Though Cowards Flinch

Last week more than 100 historians signed an open letter expressing outrage at the sentiments of David Starkey, when during his appearance on Newsnight he opined: “What has happened is that a substantial section of the chavs… have become black. The whites have become black.”

What Starkey was trying to say is that Enoch Powell had it at least partly right when he talked about the rivers of blood, and the destruction of the indigenous culture, in Britain.

In a way, through the use of patois, what Starkey believes to be black culture has transformed the identities of many white people, and so the UK has undergone some sort of black cultural hegemony.

He’s wrong, of course. For what can be defined as black culture in the form of music, language and fashion is subcultural – the message that Starkey began to read, on Newsnight, describing the words of a looter, using patois, was a single example, exploited by Starkey, to give the impression there was some racial notion at play during the riots and looting in London, Birmingham and elsewhere.

Fortunately, no one let Starkey get away with it. Waves of articles, blog posts, news items and letters filled the air as outrage turned to analysis.

Starkey got it wrong, everyone else got it right: race is not defined by a single set of ideas, therefore it is absurd to say whites have become black, just as it is say the black race is defined by patois.

So it seems only appropriate that an organisation like the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) be given the cold shoulder for supposing that a black tea party member is “a paid “mouthpiece” traitor to [his] race” (see also).

Does this not suppose that the kind of dullard conservatism to which the tea party movement in the US embraces is limited only to whites?

It reminds me of Cornel West’s examination of black conservatism. According to him, in his 1994 book Race Matters – there were large swathes of black conservatives, particularly in universities, who were scornful of affirmative action measures, and were suspicious of black liberalism as inadequate and concerned, mostly, with in-fighting.

But to fellow black academics, there was an element of traitorousness to their conservatism – they weren’t wrong because of their ideas, but their ideas were wrong for them, supposedly because of the colour of their skin.

Conservatism was once the preserve of the racist, white, middle-class male (certainly in the West), but time has shown the two to be only tediously linked. Though I’m not a conservative, it doesn’t bother me to note that there are black conservatives and black members of the tea party because I know that my criticisms of conservatism do not rest on it being inherently racially exclusive.

Conservatism is not necessarily stupid, but it can attract stupid people.

Starkey was wrong on Newsnight because he thought race meant something beyond skin. But we must, here, be consistent. Anyone who suggests that blacks are traitors to their race for supporting the tea party are wrong because they, also, believe race means something beyond skin, and that conservatism as a black person is, necessarily, an expression of black skin, white mask.

Whereas, if we read Cornel West properly, we can see that through conservatism, the black subject isn’t necessarily appropriating and imitating the coloniser, but it could have more to do with a crisis in liberal or progressive politics – where we on the Left should draw our attention.

Tony Sewell, in his defence of David Starkey, notes:

Where I believe Dr Starkey is right is that it is now just as likely to be a white or Asian teenager posing on the internet in baggy designer clothes and dripping in gold chains, either waving a weapon of some kind or pointing their fingers at the camera in a grotesque parody of a shooting.

If this is what Starkey means by a type of black culture that Enoch Powell was supposedly years ahead for criticising, then it’s no surprise to me that white or Asian teenagers partake in it – namely because it is not black culture at all.

Gang culture is a sub-culture, not a racial trait, any more than Goth culture is a racially white trait. To suppose gang culture is a specifically black thing, though seemingly true quantitatively (i.e. the perception of gangs may invoke images of black people, mirrored by the manufactured hip hop image of black struggle or excess and gang culture), is not true qualitatively because nothing sub-cultural can ever be identified alone by racial categories.

In other words if Starkey hates gang culture, then this alone is what his beef must be with. When questioned towards the end of the Newsnight section whether he felt black culture was a problem he replied “No, well…” before qualifying that a certain section of it should be condemned (this was precisely what led Toby Young to defend Starkey’s characteristically ambiguous usage of Enoch Powell’s language).

Cultural hegemony and the memetic qualities of certain cultural traits are only trivialised by adding reference to race, and come dangerously close to what Stephen Jay Gould called the “deterministic view of human society and human action”.

There was once a quote from civil rights campaigner Ella Baker which went:

Those most affected by an issue should lead

Undoubtedly this brings up images of historical figures such as Martin Luther King, who risked his life for the belief in equality between races. Had a white person led on the campaign, it would have been unjust to view it necessarily as paternalism, but certainly the issue held more weight by being represented by one most affected.

However taken to its logical conclusion, Baker’s quote is not without problems.

