The Polarisation Trap
The most difficult piece I've ever written.
In yesterday’s post, A Country Talking Past One Another, I explored our present state of polarisation, which informs what I’m sharing with you now. Today, I seek to show how certain tactics being used within the current conversation on racism are playing into what I’m grandly calling, The Polarisation Trap.
I’ve found this piece to be amongst the most difficult things I’ve ever written because of the current climate. But I think this is exactly why it is important to do so. Any controversial points I make are meant to sharpen, not slow, demands for overdue change. Even if I agree with the ends, I believe we must always question the means.
This post also serves as an invitation for you, dear reader, to enter into this much-needed conversation. Too many people that I respect are silent. I won’t make your excuses for you, but in writing this I’ve experienced the very real fear of saying the “wrong” thing. I hope my speaking up makes it easier for you to do so. Now more than ever, when everyone says that we need more empathy, we also need your courage.
Like many in the aftermath of George's Floyd's killing, I've been thinking about racism. This isn't something new for me. Like the children of many immigrants, my siblings and I have been raised on a rich oral history of our family’s struggles since they arrived in the UK in the early 1960's. I’ve lost count of the number of stories where bricks are being thrown through the windows of their houses. School runs where they were chased by National Front inspired gangs. Their trauma shapes them to this day. Thankfully, my own experiences of overt racism are limited in comparison although there have been more in recent years.
What's hopeful about this moment is that people are being educated that racism isn't just about the obvious acts of everyday prejudice. As Robin DiAngelo, author of White Fragility, said, "We have to stop thinking about racism as someone who says the N-word." Long overdue demands are being made, for example, that Britain's colonial past is taught as part of the school curriculum. The validity of catch-all acronyms like "BAME" and "BME" are being questioned, when our experiences as ethnic minorities are so different. Schools like my own are being forced to reckon with horrendous allegations that they've perpetuated environments where racism goes unpunished. It's now also been acknowledged that racism might play a role in increased risks to Black, Asian and minority communities catching and dying from Covid-19. And yes, statues are falling.
This is what Black Lives Matter has helped to achieve. Without their actions, we wouldn’t even be having this conversation about racial justice. I personally feel indebted to those who have answered their call to arms.
But despite my emphatic support for the anti-racism protests and actions that have convulsed the UK and many other parts of the world, I've been left unnerved by a moment where protests on the streets and social media have seemingly united to present everyone with a singular choice to utter their support for Black Lives Matter, or have your silence read as complicity. Even the mere act of writing the previous sentence feels seditious, as if I've violated new norms that have sprung up overnight.
It's not that White silence on race and racism isn't real. I can count the number of conversations on race and my own experiences of race in a professional context and among my White peer group on less than ten fingers. No doubt part of my unease is a result of the fact that White people from many walks of my life and beyond are now responding to this moment by flagellating themselves for their racism, or more their ignorance of racism. I've found myself asking, "Are they sincere?" "If so, how come they've only just realised?!"
I'm unnerved because I fear that some of the tactics being used in the name of anti-racism, such as making statues fall and the underlying message of slogans like “silence Is complicity,” if taken to their logical conclusion, risk dividing us further, no matter how well-intentioned the demands. I’ll explain why I think so in the course of this post.
But before proceeding, let me be absolutely clear that those fighting against racism are not responsible for creating the current climate of division. It has existed for decades, centuries even.
Some of those who are responsible today, occupy the highest offices in the land. We must reject their deliberate attempts to recast a righteous universal demand for equality into a vehicle for further polarisation. If we do allow this to happen, our window of opportunity to translate anger into votes for lasting change at the ballot box and elsewhere in our political system may be lost.
The change that we’ve seen and the conversations we are having are both welcome and long-overdue (if not exhausting), but what ultimately matters, is seizing power in order to enact systemic change.
After all, our recent political history is strewn with events where progressives expected that being on the right side of history would be enough to propel them to power and change society for the better. Instead these hopes have been dashed.
