knowingly continue. Social justice campaigners are my people and it feels like I’m not only betraying them but also myself by criticising how they go about things. It’s not just that I am being a nasty, disloyal rat, it’s that I sound like them: like a bigot. I may even be bolstering the fascists’ attacks.

This is how conformity is enforced, I think. A sense of belonging is supremely important to everyone, and to disagree with your tribe is to lose your identity. I saw this growing up in Ireland, where objecting to some of the wilder articles of Republican faith would deny you the right to think of yourself as Irish, because Irish identity was an assertion against the dominant English culture. England, by its very multiculturalism, would assimilate anything thrown to it, like some supercharged compost heap^[1], without necessarily making you feel more welcome or at home.

Tribal dominance is not an immediate personal experience, a savage triumphalism felt like a flame in the breast. Nobody looks at themselves in the mirror and thinks, “look at me! I’m so heterosexual/ brown-eyed/ non-amputee-ish!” Instead we each feel the loneliness and vulnerability of being a single, isolated consciousness, and we huddle together for warmth and safety like penguins in the arctic night, trying to work our way in to the cosy centre, pushing the weak and flawed to the margins, collecting together in smaller huddles, if ejected.

In our Equal-Rights Penguin-Huddle, there has been an ideological coup. Assertive Young Turks have mounted the podium and hijacked the movement. Now they are guiding it in the wrong direction^[2]. We need to speak out, to get back on track, but to do so would be to lose our identities. It would show that we weren’t really Black or Gay or part of the Counter Culture or dedicated to the cause of equality and human rights. Really, we are reactionary, small-minded conservatives. We are what we condemn. 

I think it is particularly difficult to speak out if you are someone from an excluded minority^[3] who has reservations about your group’s thinking. The alternative to their opinions seems to be that of the oppressive majority, which has already rejected you. Then you must suffer the indignities of prejudice alone, while your own people sneer at you for being a quisling. Much better to stifle your doubts and agree with all your leaders’ statements. It’s the lesser of two evils. 

The more discrimination your minority group experiences the harder it must be to dissent. It must be very hard to disagree if you are Black British, for example, because outside the protection of the tribe, you can still experience such naked, threatening hostility. 

This allows those who set the agenda to tell the world that they have total, unreserved support. Their policies are statements of identity and so they can impose their will without any compromise or negotiation. They can claim to speak for all, without acknowledging the variety of their members’ experiences, because they are influencers: they don’t just articulate opinions, they form them. 

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^[1] See Terry Pratchett’s Unseen University compost heap

^[2] This is presumably due to assumptions that come from their internet-generation conditioning, which leads them to accept identitarian individualism without question. (A neo-con/ Alt-Right fraud, people! – self-development is self-fulfilment, which demands consumption.)

^[3] Of course, we all have multiple facets to our identity: race, politics, age, perceived class, and some of them will make us into minorities. (Although not all minorities are equally persecuted.) I guess that’s intersectionality. 

BUT

the Zero Tolerance campaign seems to have encouraged and excused a humourless intolerance, a relentless unforgiving aggression in some British activists^[1]. They are proud of their courage and strength in being constantly huffy and thin-skinned, even though it distresses them.

Here, for example, is Otegha Uwagba remembering a conversation about Swedish people.

“’Yeah, I know,” he replies, continuing, ‘and they’re all beautiful in that really, like, Aryan-looking way as well,’ as though dreamily invoking a beauty standard popularised by a regime that murdered six million Jews in part because they didn’t conform to it is an entirely normal thing to say.”

Her pamphlet, Whites: on Race and Other Falsehoods^[2], from which this is taken, provides other examples of tactless comments that remind her of our society’s racial injustices. Continuously encountering such moments throughout their life would erode the patience (and capacity for forgiveness) of a saint. It must also lead to a sense of alienation, and Ms Uwagba talks, later, of how grateful she feels to be surrounded by “Black people, Black Joy, Black children, Black food. It feels almost baptismal, like I am being washed clean.”^[3] She is talking about a sense of belonging. Her implication is that it is ONLY in the company of others who simply share a perceived colour, that she can feel at home. Worse, that to be around (perceived) white people, and their idiotic comments, is actually soiling, if you are black. That is awful: to be so divided on such trivial grounds. 

However, in this “Aryan” incident, the problem seems mainly to be Ms Uwagba’s sensitivity. She shouldn’t take on the burden of tackling the holocaust as well as Britain’s enormous history of racism. She will exhaust herself. And it is unfair on a guy who’s using a very common way of referring to blond, beautiful, healthy people^[4]. It’s an instantly recognisable category, and when we use it we are ruefully and ironically aware of its provenance.

