“Over the past few years it has often been remarked that our so-called culture war is to some extent a publishing phenomenon, driven by clickbait and careerism rather than sincere conviction. This is true, but frothing right-wing columnists aren’t the only ones on the make; liberals, too, are doing their bit to impoverish the discourse.” (Houman Barekat, “False Alarm A Political Warning Where None is Needed” in The Guardian 23/04/22, a review of Yascha Mounk’s How to Make Diverse Democracies Work, 2022, London: Bloomsbury)

Re-reading my previous posts, I’ve noticed how alarmist they sound. The invasion of Ukraine has shown us how trivial most of our grievances are, even when perfectly valid. The stakes are simply not that high, for us. I should probably lighten up.

To clarify: I am not Right-wing. I agree with most of the criticisms of society put forward by Critical Race Theorists and Social Justice activists: they are my people, but I disagree with many of their assumptions and attitudes. 

So, I’m not claiming that challenges to the status quo or criticisms of the virtue of our cultural codes will instantly plunge us into bloody revolution. I don’t think that the moment somebody says, “I’m not sure we’ve always been entirely fair…”, the whole country will immediately descend into a hell of anarchy, riots and murder. That is a deeply reactionary, conservative way of thinking that seeks to suppress all dissent or alternative thought.

But, I do believe that some Social Justice activists draw their power and influence from conflict and antagonism, from self-righteous anger and a hypocritical prejudice. They thrive on manufacturing tribes and using the word “Justice” to promote revenge, long held resentment, and antipathy. These attitudes, conducts and activities damage the fabric of society that weaves us all together. They attack us as individuals, although respect for the individual is the basis of the moral code that justifies their grievances. This, along with the divisions they intentionally promote, weaken our sense of community and thus community identity. They erode the moral and spiritual health of our society. They lower our collective morale because they make us dislike each other and thus have no loyalty to each other.

Ok. They’re young. The young always think they ‘re the first to have ever thought about, or fought for justice. They think they know best. But in trying to remake society, they are dismantling the good along with the bad. They’re throwing the baby out with the bathwater. 

And, in the case of the influencers and writers, the theorists and the leaders of the movements, they’re doing it for their own personal gain.

So, the situation in the Ukraine demonstrates the terrible violence humans are willing to visit on people they identify as “Not Us”, as “Other”. It demonstrates how careful we must be not to foster antagonism and hatred. And this is for our own security, no matter how justified our grievances.

Because what threatens most to erode our safety is tribalism.  Not just racial, but also factional: gangs and ethnic groups and nationalities; political affiliations; religious sects; antipathy and suspicion, divisions between groups within communities that have been told that that they are different from each other, that they are at odds: these are the drivers of actual violence, although it may take time to reach these levels of intensity. 

I don’t mean the deeply inappropriate metaphoric use of the words “Violence” or “trauma”, as used by social justice activists, to signify not being treated with as much respect as they think they deserve. I mean  children chased down alleys, cornered in stairwells; Emmett Till and Trayvon Martin, Stephen Lawrence and George Floyd, Srebrenica, the Holocaust: real wounding, skull cracking, murderous violence: knives in the dark; red, sticky blood on the tarmac; gunshots at night outside your barricaded door; artillery and bombs aimed deliberately at occupied apartment blocks; mass executions; mass graves. 

The seeds of the Rwandan genocide were sown when the Belgian colonial administrators started to make an artificial distinction between Tutsis and Hutus, and to privilege the former, supposing them to be lighter skinned and more European. 

Vladimir Putin has, for years, fostered such a mindset in the Russian people, and it is this that allows him to enjoy a reported 80% approval rating in Russia for his butchery, telling his people that the West is against them, that their reports of atrocities are fake, that he is protecting Donbas Russians from Ukrainian Nazis.

The war in Ukraine has (perhaps) given a new sense of perspective to the social justice debates in the U.K. As we all now know, around the same time that Aneil Karia and Riz Ahmed were being honoured for their unsparing depiction of a hypothetical Britain, identical crimes were being uncovered in Bucha on the North-western outskirts of Kyiv, Ukraine: the bodies of civilians lying in the street, some with their hands tied behind their backs, many shot in the head. Mass graves held around 150 more bodies.

This was real. These were not trained actors in a dystopian drama. These were actual, living people, and their “inalienable rights”, not just to respect and equal treatment before the law, but to life itself, had simply evaporated on the day Russian troops had arrived in their town. 