To avoid the mistakes of the recent past, we must continue the work of building an even broader coalition than the one that has been seen on the streets of the UK in recent days and weeks.
Black Lives Matter, even if we don’t quite understand how yet, has done us all a service. Now the onus is on all of us and our political class to pick up the baton and ensure the call for racial justice is heard and enhanced by a wider agenda for societal change.
Beware Performative Acts
At the moment, there is overwhelming social pressure to show your support for Black Lives Matter. I've felt it personally through tweets like this:
Failure to do so risks being interpreted as complicity. Faced with potential condemnation, it becomes logical to signal your support or acquiescence with some sort of performative act. Many of these acts are leading to long overdue change, or at least the promise of it. But the danger with making your shibboleth an ultimatum is that some people will pay lip service to it without actually doing the hard work to change their behaviour. This is made easier by the fact that the inherent nature of a media cycle is that it eventually ends. Our attention will shift from racism, as it did from Dominic Cummings’s eyesight tests.
Even if we are comfortable with some degree of lip-service, there are two problems. First, many people, mainly White ones (many of whom fall into the “uninterested” category I referenced in my previous post), are apparently just learning about the problems for the first time. But if they are just learning about the problem, why are we already seeing so many "solutions"?
Part of this rush to create solutions is no doubt motivated by financial reasons. Being perceived as racist is not good PR. One poll, for example, showed that over 66% respondents in eight countries including the UK said that they made buying decisions based on a brand's stance on social issues (this percentage is likely higher amongst younger people).
Looking beyond this, there is a real risk that many of the solutions being proposed don't actually make things better and may even, worsen them, not least because pressure might be alleviated on the basis that something has been done to satisfy the need to be seen as anti-racist.
Second, we aren't always that good at judging what an acceptable response looks like. Take the case of Virgil Abloh, artistic director of Louis Vuitton. During the protests, he expressed dismay that his stores were looted leading many to contend he cared more about his stores than racial injustice. He was also castigated for only donating $50 to anti-racist action. In his two-part apology (here and here), he highlighted that he had donated over $20k to bail funds and other causes related to the movement.
No doubt, Abloh's initial response was tone-deaf and as he admits, he has much to learn. But was his initial response enough grounds to condemn him as not doing enough for the cause of racial justice? As a Black man in an industry known for its whiteness (and for perpetuating the idea that Whiteness is synonymous with beauty), Abloh has, despite criticisms of him, done a lot to advance diversity in the fashion industry, both directly and indirectly.
But emboldened by social media, we rush to play judge, juror and executioner often without knowing all the facts. This isn't always inherently wrong. But when it comes to an issue like racism, where we are demanding that people are no longer silent, our instinctive response to heckle someone for their misdeeds does not seem like the most effective way of constructing a space where people feel safe to talk openly.
Demanding Change By Ultimatum
In 2012, Robin DiAngelo wrote a paper called "Nothing to add: A Challenge to White Silence in Racial Discussions". One of her central arguments is that white silence in discussions of race "functions to maintain white power and privilege" and therefore "must be challenged." In the eight years since DiAngelo wrote these words, her ideas have moved from the periphery to the mainstream.
The strategy underpinning such an ultimatum is to drive those who don't think that they are racist into being active anti-racists by speaking up and taking action. But if you take such a strategy at face-value, the logical endpoint is that everyone will be polarised into two camps. Anti-racist versus racists. The problem is that the real world is not so clear-cut.
Take me, for example. I grew up in an environment where it wasn’t unusual to hear casual Islamophobia, fuelled by memories of the partition of India in 1947 and beyond. Although I can’t recall precisely, I know there were occasions when I was young where I laughed along at - and then parroted - racist jokes that I’d heard. I know I'm not alone. But having admitted that, I don't think I'm a racist. I've been unthinking for sure. I've not always considered how my language can make others feel.