By pursuing the smallest perceived slights, and labelling them “micro-aggressions” campaigners are defining simple insensitivity, or awkward inexperience with cultural and racial diversity, as the beginnings of racist oppression. 

The word “aggression” has a powerful emotional and ethical charge, and it is wholly negative. It criminalises tactlessness, and justifies intolerance and aggression in return. It allows you to angrily rebut annoying, complacent normals, but still claim that they started it. If they become defensive or annoyed, in their turn, that just confirms your point – they werebeing aggressive. 

When is something a micro-aggression and when is it just a clumsy turn of phrase? When is it thoughtlessly touching a raw nerve and when is it expressing a culture-wide bias? When does the thin edge of the wedge fade away into somebody just being annoying? Because people are idiots, whatever their heritage. And it makes them really irritating. 

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^[1] It’s different for Americans.

^[2] 2020, London: 4^th Estate, p44

^[3] ibid, p47

^[4] Whether you approve or not, it is a normal thing to say. Ordinary people do it all the time.

Activists regard themselves as The Vanguard Party, the enlightened few whose job it is to open the eyes of the rest of us^[1]. Traditional Marxist-Leninists believe they are trying to trigger wholesale class consciousness; they are recruiting the oppressed to the cause of their own emancipation. 

Modern online activists, however, respect other people’s ability to make their own decisions, so when they point out a micro-aggression, they are being accusatory. The activists are Woke; others have wilfully decided not to be.

The word “Woke” is a revealing example of the celebration of the self. It is an adjective. It describes people who have taken the Red Pill – who have alerted themselves to the true power structures of society. I guess it derives from words like “woke up” and “awakened”. However, like much American English, it has been shorn of its grammatical agreement^[2], that telling “am/was” and “-ed” that reminds us of the adjective’s lineage, it’s similarity to the passive form (“I was woken up; I was awakened”) because, once something has been impressed on you, it becomes one of your attributes. The passive denies agency to those it describes, the action has been done to them, so it has been ditched in favour of a hip new slang term that makes activists seem dynamic and independent. (And even, when adopted by British people, can I say…a little…pretentious?)

Micro-aggressions are a real thing. I’m sure they are gateway expressions of racism or sexism or transphobia that, by accretion, support a racist or sexist or transphobic society. However, by relentlessly hunting them out among our contemporaries and by using the accusation to attack individuals, we are causing problems for a campaign which must, eventually persuade, rather than destroy. We can’t shoot them all, so we’re going to have to live with them. In which case, we don’t want to appear rigid and inflexible, unforgiving. We’re supposed to be the reasonable ones.

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^[1] “Abre Los Ojos.”

^[2] We’ve pondered, before, you and I, whether this might be the result of American English being a pidgin, a simplified grammatical form that allows a diverse language community – Modern Americans have arrived from all over the world – to develop a lingua franca that all can understand. 

Alongside the Twitter and Pinterest Gladiators are the prophets of the Blogosphere (like me!) Here, we can set up our soap boxes and lecture into an enormous silence. We can develop our laborious points, air our grievances and bravely defy our imagined opponents, without fear of interruption or contradiction. We tell people what they think and then tell them why they’re wrong to think it. 

For any sort of online combatant identifying micro-aggressions is a weapon that comes easily to hand. Because they are small and the result of uncritical assumptions, people can commit micro-aggressions at any moment, without realising. An imaginative arguer, having established themselves as being part of an oppressed minority, can draw oppression out of any number of the general public’s utterances. 

In this we are literally antagonising them: redefining them as our antagonists even though they felt no enmity towards us before this. 

In the past, we’d have pointed to these slips of the tongue as evidence of cultural bias, and blamed society as an abstract entity. Now, however, we’ve realised that this allows everyone to wash their hands of the problem. Everyone sighs regretfully, and agrees that society is unjust, then they carry on as normal, refusing to acknowledge that they are part of that society, like people in traffic jams complaining about the traffic.

Now, though, the internet has incubated a supercharged belief in the autonomy of the self. And this implies personal responsibility. And that implies collusion.

Of course, the internet, social-media, is wonderfully democratic and levelling. It allows ordinary people to interact with the powerful and exalted, cross swords with them, support them, gain their endorsement. 

However, the atomistic nature of online communication means that most meaningful exchanges, no matter how fleeting, are one on one, and most disagreements are duels. They play out like the meeting of Greek and Trojan heroes in The Iliad. Users sometimes stumble on opponents in the throng, and sometimes seek each other out. Then they issue individual challenges and set to. 

Even positive online relationships are profoundly dysfunctional. The most rapid text-speed exchanges still have an artificial, elongated, stilted quality. Each utterance is un-naturally complete and intentional. Weird pauses are caused by the time-lapse of typing and transmission. Turn-taking is inviolable and no speech overlaps. What would, in a face to face conversation, be two people talking over each other, becomes a disordering of the sequence of exchanges, confusing and falsifying what was actually said. 

