Cancelling thought
When everything is seen the prism of race we begin to lose touch with our humanity. By Nick Cater
The campaign to portray America as a hideously racist dystopia stumbled recently over the significance of ropes found hanging from a tree in Oakland, California.
Libby Schaaf, the city’s mayor, instantly declared it a hate crime. Later that day, however, a man called Victor Sengabe told journalists he had strung the ropes with friends to create an outdoor gym. "Out of the hundreds and thousands of people that walked by, no one has thought that it looked anywhere close to a noose,” he said.
In less argumentative times, Mayor Schaaf might have slapped herself theatrically on the head and laughed at her silly mistake. Instead she waved a hectoring white forefinger at Sengabe, who used to be a black man but is now a person of colour. "Intentions don't matter," Schaaf said. "It is incumbent on all of us to know the actual history of racial violence, of terrorism, that a noose represents”.
Once, this parable for our time might have appeared as a chapter in a satirical novel, or a sketch in a wry TV comedy. Today these parodies appear almost daily in the news but we’re forbidden to laugh in the face of absurdity.
A white mayor, fond of lecturing about white privilege, uses her position to shame a man for racist insensitivity towards his fellow blacks and we’re not even allowed to smirk.
This exaggerated sensitivity towards race is leading the US on a path to re-segregation, comedian and TV host Bill Maher warned last week. “Instead of just seeing a person and not a colour, now we’re only seeing colour," he said.
Literature should be the forum to explore competing cultural mores like this, testing them by the fire of a writer’s pen. Novelists from Emily Bronte to Miles Franklin and Phillip Roth have used fiction to prick pretensions and mock insincerity.
Yet fiction is dangerous territory for a writer in an era when a literal reading of their words trumps literary conventions. Once a novelist could safely place uncomfortable thoughts in a character’s head. But as novelist Lionel Shriver told me in a recent podcast: “it’s now a little dangerous to express any non-orthodox opinion or statement, even in novels, even through the voices of your characters.”
The advent of cancel culture “threatens you with a certain kind of death… the ambition is to muzzle you and make it impossible for you to publish and to have a platform on the web or be on TV, or write poems and newspaper articles.”
Shriver admits she was inviting trouble with her latest work The Motion of the Body Through Space, a novel ominously described by a reviewer in the Guardian as “entertainingly problematic.”
“Problematic” is defined by one of the book’s protagonists as “the trespasses of white people who are unfathomably evil. Meaning, white people, period. The unfathomably evil part goes without saying.”
Unfashionably, Shriver portrays this older white man in a sympathetic light, sensitive to his feelings as a 60-something deputy director of a city transport department who finds himself working for a 20-something boss with no professional experience but who ticks a lots of diversity boxes. She is a woman, a person of colour, a rights activist and assumed to be a Muslim.
She knows nothing about urban transport, however, and Remington Alabaster’s career comes to a predictable end when he momentarily loses his temper in a dispute about a report on the Kelvin rating of streetlights.
Alabaster is summoned before a disciplinary panel where he is declared a white supremacist and invited to share “his side of the story.”
He confesses that he dislikes his boss, Lucinda Okonkwo, “but not because I’m a whatever-ophobe. I dislike her personally. As an individual. Is that possible anymore? Is it legal to harbour animosity toward a specific person who just happens to belong to a ‘marginalised community’?”
This Kafkaesque scene is comical and sinister in equal measure. The formulaic language of the panel, and their conviction that Alabaster can be racist even without trying rings true in a world where the word diversity has become sanctified and thinking criminalised. Anyone who doubts the latter should ask why a violent hate crime should be sanctioned more heavily than a crime that is merely violent.
Shriver, whose speech on identity politics at the 2016 Brisbane Writers Festival made her notorious in eyes of the indignant left, describes Okonkwo as “exactly the kind of character that a white writer like me is not supposed to create.”
Yet she is uncomfortable with the insistence that we notice peoples' heritage first and foremost in defiance of the words of Martin Luther King Jnr, who said we should judge people by their character, not the colour of their skin.
“I have noticed in myself a notch-up of anxiety in dealing with people who are of a difference race or ethnicity from myself that I never ever felt before, ever. And I hate it,” she says.
“I suddenly start feeling I better watch myself, turn on the editorial function, and check everything as it comes out of my mouth to make sure it doesn't break any rules.
“It is an ugly way to relate to people. I don't want to be afraid of other people. I am accustomed to conducting a robust discourse with everybody and now, this anxiety is creeping into everything. And I am sure I am not alone in this transformation.”
Closing international borders has proved to be an effective prophylactic against coronavirus. But it has not kept out the insidious ideas that fomented within the American left and quickly gained currency in media and corporate culture.
This censorious tendency with its divisive and illiberal consequences will take hold, unless our own writers, artists, publishers and broadcasters have the courage to take a stand.