I remember watching an episode of The Big Question on the BBC where euthanasia was being discussed. Opposing it was a former doctor, now retired, able to take a rather objective view that for all intents and purposes it might be unfair to burden a professional with assistance in somebody’s death. Having all proximity to the issue removed, the man weighed the pros and cons and reached the conclusion that euthanasia should not be implemented in the UK.

Against the motion, however, was a person with a terminal illness, who – for obvious reasons – was unable to hold quite the same amount of reserve as the former doctor, instead displaying a very emotional appeal to the audience about why her case proves the need for the right-to-die in this country.

By being affected by the issue, did the woman not make it problematic for herself to lead on it?

Take another example: a family were once on the news who had recently lost their child to an abductor. It was later realised their child had sadly been killed by the man. They then appeared on the news advocating the death penalty for child killers. Many would understand or at least sympathise with their grief, but conclude their proximity to the issue does not put them in good standing to lead on the issue – particularly as they advocate a system of punishment long, and rightly, opposed in this country.

Given the examples I’ll throw the question out, and hopefully get some interesting feedback in the comments thread: Should those most affected by an issue lead on it?

I put off writing this because I had already got the subject out of my system, but it has returned and it’s very difficult to ignore: it is the question of multiculturalism, and more specifically what this means to anti-fascists.

Richard Seymour recently produced a blog entry about philosopher Slavoj Zizek’s attempts to critically analyse violence and provocation carried out against the Strojan family – an extended family of 31 Gypsies, 14 of them children.

Seymour’s beef is with two things: firstly the outcome of the events, which culminated in the police succumbing to pressure by violent mobs and forcing the family to leave, who, as he notes, had they not “driven the gypsies out, the racist mob would have done so with fire and blades.”

The second thing Seymour has beef about is Zizek’s poor research on the matter. Zizek has used this example to underline his own controversial view of multiculturalism (more of which in a moment) but what he has failed to do is properly understand what happened to the family. As Seymour says in a reply to critics of the aforementioned entry:

I find no evidence that the Strojan family are car thieves, and they didn’t murder anyone. It is true that locals blamed the Strojan family for a number of thefts, but it’s also true that they acknowledge when pressed that the Strojans have been scapegoated on this issue.

I’m with Seymour here; had Zizek done his homework, he would’ve seen that this is a case of scapegoating, or at best a heavy-handed response to petite-theft among some individuals of a family, perhaps spurred on because of the family’s racial background. Zizek here is not being racist, he has just erroneously placed this disgraceful event in the wrong context; by implication I feel that Zizek’s “apologia for anti-Roma racism” is due to a misjudgement by the Slovenian.

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As it happens I find Zizek’s critique of multiculturalism very useful (which is why one can agree with Seymour on this issue, and still be in defence of Slavoj Zizek, so to speak). I will attempt to place it in its correct context.

Multiculturalism, according to Kenan Malik, author of From Fatwa to Jihad: The Rushdie Affair and its Legacy, has come to be defined as a policy promoting diversity among a society of people with fixed identities, partly as a reaction to inharmonious feeling at a time of increased immigration into the UK. For Malik this has simultaneously become the problem and solution to intolerance. While it rather nobly aims to celebrate difference, it also rather crudely pigeon-holes people, on account of their racial or national heritage.

In trying to effect “respect for pluralism [and] avowal of identity politics” – which have come to be “hallmarks of a progressive, anti-racist outlook” – segregation has simply become institutionalised.

As a consequence to the respect agenda, all cultures have become of equal value, which may mean that in purely multicultural terms everything is permissible if it can be justified on the grounds of cultural heritage – which leads to the question who can authoritatively account for what a cultural trait is (for Malik, such policies in the eighties served only to strengthen conservative Muslim leaders in Birmingham, on the daft assumption that they alone could authoritatively account for what Islam is).

For Zizek, there is a bourgeois liberal variant of multiculturalism that is repulsed by (far) right wing populism of the Other (the immigrant for example) to the extent that it starts to fetishise the Other. Not content with opposing all racism directed at this Other, it starts to think the Other can do no wrong. Take as an example the song “Kill the Boer, Kill the Farmer” often sung by Julius Malema, President of the African National Congress Youth League; the real anti-racist would oppose this song in spite of its historical context, for whatever the white farmers’ crimes during the apartheid, this is a song that is derogatory towards a race. The bourgeois liberal fetishist, of the ilk to which Zizek refers, may justify singing the song on the grounds that such retaliation is historically justified (you could perhaps ascribe to this the notion of “white guilt”).