Then there’s the dislocation of being in separate places and times. Without common reference points, without feedback on whether you’ve been understood, you either have to laboriously explain everything or live with the doubt. 

The rich experience of being physically present with somebody else is lost – all that body language, stuttering, false starts, hesitation, facial expression, breathing, breath, tone of voice, is lost. Emotional content is decided on by the speaker (writer) in words and the crude approximations of emojis. With no other cues available, the listener (reader) is reduced to deciding between undeserved scepticism or naïve trust. 

We are much more profligate in our relationships but each is critically impoverished. 

The hegemonic doctrine of micro-aggressions becomes particularly problematic, I think, when it appears on social media. The internet’s celebration of the individual, combined with the gladiatorial nature of online debate, forms a toxic brew when mixed up with this creed, expressed most commonly in the aphorism, “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.”

I’m sure this slogan began as an attempt to form alliances with those nice, liberal, heterosexual white kids who support your cause, but don’t feel it’s their place to get involved. It is reaching out to them, saying, “Please do get involved. We can’t do without you. We are all members of the same community: we need to act together.”

Unfortunately, everything soon becomes a means of persecution, or of wounding, on the internet. 

Using an internet-enabled device is still a solitary activity. We are each shut up in our own little cell. In every moment of fellow-feeling, there is a pang of loneliness. knowing that your comrade is miles away and cannot reach you, that you are still alone. 

Evolving from this comes a sense that even mass actions online are profoundly atomistic. We add our individual voices to those of others in movements called “Me Too” and “Not in My Name”^[1], as if our importance lay in our unique self, and our power lay in sheer numbers, the arithmetic of crowds, rather than in consensus and co-operation. 

The celebration of individuality makes the internet a fundamentalist meritocracy. Users believe they have complete existential autonomy and self-authorship. You create yourself spontaneously, and can take absolute, personal ownership of your successes. 

The flip side of this is the belief that it is your own fault if you fail to be enlightened. If you’re not woke, you must be actively resisting the movement: “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.” The emphasis has quickly changed from asking people to help solve a problem, to accusing them of causing it. Rather than making yourself and others aware of the conditioning forces that operate on all of us, you can blame them, individually, for being reactionary oppressors, and use their “micro-aggressions” as evidence^[2]. They are complicit.

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^[1] not “We” or “our”

^[2] Confusingly, this seems self-contradictory, at odds with the very theories of false-consciousness that underpin the thinking. If everyone could enlighten themselves, on a whim, hegemonies would be unable to function. 

The ideas of Hegemony, False-Consciousness reinforced by the culture it generates: these are wonderful analytical tools. They allow us to explore and explain our world more perceptively and more articulately. 

Theories are useful models of thinking, but they aren’t real things. They are prefaced by an assumed “it’s as if…” They draw us in certain directions; they favour coming to certain sorts of value-derived conclusions, so they must be approached critically. All thought processes should be constantly monitored: there are alternatives. 

Once we have arrived at a successful way of thinking, though, we start to use it all the time and see evidence for it everywhere. This is confirmation bias. We are bedding in and reinforcing particular neural pathways, so that our brain can jump to those conclusions without wasting time. 

Then the theory has become a habit of thought: an assumption: a truth^[1].

But truths are undeniable laws, strictures. Only the most specific and verifiable facts should fit these criteria. When a complex, totalising theory about society begins to be regarded, uncritically, as a given, it becomes a hegemony itself, at least within the realm where it holds sway. It restricts and channels thinking towards one way of structuring the world, and therefore one hierarchy and power system; it becomes a source of authority. 

When such orthodoxies start to be imposed on our debates, we ought to ask ourselves (as we should ask of all assertions) Qui Bono? Who benefits from this interpretation? Why are they so keen on it?

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^[1] Babies enter the realms of thought with little other than an innate capacity to theorise from first-hand experience. That’s how they learn to differentiate between the phenomena they encounter, between people, day and night, waking and sleeping, predict what might happen next and thus learn to navigate the world independently. They are amazing at it, superhuman geniuses. Unfortunately, by the time they are ready to theorise about society and human nature, more abstract notions, they are approaching adulthood, when their brains are beginning to atrophy, get set in their ways, take shortcuts. It happens to us all.

By and large, protest marchers seem to be having a good time, despite their determination. They seem flushed and happy, buoyed up by a sense purpose and community, fed by the endorphins that are released by physical exercise and excitement. Perhaps the human body retains an atavistic need to merge physical and meaningful activity. It is more satisfying to help dig a well than to input data on the spreadsheets of a well-digging organisation. It’s probably more fun to chuck a statue in the docks than to call for more debate on Britain’s historical links to slavery. 

