A thread on the outrage (and worse) directed against my colleague Priya Gopal yesterday. 
First, the context: during a football match on Monday in which the players agreed to take the knee, local ‘fans’ hired a plane to fly a banner over the ground saying “WHITE LIVES MATTER”.
bbc.co.uk/sport/football…
bbc.co.uk/sport/football…
This was widely condemned by the footballers themselves, which in turn seems to have triggered those who thought it was a good idea in the first place to hijack a Black Lives Matter tribute by demanding respect for white lives. theguardian.com/football/2020/…
Here in Britain we’ve been dealing with the aftershocks of this all week: the guy who paid for the banner has been fired from his job, because his employer concluded that it didn’t want to employ someone who’d pull a stunt like this. news.sky.com/story/burnley-…
Our right-wing newspapers have been unusually hesitant about defending the banner, but right-wingers on social media have been circulating videos and posts in support of “white lives matter” all week.
The backdrop to this is that here in the UK (as in the US) we have very little education on even the basics of race: most people have no idea that race is a constructed category with no scientific validity which was invented and refined principally to oppress people of colour.
Whiteness is normalised: white people have the privilege of never being defined by their race. Whiteness in the UK and US is not & never has been a category of disadvantage. In Ta-Nehisi Coates’s phrase, racial privilege is a “bloody heirloom” which white people silently inherit.
Most mainstream commentators trying to explain why the White Lives Matter banner was a bad idea have suggested that OF COURSE white lives matter: it’s the context that explains why the banner was offensive.
Here’s the Sky Sports presenter Mike Wedderburn on this, in a video that got a lot of traction this week.
The line that “of course white lives matter” is intended to reassure white people who have been unnerved by the focus on black lives, and who feel that the toppling of statues or the protests against the police are somehow a criticism of them.
But it also, perhaps inadvertently, has the effect of reassuring white people that _whiteness_ isn’t in any way a problem.
We white people shouldn’t just be creating more space for Black people; we should be interrogating the entire system of race which has done horrific damage across centuries. That means admitting that whiteness IS a problem; our goal should be to dismantle race altogether.
Priya’s tweet is provocative, but it clearly says that white lives don’t matter _as white lives_. That qualification is everything. She’s not saying that white people don’t matter, just that whiteness shouldn’t be the grounds on which we defend our worth.
So why do Black lives matter? Because Black people come into this struggle from a totally different place: they are perpetually racialised, discriminated against, defined by the colour of their skin. They never had the privilege of being able to forget or normalise race.
Black people's journey to transcending racial oppression (and race itself) involves a struggle for equality and basic respect which white people have never had to wage _on racial grounds_. That's why "white lives matter" and "black lives matter" aren't equivalent.
It should be ridiculous to say “white lives matter” since every aspect of our society screams that truth every moment of every day; but here’s where the larger context of our politics comes into the debate.
The right in Britain (& the US) has been spoiling for a "culture war", in politics & the media. Simple reason for this: through dog-whistles (or worse) on race, the right thinks it can win ‘traditional’ voters to whom it offers nothing economically. telegraph.co.uk/politics/2019/…
This is NOT a new phenomenon: we can see it going back decades (even centuries) in the UK and US. It’s always ugly and divisive, and it always makes the work of actually dismantling race and effecting real change in our society much harder.
But it’s important to see the deliberate strategy here by right-wing journalists & politicians: to shake white people from their complacency over race not to address its oppression of Black people, but to signal to whites that THEY are race’s true victims.
It’s breathtaking that anyone could think whiteness is a category of disadvantage. You have to work really hard to get to this idea. But that’s precisely what our media have been doing, e.g. in this defence of whites-only scholarships in our ‘newspaper of record’ in December.
Or in Boris Johnson’s outrageous insistence that his new "commission on racial inequalities" would be looking into the problems of... “working-class white boys”. politicshome.com/news/article/n…
The effort to present whiteness as embattled, under attack from the ‘cultural left’ & ‘political correctness’, is pernicious and profoundly dangerous. But it’s in full swing right now, and it’s why Priya’s tweet has been so widely condemned and poorly understood.
Expect to see right-wing papers like the Times continue to decry the abandonment of the “white working class”, signalling that in our collective rush to hug Black people we’re leaving behind white people _because they’re white_. A total lie, but a powerful and dangerous one.
I’ve complained many times here about the lazy and/or insidious way in which white commentators and journalists have deployed “white working class”: the term continues to mislead by suggesting that race has any relevance to poverty for white people. It doesn’t.
Worse, the term (alongside euphemisms like “traditional voters”) excludes people of colour from the “working class”, despite the fact that Black and brown people are disproportionately represented in that class. It’s a total inversion of multiple truths.
We have to do so much more to cultivate basic literacy on questions of race, especially in our schools. If a scholar can’t challenge the basis of whiteness without getting death threats and other vile abuse, it’s clear we have a long way to go.
We have to be more consistent and insistent in calling out racism in our media & politics: even at the risk of giving the right the culture war it’s been seeking, we have to be clear-headed about the dangers of weaponising whiteness and the cravenness of those who are doing it.
And white people need to continue to educate themselves, and to do their share of the heavy lifting. People like Priya get vastly more abuse than white people who’d say the same thing. That’s an indictment of us all. /