For Zizek, the bourgeois liberal justifying Malema singing the song is akin to expressing the belief that Melama knows no better, leading Zizek to assert that certain modes of politically correct tolerance of the Other is grounded upon the belief that certain groups can be judged differently (which is why the BNP for example are wrong for being racist populists, but Malema is clear on the grounds that he has experienced racism himself). This ends up being monoculturalism based upon a rather stereotypical ideal of how the Other should act – the point being that the bourgeois liberal, for Zizek, is deluding himself by thinking he is a mutliculturalist, since it is almost a colonial understanding of the foreign Other who he is identifying.

In short, this notion of multiculturalism masks a racist idea of the Other who needs to be “tolerated” (for more on this see Naadir Jeewa’s excellent analysis).

The confusion here lies in who we identify as this bourgeois liberal, naïve apologist? For many people who subscribe to multiculturalism this simply doesn’t resonate. For me, Zizek’s analysis is less a critique of multiculturalism, and more a critique of naïve, neo-colonial monoculturalism (which I assume he is well aware of, though if not, we ought to understand that the bourgeois liberal variant of multiculturalism is not necessarily inherent to multiculturalism proper). But maybe the word multiculturalism lends itself too easily to the idea that cultural relativism is appropriate– since we’re immediately in a struggle to identify what we can call culture (authority on which, as Malik explains, can often fall into the wrong hands).

When most people support multiculturalism, what they mean is that a country ought not to have a dominant national character immigrants are obliged to adopt as a guarantee of their debt to their new homeland. Instead a country should allow all to practice what they wish, as they wish, provided that it doesn’t harm anyone. Perhaps I’ll adopt the term socialist universalism?

Remember that ironically titled article by Yasmin Alibhai Brown called God bless the foreigners willing to do our dirty work where she mourned the exploitation, often unregulated and often un-unionised work that people from abroad have to suffer. The one where she castigated the managerial class for embracing the free movement of labour as a way of driving down wages, and enjoyed the lack of laws relating to temp workers so hours can be longer and wages minimal? No?

I guess that is not what she meant when she penned the following:

Two fit white British men loiter outside my local bank. They beg. I asked if they wanted to clear out my back garden for a fair wage. They said I was one crazy lady. Polish Andrew did the job cheerfully and efficiently. God bless bloody foreigners who do our dirty work and are then damned by an ungrateful, obtuse nation.

If this is the voice of someone left wing or progressive (that, among other things; self-described of course) then I’ll get my coat. But left wing this is not.

Brown has made quite a name for herself as being someone who derides the “lazy” – demonstrating, not simply a lack of knowledge in the writing of Paul Lafargue (won’t blame her for that), but as one who forgets the golden rule against using dangerous generalisations and sweeping statements unable to be substantiated upon.  

Eagle-eyed Reuben, over at TTE, noticed this as well. He says:

While Yasmin says she knows a number of lazy immigrants, she observes “most of us immigrants feel insecure and vulnerable and can never take anything for granted. The survival instinct makes us push the work ethic into our kids.”

The point Reuben goes on to elaborate is immigrants should not have to work for nothing, or next to nothing, which can quite often be their option, and points out that if this “ethic” is to substantiated, it is not necessarily the most rewarding in a society predicated so fixedly on exploiter and exploited (similar to the conclusion made by Lafargue in fact).

I want to go further; I’m happy for Brown to say this instinct is present in people who have felt vulnerable, but in context with other comments she has made about  who she might refer to as lazy white British men, what results is excluding the white working class from being either “insecure” or “vulnerable” – which of course is baseless.

Read again, with knowledge of other things she has said about those who do not work; is insecurity and vulnerability necessary elements to a good work ethic, and if so, does that mean people who do not work are not “insecure” or “vulnerable” enough?

I might forward this reasoning to the caricature bourgeois, suburban liberal middle class comments awards taking place at an as-yet-unnamed venue.

Her latest offering, at first glance on the subject of how Taliban values are entering Muslim children in the UK, turns out to do with middle class Muslim attitudes to rogue British children in state schools.

She “interviews” a representative sample:

Samad Hussein, who runs a corner shop near my home, speaks for many when he says: ‘When I first came to England, it was a nice country – polite, respectful.

‘People knew good behaviour. My older children had English friends, no problem.

‘Now these girls, nearly naked in the roads, drinking and swearing, sex everywhere. I can’t let my young daughters be like that.

‘So I send them to Muslim schools. I don’t want to, but it is bad out there.’

What I detect in Brown’s attitude is, not sympathy with the difficulty in juggling progressive values with wanting to ensure ones child(ren) receives a good education, one which they have a right to, but rather a moral superiority very few of us on the left would ever wish to promote positively.