It is the commentators, online and in print, who seem the most hard-line and embittered. Partly, of course, because words need to be forceful to have impact; possibly because they are sitting at computers all day and aren’t getting out into the sunshine. 

Historians research historical racisms and other discriminations and suggest how these might feed into modern assumptions and complicity in structural inequality. Social scientists diagnose societies’ deep-structures and coin terms to describe them. They are demonstrating that, despite much superficial progress on equality and social inclusion, toxic assumptions still form the basis of some thinking in our communities. 

To this discussion, social commentators’ contribute their own experiences of being dismissed and belittled due to their race, gender or identity (or identity choices). The theory behind their position is a quasi-Marxist belief that society’s hierarchies are maintained by hegemonies^[1]: mind-sets or cultural assumptions. These, in turn, are maintained by a constant drip-feed of reinforcements, trivial value-judgements that seem too small to challenge in themselves, yet build up to an absolute acceptance of the status quo, the belief that inequalities and oppression are “simply how the world is.” Marxists call this “false consciousness”. 

For this reason, even the smallest expression of prevailing hegemonies, now termed “micro-aggressions”, should be challenged and rebutted. 

So the theory goes.

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^[1] This term was coined by Antonio Gramsci (1891 – 1937), I think, in his Prison Notebooks.

If you’d been following this blog^[1], you’d have realised what I’ve been coyly approaching. I’ve been working up to discussing, perhaps challenging, the most vigorous forms of online activism^[2] of the moment: those that have flourished since the death of George Floyd^[3].  

I’m nervous of this, because of the (understandable) strength of feeling coursing through these debates. I wholeheartedly support those trying to create a world of social justice and equality. I am on their side; I want to put that on record. The Black Lives Matter campaigns, in the USA, seem absolutely necessary. American society seems to contain a catastrophic schism between perceived ethnic groups. Black people face prejudice, discrimination, persecution and even death because of the pigmentation of their skin. This situation is intolerable, but the campaigns that have sprung up to challenge it have largely been carried out with dignity, grace and courage. They are reaching out and communicating their experience of prejudice. 

The situation is a little different in Britain, with its markedly different history of discrimination and, I think, markedly higher levels of integration. Here, as online in America, some people seem kind of intemperate in the way they deliver their messages.

I guess this isn’t surprising. They’ve endured a relentless stream of low-grade bullshit and assumptions about who they are, in daily life, and open abuse and hostility online. But I don’t think it’s helpful.  The Right seek out tribal conflict. It justifies their claims that we are too different to live together and that “foreigners” should “go home”. We must try not to give them what they need. 

So, I’m not expressing right-wing opinions in what I’m about to say. I just think we should agree on what we believe and what we’re about to say before we say it. We need to get our messages straight. And, for Christ’s sake, stop attacking each other!

I feel a sense of shame expressing these opinions. I feel I must be wrong. Or racist (a condition our society abhors in theory) that I’m revealing my squalid inner worthlessness. I guess this comes partly from the conditioning of my social faction (Guardian-reading lefties) and from my low-self-esteem. 

However, I also think the Far-Right have claimed a monopoly on questioning the pieties of the social justice movement. If anyone expresses reservations about the way self-defining Black or LGBTQ+ Activists are acting, the Far-Right gleefully claims them as their own.

The problem is that the rest of us collude in that definition. Anytime a person stands up and suggests the smallest recalibration in the way a Human rights campaign is being run, even if it is eminently reasonable, everyone roundly condemns it as reactionary propaganda. I am as bad, and as conflicted, as anyone. I’ll read an article by some fair-minded professor of ethics, and think, “he is absolutely right!”, followed, rapidly, by “but maybe he’s just a closet racist and ultra-conservative”, followed just as swiftly by, “so does that mean I am, too?”^[4]

Thus we struggle to cleanse our own thoughts, to keep them orthodox and conventionally unconventional.

And some Social Justice activists collude in this^[5], because they insist you must accept their ideas in their entirety or be labelled a fascist. They are in cahoots with the Right, because they are deciding together which parts of the population they can each have as their constituencies in order to mutually cement their importance as leaders of their movements (I suspect.)

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^[1] And I’m pretty certain you haven’t, dear reader!

^[2] The “mainstream media” pick up on online trends and amplify them by reporting on them. Journalistic research, nowadays, seems to consist of trawling social media sites to see what’s trending.

^[3] The previous dominant voice, The LGBTQ+ lobby, has had to take a back seat for the moment. 

^[4] This train of thought is not discouraged by Jordan Petersen, who said some very wise and sensible things and then turned out to have some very suspect views on race (apparently.)

^[5] Not you, dear reader, of course!