They were just like us. They lived normal lives on the outskirts of a modern European capital city, with Twitter and Netflix and lockdown-acquired kittens underfoot and the gloom of Monday mornings on the way to work. Maybe sometimes they forgot to put the bins out until they heard the lorry, and had to rush out in embarrassing pyjamas. 

Like us, they didn’t live in a warzone. They had no need of that miserable civilian fatalism until February this year. Just the other day they walked where they wanted, acted according to their own desires, talked of their hopes and fears, loved and were loved. 

And then, suddenly, without time to prepare themselves, only a few moments, perhaps, of terror and despair, of disbelief, of awful pain, they became nothing. Lumps of putrescent, blackening meat, relics that once held the gleam of sacred fire. 

And nobody came to save them. Nobody could. No well attended protests, no “speaking truth to power” or “calling out injustice” rescued them or could have. No statistics on inequality would have made a difference.^[1]

Because, the truth is, Inalienable Rights are a fiction. Life isn’t fair. All we have is a series of fragile and approximate truces. 

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^[1] There was a joke or a cartoon doing the rounds in Russia a few weeks ago: two Russian soldiers are sitting in a Parisian café, having conquered the whole of Europe. One is saying to the other, “Apparently, we lost the information war…”

No doubt, many would say I have no right to comment on the sense of alienation and threat, let alone the actual discrimination experienced by British-Asians. How would I know the psychological reality of life as a member of a minority in this country? In his excellent Jews Don’t Count (2021, London: TLS Books) David Baddiel says, “Being white [is] not just about skin colour, but about security…White really means: safe.”(p117)

However, as I said before, I live in this country, too. I communicate with people of different ethnic and cultural heritage. I walk these streets. I’d notice if people were being dragged into them and shot en masse. 

In addition, if we are excluded from knowing and understanding the thoughts and experiences of other racial groups, surely I am better placed than the film makers to speak with authority on the motivations and actions of white people? I am a member of that complicit and complacent majority. 

But I reject the increasingly held view that we cannot possibly understand the experiences of others, merely because of these (literally) superficial differences. To dismiss people’s opinions not on their truth or falsity, but on presumptions you make about who they are, is to promote the very prejudice you are condemning. To do so on the grounds of your perception of their race is racist.

We all share a deep and fundamental common humanity. The human experience – the need for love acceptance and community, the misery of alienation, the fear of death is shared by all.

Community is held together by bonds of empathy that (nearly) all can access, and that we should cultivate and strengthen. These bonds are felt personally and individually. The key to breaking down ethnic divisions is individuals reaching out to each other across the barriers, accepting other individuals simply for who they are. 

We are all members of one sub-group or another: the left handed, the very tall, the gingers, the overweight. All have experiences that, although of incomparable mildness to the truly persecuted, allow us to imaginatively empathise with them. White people don’t feel universally safe, they fear all sorts of persecution, just not racial persecution. (Some do, of course, but they are simply wrong!) 

For example, growing up with proudly British-Scottish parents in the republic of Ireland, during the troubles, I experienced a very gentle form of alienation and exclusion, a murmured message that I was an enemy alien, but it wasn’t my fault, and my friends and neighbours loved me, anyway. There were even slight tremors of feeling that we weren’t entirely safe, when news reached us, occasionally, of the murder of people we identified as our own. There was a need to keep quiet about our Britishness among people we didn’t know. This must allow me, through empathy, to imagine some aspects of the immigrant experience in Britain. You, through warm and constructive communication, appealing to my imagination, can help me understand it further. 

In America, the involvement of uniformed police in execution-style shootings has received a lot of media attention. I was just reading about the shooting of Patrick Lyoya in Michigan, on April 4^th. He was shot in the head while lying on the ground, apparently. With the development of high-quality phone cameras, more and more footage of these events has become available. 

A British audience, recognising the quintessentially modern British nature of the characters, and the suburban setting, in The Long Goodbye will instantly recognise it as depicting an event that has never actually occurred in this country. They will automatically understand this as a dystopian nightmare, a fear for the future and an expression of alienated anxiety. Not so an American audience. For them, the imagery must seem much more plausible and immediate. 

My daughter (a 16 year old political firebrand) was online, discussing Britain’s relatively high rates of inter-racial marriage (though lower than the U.S.) and her American inter-locutor said, “Yes, but you guys are still very racist. Look at The Long Goodbye.”

