Mayfly Seven
PoC gone mad ~ Why the race report? ~ Living Marxism ~ The Conservative's class war ~ Unintended consequences of banning cookies ~ Amusement arcade
PoC gone mad
Three stories:
One. David Lammy MP received plaudits for his calmness in the face of idiotic provocation this week. As part of his response he said: “the term [BAME] is lazy, it’s impersonal. I don’t like being described as jargon – I’m not jargon. I’m black, I’m English, I’m British and I’m proud”.
Two. I read an advert for a trustee posted by a nice small charity that does good work, which I won’t embarrass by naming. They say they’re looking for somone with “real life experience or knowledge of Black, Indigenous and People of Colour communities in the UK and ideally London”. Their intentions are good: they want their board to be more like the people they help. But when they say “indigenous”, what do they mean? Do they mean London born and bred? Do they mean white? If they do, this would ‘other’ those who aren’t indigenous, and I’m sure that is not their intention. Or, cautious about wording and scared of offending, have they copied BIPoC phrasing from somewhere ‘indigenous’ might make more sense?
Three. In September there was a minor media storm when footballers playing for QPR were criticised for not taking the knee prior to kickoff in a televised game. Les Ferdinand, the Director of Football at QPR, came out strongly: “The message has been lost. It is now not dissimilar to a fancy hashtag or a nice pin badge. What are our plans with this? Will people be happy for players to take the knee for the next 10 years but see no actual progress made? Taking the knee will not bring about change in the game - actions will…Don’t judge us. Simple research and evidence will show you we are doing more than most. If you want change, judge yourselves”.
What connects these stories?
Each of them involves a symbol — ‘BAME’, ‘indigenous’, taking the knee — that has become meaningless; a symbol that is safe ground for well-intentioned people to retreat to when they don’t want to cause offence.
Now I sympathise with those who feel they cannot keep up with the right language for discussing race. There are those who were brought up to think the word ‘coloured’ was polite, and who (somehow, still) cannot understand why it is now considered problematic. But I do think that fear of phrasing something incorrectly — which is not unjustified — can get in the way of real communication.
I try to remind myself to look past stock reactions to empty symbols and to examine both the intention and the effect of what is said.
Why the race report?
Since I wrote the piece above, the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities released its report, with one of the conclusions being a reasonable call to ditch the term BAME, which they called “reductionist”.
The report was received with another carnival of outrage. Academics Raminder Kaur and Gill Hague, give a good summary of the criticisms. I’m also very much looking forward to James Wild MP grilling Tony Sewell about the absence of even a single one of our cherished union flags.
I took a quick look. The recommendations are a model of blandness. Encourage this, improve that, invest in the other, all under headings that nobody could disagree with: build trust, promote fairness, create agency, increase inclusivity.
The authors write they “never assumed that minorities are inert victims of circumstance,” before adding “the fact most of us are successful minority professionals has no doubt shaped this thinking”. This is unintentionally funny because I immediately wondered which of the authors they were suggesting were not successful. It is also indicative of a phenomenon I’d like to explore more another time: the tendency of succesful people to think their own success is proof success is available for everyone, blind to their own exceptionalism. Plus its an admission that their experience is unusual and might prejudice their conclusions.
Fundamentally, the report says disparities are better explained by social class than race. And if there is a racial explanation it’s to do with “different cultural patterns and expectations” from within groups, rather than any negative force from outside. Both are important, yes, but their importance does not exclude structural racism as a contributing explanatory factor as the report implies.
Munira Mirza and the Living Marxism network
The report has received most criticism for concluding there is no institutional racism in the UK.
This conclusion should come as no surprise.
The authors were picked by Munira Mirza, head of the Downing Street Policy unit, specifically because they do not believe institutional racism exists. In 2017 Mirza herself described the anti-racism movement as bogus moral crusade imported from the US. In fact, she has continually rejected the idea that racism is a problem, as summarised by Zarah Sultana MP.
So what’s the background?
Mirza graduated from Oxford, married a Tory swinger, and wrote for Claire Fox’s Institute of Ideas, Culture Wars, and Spiked. These are nodes on a loose network that emerged from the ashes of Living Marxism, the magazine of the Revolutionary Communist Party, after it was sued out of existence for libel (as all recounted in this article).
Jenny Turner in the LRB says this network shares “a rather shallow and repetitive libertarian agenda”, and displays “varying degrees of left-liberal-baiting enthusiasm for all the big, scary corporate technologies”. With ‘Marxism’ expunged from the rhetoric, freedom of speech and anti-anti-fascism became the banner under which to promote causes important to those who provided significant funding: tobacco, GM-agriculture, big pharma, fossil fuels, and the Koch Brothers. (If you don’t know the Koch bros you’ll get a good idea of what they’re about from this negative review, written by a member of the Living Marxism network, of an excoriating book about them).
Mirza worked at Michael Gove’s think tank Policy Exchange. From there she was recruited as cultural advisor by Boris Johnson when he became London Mayor. Johnson sought to add a libertarian edge to the progressive camouflage of Cameron’s Conservatives, and Mirza, as “a long term critic of multiculturalism…was able to give Boris arguments for making reactionary decisions while giving apparently progressive justifications”. Conservative Home paints a prettier picture of an independent mind unafraid to challenge preconceptions.
