Losing the Ability to Think
The left’s distortion of the race debate has created a culture of fear and loathing ... and it’s time for writers, artists, publishers and broadcasters to make a stand. By Nick Cater
The campaign to portray the US 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 who walked by, no one has thought that it looked anywhere close to a noose,” he said.
If Schaaf had been able to take herself less seriously, she 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 TV sketch. Today, these parodies appear almost daily in the news and we’re not supposed to laugh.
A white mayor, fond of lecturing about white privilege, uses her position to shame a man too poor to visit the gym for racist insensitivity towards his fellow blacks and we can’t voice a smirk.
Last week, an innocent raspberry-flavoured confectionery found itself in the dock for possessing an allegedly derogatory, racist name.
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 Philip 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 an author could place uncomfortable thoughts in a character’s head. But as novelist Lionel Shriver told me last week: “It’s now a little dangerous to express any non-orthodox opinion or statement, even in novels, even through the voices of 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”, she added.
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 newspaper 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”.
Shriver, unfashionably, portrays this old white man in a sympathetic light, sensitive to his feelings as a sixty-something deputy director in a city transport department who finds himself working for a twenty-something boss with no professional experience but who ticks a lot 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 street lights.
Alabaster is summoned before the disciplinary panel where he is declared a white supremacist and invited to share “his side of the story”.
He confesses to disliking 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 both comical and sinister in equal measure. The formulaic language of the panel, and its 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 question why a violent hate crime should be sanctioned more heavily than a crime of pure violence.
Shriver, whose speech on identity politics at the 2016 Brisbane Writers Festival made her notorious in the 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 people’s heritage first and foremost in defiance of the words of Martin Luther King Jr, who urged us to judge people by the content of the 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 different 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.”
The sudden closing of international borders has proved to be an effective prophylactic against the spread of the 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 around the world.
This censorious tendency, with its divisive and illiberal result, might take hold unless our own writers, artists, publishers and broadcasters have the courage to make a stand.