In fact, minorities in Britain seem, by and large, much more integrated than in the US, although this isn’t saying much. Most people don’t seem to have much trouble getting along with, and forming friendships with, people of other ethnic backgrounds. 

Of course, there are tensions and misunderstandings. Biased assumptions are made, but that’s not restricted to racial issues. After all, one of the great miracles of human intelligence and imagination is our ability to generalise from one experience, situation, or piece of information to another. It’s something A.I. is unable to replicate, so far. 

The greatest racial problem in Britain remains whole population unequalness, demonstrated statistically, rather than through the frequency of racist attacks most individuals experience. (off-line, at least. On-line trolls will use any insult they think will work.) This is, I think, usually a consequence of a xenophobic indigenous population hoarding their resources, rather than actual racial disdain. 

I can’t believe such talented and thoughtful film makers truly believe that their demonic Neo-Nazi death-squads represent the attitudes of the majority British population, so The Long Goodbye feels more like an appeal for reassurance than an outright attack, although that direct address to the camera and thus the viewer, at the end, does make you feel personally accused. That’s probably good for us, though. It makes us stop and think, “Am I complicit?” and, even if you conclude, in the end, that you are not, it’s an important check to make. 

My fear for this film is that it will now be picked up by American influencers as evidence that British society is as divided as American, perhaps more so. It is my belief that the division between self-identifying groups in Britain is being aggravated by American cultural imperialism, imported through the internet. People brought up on the internet assume that all culture and cultural tensions in their own countries are the same as those delivered to them online. But the internet is a dark, digital mirror of its creator-culture: America’s capitalist Silicon Valley, where racial tensions are much greater. 

Basing their campaigns on undeniable statistical imbalances, powering them with mass online support, social activists have encouraged tribes to pit themselves against each other, in pursuit of their rights. Ironically this has driven tribes into mutually hostile enclaves. 

Might this film not become an instrument of such division? 

In my last post I was suggesting that American viewers of Aneil Karia and Riz Ahmed’s The Long Goodbyemight assume that it depicted the true state of race relations in Britain, at an essential, if not a literal level. This hunch appears to be borne out by an interview I discovered in The Hollywood Reporter, where the journalist describes the film as “A terrifying look at an everyday nightmare for certain marginalised communities” (“Riz Ahmed and Director Aneil Karia on Making ‘The Long Goodbye’: “It’s a deceptively difficult thing to Nail”” 31/01/22)

I hope such cataclysmic terror isn’t the “everyday” truth for Britain’s Asian communities. I don’t think it is. It would surely be impossible to live with that level of extreme anxiety, day to day. 

Of course, there are some terrible, violent racists, in Britain, who hate and fear Asian people. Of course, there are some prejudiced white policemen who make biased judgements and can even infect the whole working practices of their organisation with racist assumptions, as they gain seniority. Of course, there is institutional racism, which, when demonstrated statistically, can show how much more difficult it is to excel if you are a person of colour.

What there isn’t (yet) is an explicit, intentional collaboration between these factors, so that organised paramilitaries, openly supported by the organs of the state, can enact a systematic programme of genocide in broad daylight. 

There isn’t even anything approaching that in atmosphere or public rhetoric. No matter how cowardly, prejudiced, and miserly we all are, neither the government nor the police, nor the people of Britain would tolerate that, at this point in our history. Each would feel too threatened by the lawless violence of it all; none currently feel threatened enough by ordinary British people of minority heritage. 

I am decidedly anti-nationalist and have no illusions about the “virtues of the British character.” This is the nation that pretty much single-handedly invented rapacious modern capitalism and imperialism, although the U.S. has learned to excel us, and to claim British people were born with certain democratic qualities would be deeply racist.  

Of course, our cultures and societies profoundly condition our thinking and our assumptions, and not all are equally benign. The current British ethico-political belief system is founded in liberal humanist principles: however hypocritical we are, we like to think we believe in the equality, the rights and freedom of all individuals whatever their race or creed. Examples of ethnic cleansing from around the world suggest we could be persuaded to accept murderous regimes, but from this starting point it would take time to prepare us. 

I’ve just watched The Long Goodbye (Aneil Karia and Riz Ahmed, 2020), which won the 2022 Oscar for best short film. Ouch! Brutal. Very powerful. A savage gut-punch of British-Asian paranoia, resentment and hurt. It ends with Riz Ahmed delivering the most thrilling performance poem I have ever seen, straight to camera. That monologue is a truly exhilarating experience. It’s a brilliant example of artistic creation: intense, passionate expression, comunicating a profound psycho-social message that might genuinely change minds for the better.