Scott Alexander’s recipe for electoral success
With this provenance in mind, if I’m trying to look past stock reactions, what is the intention and the effect of the Race report?
Marina Hyde says it is designed to stoke culture wars, and such efforts always end badly. She doesn’t say how they end badly, apart form pointing to Trump; but of course many people who don’t read Hyde don’t think he is bad.
I think this is only part of the story.
Independent of whether Mirza and her colleagues really believe in their conclusions (and I think they do), they also appear to be already acting on a strategy that the champion blogger Scott Alexander recently outlined in a belated and compelling recommendation to US Republicans.
Alexander suggests Republicans can build on Trump’s successes by pivoting from “mindless populist rage” to a platform of fighting classism; by moving from seeking support from the WHITE working class, to support from the white WORKING CLASS.
Alongside a war on higher education, experts, and the upper-class media (formerly known as the mainstream media), a key component of the strategy as Alexander outlines it is a war on wokeness.
Alexander recommends arguing that, “Wokeness is a made-up mystery religion that college-educated people invented so they could feel superior to you”, leading to a situation in which “the only way not to be racist is to master an inscrutable and constantly-changing collection of fashionable shibboleths and opinions which are secretly class norms. The whole point is to make sure the working-class white guy…feels immeasurably inferior to the college-educated white guy who knows that saying ‘colored people’ is horrendously offensive but saying ‘people of color’ is the only way to dismantle white supremacy.” Then, “If anybody asks you for your theory of racism, it should be that a lot of modern racism is a subform of classism, where people naturally assume minorities are lower class”.
It’s a strange strategy. In some ways it seems all backwards with the ‘right’ invoking class to gain power. But give it a moment’s thought and it makes sense, and has already been happening, if not in those terms. Free market small state low tax low regulation capitalism painted as the solution that allows hardworking individuals to get ahead, untramelled by the EU, welfare state, red tape, urban elite, and scoffing intellectuals. Whether those are you politics or not, the fact it also allows billionaires and multinationals free reign is surely significant in their promulgation.
Intention and effect
If it is in any way true that Mirza et al are following a strategy like this — and it does not seem unlikely considering Mirza’s long links to a network that used to argue in the class terms of Marxism, that has long enjoyed baiting liberals, and that is funded by the Koch brothers — the intention of the Commission’s Report, therefore, is:
To start the shift towards a discussion of class rather than race, as continuation of the positioning of the Conservatives as the party of the working class as opposed to elites and social justice warriors; and
to provoke an angry response in the “upper-class media” that alienates them even more from a quiet majority of normal decent non-racist people who are confused by all the fuss and a bit scared of being called racist.
The effect on both counts has been achieved.
Unintended consequences of blocking cookies
I introduced some thoughts about changes in online advertising a few weeks back. It sounds dull, but I promise you it is important. It’s intrinsically tied up in some of the most pressing issues of the day: mind, behaviour and social control, privacy, free speech, trans-border corporatism, AI, and the nature of our online existence, which of course takes up ever more of our lives (check your daily average screen time stats and compare them with how much time you spend talking to people you love). So it’s worth trying to understand a little, right?
Donald MacKenzie also looked at the changes in the most recent LRB, giving a nice précis of cookies, pixels, fingerprinting, Zuboff’s Surveillance Capitalism, and Hwang’s Subprime Attention Crisis. MacKenzie concludes by noting the unresolved tension between data protection law and competition law, with an Unintended Consequence of the former empowering the more dominant firms the latter would like to restrain. He’d like a plan that preserves the competitiveness of a network of small companies that know just a bit about you in the face of an invasive oligopoly that knows everything about you. So would I.
It is interesting to me that CDPs again fly under the radar. Perhaps it’s because of their narcoleptic name (it stands for Customer Data Platform). These massive dynamic databases, from the likes of Oracle and Adobe, hoover up any information they can find about you from any source available, link it together, and apply A/B testing, nudge theory and machine learning, to work out how to best influence what you spend.
There is a (probably) Unintended Consequence of impending cookie and IDFA bans blocking the easy path to targeted advertising: Marketers won’t throw their hands up in surrender. Instead they will use ever more sophisticated tools, powered by CDPs and companies like Palantir.
In other words, I expect the effect of stopping companies tracking us with cookies will be even more intrusive and manipulative snooping.
How this is used by people whose intention is less pure than selling you a product is what concerns me. You know, those people who might want you to think a certain way about a politician, or a cause, or a hot topic? Or worse, those who might want to restrict your access to information or services based on your behaviour, your friends, or the private opinions you express as read by gmail or heard by Alexa?
Amusement arcade
Links
The New York Times has a fascinating exposé. The Trump campaign was nearly bankrupt, so they changed a tick box on their fundraising forms so that supporters automatically repeated their contributions, often without knowing it. Much of the money raised for Trump’s subsequent attempt to challenge the election result went to paying those supporters back.
Donald MacKenzie explains bitcoin very well, in a 2019 article in the LRB.
I apologise that it has all been a bit serious and gloomy this week. Please enjoy the Timelines of Slang. This crank is so zanzy I wanna boil your cabbage.
There’s also something very pleasing about this:
And finally, Read this very short story you meathead.
“Meat. They're made out of meat.”
“Meat?”
“There's no doubt about it. We picked several from different parts of the planet, took them aboard our recon vessels, probed them all the way through. They’re completely meat.”