But when we divide the world into these two camps, racist and anti-racist, and make people fearful of being called a racist, I fear that it becomes harder for people to actually reflect on their behaviour and in the longer-run, change it.
Yes, we may succeed in driving those who are actively racist and many others who have been racist into a welcome silence. But for many, it will be easier to stay silent. For some, it will be easier for them to say, "I'm part of a system that is racist,” rather than to admit to moments when they’ve been racist themselves.
Creating such a stark division also ignores our own evolutionary history and the process of identity formation. To create a conception of Us, we've needed a Them. Ironically, even the Black Lives Matter movement risks creating a Them. The danger in doing so is that we remove the opportunity to find a common ground by condemning our silent fellow citizens as racists-for-life.
Avoiding The Culture Wars
As I explored in my previous post, the debate over statues, and whether and how they should fall, is the stuff of dreams for demagogues, offering them familiar territory from which they can convince their followers this is another episode of the ongoing cultural wars that we find ourselves in, convincing them that their entire identity and way of life is under threat.
Whatever critics say, such actions have punctuated Britain’s historical amnesia. When you listen to our national discourse, it’s as if we’ve forgotten that our three lions went on a 350-year-long rampage.
But if we continue down the route of making statues fall, we may miss the opportunity to have an even wider dialogue than the one we’ve been having. One that can educate many more British people who are silent or ignorant about racism.
This matters because there is an opportunity to build a wider movement for racial and economic justice that cuts across race and other differences, which I fear could slip away.
The perils of the polarisation trap and the challenge that progressives must solve has been well-documented. In his book, Now We Have Your Attention: The New Politics of the People, journalist Jack Shenker documents the experiences of marginalised communities across the UK. Visiting Tilbury in Essex, a majority White community that the Conservatives would frame as "left behind", Shenker writes:
The question posed by Tilbury is not about how liberal democracies can respond to the racial self-interest of a non-existent monocultural majority. It is about whether those left behind by privatisation, financialisation and globalisation will be united by their shared economic interests, or divided by a racialised insecurity capable of taking root even in a place with such a cosmopolitan past.
The risk is that in attacking symbols of British history in absence of a wider civic dialogue about that history, Black Lives Matter can easily be construed as attacking communities that are already uneasy about their status, who also have very real grievances and that have been failed by our politics. Instead of uniting around shared injustices, we risk alienating ourselves from each other to the point of no return.
Reversing this dynamic is not the responsibility of Black Lives Matter, but we shouldn't be blind to the dangerous trap that we all face.
How does change happen?
The German physicist Max Planck famously said that science advances one funeral at a time. Or more precisely:
A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.
I suspect, or more hope, that anti-racism, like science, will triumph with each passing generation. If you subscribe to such a view on how change happens, it may be tempting to write off fellow citizens you deem to be racists. But to do so is not harmless. With the backdrop of Covid-19, the risks of violence and the collapse of our democratic system feel more real than it has in times past. For this reason, it is more critical than ever that we find common ground in order to translate righteous anger into long-term change.
I've written about our such themes before. In advocating for the common ground, I'm not seeking to eradicate or delegitimise the very real suffering that is being experienced and that has been felt for decades and centuries past. Finding common ground is about creating space for civic dialogue, where we can all, with time, feel equally invested in, and part of, positive change.
This national discussion we are having about racism is emblematic of a wider challenge that we in the West face. The need to reconcile values that we now believe to be universal with specific histories and cultures that are chequered with hypocrisy and ignorance of this very hypocrisy.
Solving this and avoiding the polarisation trap is not the sole responsibility of those moved by racial injustice in recent weeks. We all have work to do, but none more so than our political class. They must articulate a narrative and an accompanying agenda for societal change that enables us all to navigate a debate that is about our past, present and future all at once.
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My name is Sunil Suri. I help build social enterprises that reimagine how public services are delivered.
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