The viewer is made receptive to that final message by the increasing horror of the story that precedes it. The warmth and happiness of a crowded British-Asian household, as they prepare for a celebration, is enhanced by the intimacy of a hand-held camera that weaves its way through them, following Riz Ahmed’s character as he plays with his little nephew, bickers with his siblings, helps set up. It’s such a lovely portrait of normal, British family life that you just know it’s all going to go wrong, which it duly does, as black vans full of armed and balaclava-wearing racists pull up outside. They are supervised by weary looking police officers who do not intervene.

The film conveys the sense of alienation and threat felt by some, in contemporary Britain. It’s a deeply disturbing attempt to render society’s divisions and tensions in a visible, concrete form. The fear of organised racist violence endorsed by the state is depicted as actual organised racist violence endorsed by the state. 

As a result, this short is troubling in a way that the film makers may not have intended. The Academy awards are American as, presumably, are most of its prize jury. Racial tension in America is clearly endemic, virulent, and highly, highly toxic, especially between people of colour and the police. The catastrophic rifts in American society have become increasingly visible, as more and more videos of police brutality and summary execution have emerged. 

Academy jurors may have taken for granted, then, that The Long Goodbye, in its depiction of distress, rage and hatred between racial groups, is expressing an essential emotional truth of British society, rather than an expression of British-Asian fears for the future. 

But it isn’t like that, in Britain. It truly isn’t. I am not British-Asian, but I walk these same streets, and I see how different people interact. An event like this has never occurred in modern Britain. Not yet. 

Added together, a disproportionate number of people of colour suffer from a whole range of disadvantages. The statistics reveal a fundamental problem (or web of related problems) in society that we might label “institutional Racism” or “Structural Racism” or “Systemic Racism.” This is dreadful and we must work hard to dismantle these structures and remain vigilant that we do not make biased assumptions about people of colour, based on our acceptance of them as the norm. 

But statistics are not lived experience, as I’m always saying. Any individual of colour may not have experienced all, or even any of these disadvantages. For example, according to statisa.com, Police have shot just under 1000 people a year in the USA, since 2017. The number of people of colour is disproportionately high in each year. However, every year the total number males has been well over 900 (940, 942, 961, 983 and 996, to be exact, excluding the incomplete data for 2022). The total number of women has always been under 60. (45, 53, 43, 38, and 56), so a woman of colour is not at significantly increased risk of being shot by the police, whereas a man of colour is. (Individual black women have been shot, as have a higher number – although a lower proportion – of white people and so these statistics were of no use to them, as individuals, at all.)

So, when any white person encounters any person of colour, each may have experienced any, or any combination of, a whole range of privileges, disadvantages, or discriminations, just as each may hold any number of biased beliefs about the other. This white financier’s son may have been traumatically abused and neglected as a child while that woman of colour, brought up on a council estate by a single parent, may have been lovingly cradled in the bosom of a warm, extended family. This woman of colour may be the Oxbridge educated daughter of a cultured diplomat. This afro-Caribbean kid from an impoverished background may be formidably intelligent, or lucky enough to go to a good school with teachers who nurtured his talents; that white boy from an affluent area may have severe learning difficulties or crack-addicted parents. Who knows? 

Through a coincidence of factors in my upbringing, I seem genuinely to lack the anti-Semitic assumptions so wincingly present in British society.  This was luck not judgement. (I assumed, until I moved to England, around the age of 30, that tropes such as the Jewish Banker stereotype were dead, in the British Isles. I was wrong.) You cannot tell on an individual level who has suffered more. You cannot even reduce the unique experiences of human existence to a single unit or rubric to compare them.

Whole population statistics, national or world-wide, will involve thousands, even hundreds of thousands, even millions, of exceptions to the trend. Significant trends and disproportions in statistical data can involve small numbers and proportions of the population. For example, the British government’s own data on prison populations for 2020 showed that Black people made up 3% of the general population, but 10% of those receiving custodial sentences. As the total prison population in 2020 was, according to World Prison Brief (@prisonstudies.org) 79,514, that puts the number of Black people in prison at just under 8000 out of a population of just under 2 million, or 0.04%. So, while Black people are disproportionately jailed, and this is a sign of systematic injustice, imprisonment is not the common experience of black people (or any other ethnic minority) and any person of colour you meet is unlikely to be an ex-convict. 

