Bahar Mustafa, the welfare and diversity officer at Goldsmiths, is facing a petition for her removal after she allegedly used hate speech on social media. Apparently she used the hashtag #KillAllWhiteMen. Critics say this is inciting violence: “Too befuddled by theory to know that killing is wrong“.
Obviously, someone elected to a position of authority and responsibility should be more diplomatic in their use of language so its probably right that she should be asked to step down. But the story is a useful way to restate a point about ‘white privilege’ and ‘male privilege’ that I touched on a while back when Diane Abbott was accused of racism.
Its this: My white male privilege is such that when someone tweets #KillAllWhiteMen, I assume is a joke. I read the hashtag and my natural reaction is that she’s indulging in hyperbole. Banter. I get to make that assumption because I don’t live in a society that demeans or belittles me because of my race or gender. Nothing in the mainstream culture or media undermines me or makes me insecure because of my phenotype or chromosomes.
Black people do not get to make that assumption.
Women do not get to make that assumption.
LGBTQ people do not get to make that assumption.
When any of these people see comparable hashtags (posted, usually, by white men) the threat feels real, and their outrage in response to such message is real and justified. Conversely, when there is an angry backlash against people like Mustafa on petition sites and newspapers like The Daily Mail, the outrage seems (to my mind) quite false: a mask donned in order to better fight the culture war.
None of this is to defend Bahar Mustafa or to suggest that routinely posting antagonistic messages is admirable. Rather, its just to point out that context is important. While laws should be blind to race, gender and sexuality, our society and the interactions within it are not. Words that bite in one context may be toothless in another.
Indeed, changing contexts mean there will be situations where white men would indeed feel menanced by a hashtag. For example, if it were tweeted in Paris on 7th January, right after the Charlie Hebdo murders, messages like #KillAllWhiteMen would take on on a whole new meaning, and I’d think again.
Category: Diary (Page 62 of 301)
Things that happen to me, or things I do
In response to the news that my book been nominated for the Shirley Jackson Award, we’ve brought forward the launch of the e-book versions of The Good Shabti. It’s now available for the Amazon Kindle and EPUB versions also available in Kobo, Nook and Lulu stores. A version is also available on the Apple Store.
Continue readingIn other news… I’m delighted to announce that my novella The Good Shabti has been nominated for The Shirley Jackson Awards 2014!
Continue readingCrikey. I’m dismayed by the result of the general election.
First, I should note just how wrong my own perception of the election campaign turned out to be! After the leaders debates I said I expected Ed Miliband to be Prime Minister in May. That is clearly not going to happen. And earlier this week I said I perceived a decline in the influence of the mainstream media on election campaigns. After the apparent last minute shift in voters’ intentions, that appears to be incorrect.
However, my dismay comes not from the injury to my pride which results from making poor predictions. Rather, it’s the prospect of what comes next for our unions (yes, unions plural) and our rights as citizens.
First, the fact that David Cameron will attempt to govern alone with a minority government, or a slender majority, will mean that the more Euroskeptic elements to the the right of the Conservative party will be able to hold him to ransom—just as the SNP would have apparently held a Labour government hostage. The Conservatives have already promised that we will have a referendum on our membership of the European Union. We now face the prospect of leaving the EU, sundering and cauterising our cultural and economic links with the continent. This isolation will not be good for the UK.
A ‘Brexit’ will further strengthen the already jubilant Scottish National Party. Despite the slightly skewed results that our ‘first past the post’ system delivers I just do not see how another referendum on Scottish Independence can still be ‘off the table’. For goodness sake—all but three MPs in Scotland are from the SNP! If the UK leaves the EU, and with the other parties’ reduced political presence, another plebiscite on Independence would probably yield a ‘Yes’ vote. Bye bye Scotland.
Finally, the Conservatives have also promised to scrap the Human Rights Act, a pledge that lawyers think is ‘legally illiterate’. The so-called ‘British Bill of Rights’ will water down the rights that we currently enjoy. And since the Tories gutted legal aid provision and squeezed the judicial review process, it will be harder than ever for citizens to hold the government to account when it deploys discriminatory policies against us.
So by the time of the next general election in 2020, there is a very good chance that those of us living in rUK will have lost the political protections of the EU, will have lost the guarantee that out human rights will be protected, and will have lost a progressive political counter-weight to the Tories that may be found in Scotland. And the right-wing media will cheer it all.
Grim, grim grim.
On OpenDemocracy’s OurKingdom blog, Oliver Huitson draws attention to the way in which the right-wing media has shifted the focus of its attacks in recent days: from ad hominem assaults on Ed Miliband, to warning about the danger of SNP influence on a possible minority Labour administration. Continue reading