Statues, street signs, cancellations and culture wars
Progressives need to build coalitions. Instead, we seem intent on fracturing them
‘Both bizarre and inevitable.’
This was the response by British academic Kenan Malik to the news that HBO Max had removed Gone With the Wind due to its problematic depiction of a southern aristocratic family in the 1860s. This pithy one-liner seemed to perfectly encapsulate where we are. Society’s tumble into a spiral of a culture war is both bizarre and inevitable.
Young graduates dominate in tech, arts and culture. They tear down symbols that they deem problematic. They look upon their Twitter feeds and see flickers of outrage and worry for their brand image. Despite privately disagreeing with the day’s outrage, they pick ‘their side’ to avoid a ‘cancellation’ that would dent to their image or their profit margins.
A young marketer sits behind their desk and pretends to embody Yorkshire Tea for the day. Alt-Right and very-online right-wingers howl with rage. The rest of the society looks on perplexed, as they hear about the ‘controversy’ on a news channel.
Statues and street signs
I cannot shed a tear for the tearing down of statues of slavers. In fact, I felt somewhat moved by the pulling down of Edward Colston’s statue. The symbolism of the act could not be missed, as Bristol Mayor Marvin Rees explained so eloquently when asked to reflect on the protester's actions:
“Torn down, dragged through the streets . . . When you think about some of the punishments that would have been meted out on his slaves, Africans . . . Thrown off the quayside where Colston’s ships would undoubtedly have docked, next to a bridge called Pero’s Bridge named after a Bristol slave. And you think about all the Africans that were thrown overboard and finished their lives underwater. I mean the historical poetry of that should not be lost on anyone.”
Colston’s statue in Bristol is a particularly egregious case, and there had been many long and arduous and ultimately failed attempts by residents of the city to have it removed by ‘democratic’ means. However, as footage of the tumbling statue was gleefully shared around my social media, I held a wry smile. ‘You don’t think it will end here, do you?’
Within days the University of Liverpool said it would be changing the name of one of its halls of residence as it was named after ex-Prime Minister and Chancellor William Gladstone.
Gladstone’s views and legacy are undoubtedly complex. He was born and raised in Liverpool and his family drew immense wealth from the slave trade. Though ultimately a critic of the slave trade, his maiden speech defended the interests of the West Indian slave-owning plantation owners and he supported financial compensation for slave owners. Yet Gladstone also presided over many seismic democratic reforms which shaped the country for the better — extending the franchise, legalising trade unions, introducing the secret ballot and universal education. He campaigned for years to bring Home Rule to Ireland. He achieved more in his life than most of us could ever dream of.
There is an obvious question to ask here. If we judge historical figures by contemporary standards, who will be left standing? Society’s moral framework is constantly shifting. The concept and the ‘common-sense’ moral acceptance of universal human rights are relatively modern. Being liberal in 1820 is different from being liberal in 2020.
I sincerely hope that in 200 years, my legacy and those of my contemporaries are reflected on and assessed within the values of our time. We never know what the future holds. In 200 years, we might believe throwing some people in jail is an abhorrent removal of fundamental human rights. I am as liberal as they come on prison reform, but I still think they have a place in society. In 2220, I hope my support for the insatiable cruelty of prison and generational trauma we believe it caused is understood in the context of their broad use and acceptance in early 21st-century life.
Take as well the example of gender. A topic where society’s views on it are changing so rapidly that even as a 28-year-old, I now understand the difficulty my grandparents have grasping the nuances of changing language and social norms. In 100 years we might believe that denying that a sex/gender spectrum exists is unforgivable abuse and that thinking people should accept a binary was unforgivable. My common and casual use of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ could erase any celebration of my work still deemed positive in 2120.
Today’s rows over statues raise the sorts of questions which will be asked about our own generation in centuries to come. But the protagonists are often highly selective in who and what they target. The website ToppleTheRacists.org is a case in point. The website hosts a crowdsourced map which locates statues and monuments in the UK that ‘celebrate slavery and racism’. The site says its purpose is to ‘start a debate’, and in a sense it has. As for what I find most illuminating about the site is not its historical illiteracy, but its obvious ommissions.
The site wants to ‘topple’ buildings named in honour of persons involved in the Institute for the Study of Eugenics at the University College London. However, as yet, the site has not recommended the toppling of statues and plaques commemorating socialist thinkers such as HG Wells, George Bernard Shaw and Sidney and Beatrice Webb. They were all strong proponents of eugenics.