Assumptions should not, then, be made, by either party in a personal encounter. Individuals are not responsible for statistical injustices; presuming that someone share the prejudices or the ignorance of other members of the group you’ve assigned to them is prejudice. You have “prejudged” them.

We are all far more intensely and viscerally aware of our injuries than the abstract idea of any one of the literally infinite number of ways we haven’t suffered (and that goes for all minorities groups, too.) If this is “privilege”, everybody on the planet has some form of it. It is a necessary constituent part of human identity because each human consciousness is singular and isolated from all others. We should all strive to overcome our insensitivities, but they should not be used as an accusation. What elevates us is our capacity for imaginative empathy, which leaps that gulf. Celebrate it.

Katy Lee, writing in The Daily Telegraph, recently (04/04/22), was reporting on how French people intended to vote in their upcoming presidential election. She’d gone to Arcachon, a coastal town in the south-west and discovered a worrying rise in support for Marine LePen, the far right leader of the National Rally party (which used to be the National Front.) A retired teacher, who voted for the left wing Jean-Luc Melenchon in 2017, gave her this explanation, “We don’t like all this ‘Cancel Culture’ and ‘woke’ stuff there is on the Left now, …I don’t feel like I abandoned the Left; the Left abandoned me.” 

This is our own doing. The far right pose a genuine and serious threat to the health and well-being of our communities, our freedom, our safety, our struggle for a humanist equality, even to peace between nations, as we’ve seen in Ukraine. Now our lunatic fringe has provided the far-right with ample ammunition. They don’t even have to make up the usual lies to make us sound completely unreasonable and themselves as the voices of common sense. 

This is what happens when you pursue a policy of confrontation and blame aimed at ordinary people. 

Of course, the theory is that we will goad them out of their complacent passivity where they can pay lip service to liberal humanism without actually doing anything to effect positive change. But, if we tell them to choose a side when we’ve already rejected them, we’re driving them into the arms of the truly poisonous and dangerous forces in society. We are acting as recruiting sergeants for reactionary armies. 

In our self-reinforcing bubbles we encourage each other to greater and greater unreasonableness, but, without challenge, we believe we speak for all sensible normal people and are resisted only by extremists. This is not true. In anything approaching a democracy we need to understand the point of view of those who oppose us. We need to reach out to them and negotiate a compromise position. They’re just people. (Except, maybe, the MAGA/ QAnon lot.)

A similar deliberate confusion between racism and xenophobia appears to have happened with the Windrush Scandal. Here, the endemic hostility towards foreigners, and thus immigrants, in certain sections of the British population, was turned into official government policy and legislation by Theresa May, when she was Home Secretary in 2012. This was a naked attempt to win over right-wing voters and it meant that, among many other implications, hundreds of people from Commonwealth countries, who had spent their whole lives in Britain, suddenly had to find documentation to prove they had the right to remain here. 

The burden of proof was placed on the individuals, who were required to find at least one document for every year they had spent in the country! This was despite the fact they had been invited by the then British Governments, to ease a shortage of workers, and that the Home Office and Immigration services had destroyed much of its own records. (Theresa May also required employers, banks, landlords and the NHS to follow these enquiries up, to do the Home Office’s dirty work, in other words, presumably as a cost saving measure.)

Of course, this was an impossible task for many people. Ironically, the longer they had spent in Britain, contributing to the economic, community and cultural life of the country, the more difficult it became to prove “the right to remain.” Without this proof, they began to lose access to healthcare, housing, bank accounts, driving licenses and so on. Some were sent to detention centres for immigrants. Some were deported to countries they had left as small children, had no memory of, and no close contacts in. (The Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants’ website has a fantastic page on this, entitled “Windrush Scandal Explained”: jcwi.org.uk) 

This is outrageous. It astonishes me how anyone in this country can still vote conservative. However, activists insist on calling this scenario “racist.” Even the JCWI says, “There was widespread shock and outrage that so many Black Britons had had their lives devastated.” (Would there have been less shock and outrage, then, if they had been Asian? or European? Presumably not.)

The specification of skin colour, here, is unhelpful and unnecessary. The legislation that underpins the persecution doesn’t seem to specify, by race, who is to be targeted. It is generally xenophobic, not racist. 

Anti-racism campaigners are trying to muscle in on a separate injustice, to feed off the energy of its outrage, to maintain their own importance and centrality to the debate, I assume. It’s another form of colonialism, or, at least, an activist coup.