I highlight this because we need to realise this new puritanism can make everyone pay a price — including my leftist friends who champion it. Do you realise that you might soon need to tear down statues of socialist icons from Friedrich Engels to Keir Hardie? And someone, somewhere, will be offended by your Che Guevera t-shirt because he was a racist. You’ll need to bin that too.
Sadiq Khan has committed to a review of not just all statues of slavers in London but of all street names in the city named after them. I lived in Liverpool for three years and studied the history of its inner-city Georgian neighbourhoods for my dissertation. I know a few roads there named after slavers, including Clarence Street, Manesty’s Lane and Penny Lane. I’d be curious to hear the thoughts of someone who is so offended by these names that they believe they must be removed.
I am certain the offended individual would be able to link the racial stereotypes that linger in society to colonial-era racial pseudoscience. Moreover, they would likely be able to link the poverty and social exclusion of working-class immigrants from the Commonwealth to the legacy of slavery and colonialism. But could they link racist behaviour today, to a road name? Could we link the structural inequality that affects working-class BAME communities to road names?
If someone knows that Clarence Street is named after anti-abolitionist the Duke of Clarence, they’ll likely know that the name reflected the 1790s when it was laid and named. Renaming the street doesn’t confirm that times have changed, that we no longer memorialise and celebrate slavers. Because we’ve long since ceased to celebrated slavers. Slavery is viewed by the vast majority of British society as an ultimate evil.
Renaming streets in London and Liverpool is easy. However, it does almost nothing to tackle racism in the here and now. Tackling the lack of good quality housing, lack of affordable pre-school places and poor air quality in London, which disproportionately affects the outcomes for working-class BAME Londoners, is tough. However, it is these issues that reproduce generational inequality and tackling them is likely to have more widespread support.
You’ve been cancelled
Fawlty Tower’s is one of Britain’s most loved sitcoms and is deemed by many to be iconic. However, the famous “Don’t Mention the War” episode has been taken off UKTV (which is owned by the BBC). The episode has been deemed unpalatable due to character Major Gowen repeatedly using the N-word in reference to members of the West Indies cricket team. However, there remains a strong argument that the show is not racist. As articulated by journalist Mark Lawson, the show satirises English upper-class bigotry through Major Gowen. It is mocking the racist.
I do not think words in and of themselves are offensive, but words within a specific context can be. However, if we censor ‘offensive words’ because someone, somewhere, claims to be offended by that word, where could we end up? Think just for a moment about how many characters in your favourite films use deeply offensive or racist terminology.
As Lawson also highlights, after the BBC censored the Pogues’ ‘Fairytale of New York’, the original was reinstated following audience protests that the words were used ‘without malice and as dramatic quotation’. Likewise, I tried to argue that the use of offensive words needs to be assessed within their artistic context during the Twitter furore following the comedic use of ‘Fairytale of New York’ in the 2019 Gavin & Stacey Christmas special.
Like tearing down a statue, there is a righteous thrill to be gained from cancelling someone. Recently, Twitter comedian Meggie Foster was condemned for mocking Diane Abbott’s infamous car-crash LBC interview in the run-up to the 2017 general election. For mocking Abbott, Foster was deemed racist. This is despite her regularly mocking MPs of all political creeds, backgrounds and ethnicities, in the very same style. There is no evidence that she was targeting politicians of a specific background.
I believe that Abbott’s interview gained such high-levels of public cut-through in part due to widespread misogyny and racism. However, I also think this interview also gained cut-through because it was a monumentally bad interview in which the potential Home Secretary got in a profound pickle in a general election campaign over finances, a perceived weak point for the Labour Party. Foster understandably chooses to parody moments that remain in the public consciousness. I completely accept that the stereotype that black people are stupid is a pervasive and toxic racist trope. But Foster was mocking a specific black person for a specific incident in which they said something stupid. Surely, we can see the difference?
I hate our new insatiable urge to ‘cancel’ people. Though there is a growing movement to view racism-through-inherent-privilege as something within us all, there is still, quite understandably, a huge stigma about being labelled a bigot, racist, homophobe or transphobe. Being labelled a racist isn’t just upsetting because of your ‘white fragility’. It is upsetting because it can mean you lose your job, career and are ostracised from your liberal friendship group.
I once believed that at the core of the liberal world view was a belief that people were inherently decent. That even the most pervasive criminals can be reformed; nobody is born ‘evil’ and even those who commit the most heinous of crimes are very likely to be victims of profound trauma themselves. Crime has social causes and how we respond to crime should reflect that and be ‘reasonable’ in response. Therefore, I recoil when livelihoods are trashed because someone’s remark is deliberately read from the worst possible angle and intent.
The language of ‘microaggressions’, the linguistic devices such as ‘words are violence’, and the reframing of disagreeing with someone as ‘erasing one’s identity’ or ‘erasing one’s lived experience’ makes it very easy to cancel someone. Instead of looking for allies, we turned allies (or potential allies) into traitors for minor discretions. I am saying nothing new.
Build coalitions — don’t break them
Sadiq Khan is a master of political framing and gesturing. On Brexit and his public battles with Trump, he signals effectively to London’s growing liberal voter base. However, if we want to tackle racial inequality and produce a more liberal society as a whole, we need to use messaging and demands that bring the country along with us. We need not ponder how to shame sympathetic liberal politicians, but instead, figure out how we can build a broad coalition of support for practical policies.
The calls to ‘defund the police’ encapsulate the current madness. Supposedly, the slogan doesn’t actually mean let’s abolish the police… and let private security fill the void (as would certainly happen for those who could afford it). It means we should reduce police funding, and reinvest the money saved in initiatives that tackle systemic class and racial inequality and the root causes of crime.
You don’t need to be an expert in political comms to see that a while this slogan might energise people supportive enough to go to a BLM protest, it is laughably bad at winning anybody over. There is mainstream support in America for training police on how to de-escalate, giving all officers body cameras, introducing warning systems to spot problematic officers and for banning neck restraints. The proposal to cut funding for police departments is disliked across the board, including in black communities.
As Stephen Bush recently pointed out, Theresa May commissioned an independent review of deaths and serious incidents in police custody in the United Kingdom, in addition to a review into racial inequality in the criminal justice system chaired by David Lammy. Very few of the recommendations offered by these substantial reports have been passed into law. Here lies a golden opportunity for criminal justice reform but it involves building an alliance across the left to figures on the right, including the ex-Prime Minister who commissioned the reports.
If we sharpen our swords and pitchforks and engage in this growing culture war, we face two interplaying issues. First, we’ll let easy wins but ultimately symbolic gestures replace the hard graft needed to build support for the policies to end systemic racism. Secondly, we will fail in the hard graft of convincing people if we follow the authoritarian and illiberal practices that typify U.S style campus-born-culture-wars. How do we persuade someone to support an idea when we routinely portray them as racist or evil?
It has been commonplace to describe political opponents on the Right as evil/racist/fundamentally bad people for as long as I’ve been involved in politics. This now seems to be growing, as the thrill of cancelling grows and grows.
Change is gradual and we all need to buy into it
The journey of reframing racism as an overt conscious act of racial prejudice by an individual, to understanding it as a systemic issue perpetuated by structural inequality and unconscious bias, will be a difficult and thorny one. And while in liberal circles we love to describe racism as an issue of systems, we cannot help but individualise the problem. We focus on cleansing the individual through terms such as ‘internalised white supremacy’ and publicly shaming people for ‘colour blindness’ or for daring to defend themselves from the accusation of racism.
As Kenan Malik argues, the ‘stress on ‘white privilege’ turns a social issue into a matter of personal and group psychology’. Public displays of guilt and atonement are the cure to salvage a sinner and social media has been awash with people acknowledging and apologising for their white privilege. This has the effect of moving the discussion away from examining systemic racism as a complex interplay between deeply rooted inequalities and subconscious biases that are racist and classist in character.
By viewing racism as a matter of white psychology, we struggle to explain why the ‘problems faced by African Americans are not due simply to white people, or even to white police officers’. Stating that the racial disparity in the UK criminal justice system is caused by the racism of white officers we struggle to explain intra-ethnic disparities. People of Indian ethnicity in the UK are less likely to be arrested and no more likely to be stopped and searched as a white Briton. While those of Indian ethnicity in the UK are more likely to employed in professional occupations and perform better than white Britons in school, Bangladeshi, Pakistani, and Black Britons face disadvantage across income, housing and education. They are overly represented in the criminal justice system.
As Stephen Bush succinctly sums it up when he argued that problems of racial disparity in the criminal justice system are ‘primarily ones of class, with racism as a co-morbidity, rather than a cause’. The process of fixing systemic racism will mean acknowledging that implicit racial biases within institutions play a role, without reducing it to a personalised theory of a million rotten apples.
By facing up to these nuances we can avoid the growing bind we find ourselves in. On the one hand, we want people to become more conscious and accepting of the latent biases they might have, as the first step onto personal growth. We want to acknowledge that we all hold racial biases, re-shaping racism away from the idea of overt acts carried out by bad people. However, on the other hand, we find ourselves increasingly shaming and cancelling bad people as racists for minor slights of cultural appropriation or micro-aggressions.
If we want everyone to adopt a definition of racism encompassing inadvertent and opaque transgressions, we’ll need to have a widespread conversation. It might mean finding a new language, so Donald Trump describing Mexicans as rapists and your white work colleague asking a black colleague to calm down are not both simply described as racist.
Progress happens when there is relatively broad buy-in across society. This takes place gradually, through debate and engaging people with opposing views. As a society, we seem to be losing faith in debate and mediation. It is all too common for any discussion on what is or is not racist/homophobic/transphobic to be shut down by “you can’t comment on this (or your argument are inherently invalid) because you are not of the ‘affected’ identity”. We deem this to be progressive. This is deemed a pragmatic way of breaking down the defensiveness of people who may be less receptive to new norms in language or the reform of their institutions.
If we are going to continue the discussion on what statues, road names, jokes, words and symbols are deemed offensive and unpalatable, we will need to engage voices outside our bubbles and beyond our side in the culture war. Talking more about these issues helps. It will mean listening to white people’s views and the views of socially conservative black and Asian citizens as well. It will mean avoiding terms like gaslighting to describe those who disagree with you. It means finding a language of inclusivity and shared universal experience, rather than splitting us up into ‘identity’ or in and out-groups.
Due to the social-economic make-up of the academic and cultural sphere, the liberal-Left might think it is winning the culture war in the UK. However, as the net around what is ‘problematic’ speech widens, before its broad acceptance in society, we will see more and more people feel excluded. Liberals who are left unpersuaded that group/colour blindness shouldn’t be something to strive for, or left unpersuaded that our gender identity defines our lived experiences as a man or woman more so than our sex, will begin to dig into the culture-war trenches. Before you know it, ‘the other side’ has reinforcements.
There is a growing feeling that the conversation about what is deemed ‘progressive’ isn’t a debate but intimidation. To combat this we need to do two things. Firstly, we should remember that despite its problems, Britain is one of the most liberal countries in the world. Polls show that a clear majority of the public are against racism, sexism, and for civility. A broad majority opposes the ‘political correctness has gone too far’ narrative. There is scope to engage the broad public in changing and pushing liberal norms, without damning and dismissing. There is likely to be an appetite for pragmatic liberal reform - if these reforms are not framed an attack on the side of a culture war.
The liberal-Left need to start being brave. They need to question new orthodoxies. They can’t just keep their head down when they see someone ‘cancelled’ for an opinion they also hold. We need to stand up for the importance of saying “hold on a minute” and accept seeing things in another light. Let’s start debates even if they are ‘uncomfortable’. If we don’t, we will start to see a schism. You will be left perplexed by the polls, policies and election results. Your bubble will say one thing is hatred, and the country will vote for it.
TL;DR: Bring nuance and tolerance back to discussions around history, identity and ‘problematic’ language. Let’s embrace debate, not shut it down. Cancel culture and culture wars shatter centre-left coalitions and help construct new centre- right ones.
This is what I’d like to see happen.
1. The British Empire, colonialism and slavery should be placed on the National Curriculum. The appraisal of the legacy of the British Empire needs to attempt to rise above culture war partisanship.
2. Education and reframing of historical memorials is usually more productive and less antagonising than tearing them down. Let’s also build new ones.
3. Focusing on easy-symbolic action can lead us to ignore the difficult practical steps towards tackling deep-rooted racial inequality.
4. Uncompromising positions strengthen your opponents’ resolve. Arguments need to be framed in a way to win broad support. The liberal-Left should look to persuade others rather than silencing and ‘cancelling’.
5. The concept that only a person of a particular race/class/gender/protected characteristic has moral authority to discuss issues relating to their race/class/gender/characteristic — or that the views of a person of particular of race/class/gender/protected characteristic are inherently more valid, no matter the clarity or evidence of their argument, than the view of someone not of that identiy — is reductive. While we should recognise the privilege accorded to ‘cis white men’ throughout history and be sensitive to it, our goal in a debate is to persuade. Shutting down voices by saying ‘you can’t comment on this because of your identiy, or your views are less valid due to who you are’ is degrading no matter who it is aimed at. To build a consensus around language and progress, we need buy-in from all sections of society - so allow them into the debate.
