Giles Fraser warns against slippage
Giles Fraser is all in a lather about “Islamophobia.” He quite understands that it’s permissible to criticize Islam as such, sort of, though he’d much rather you didn’t, but still he does realize he has to say you can if you really want to, but
but but but
it’s really not. Actually. Since you ask.
Conversations generally begin with the sort of anxieties that many of us might reasonably share: it cannot be right for women to be denied access to education in some Islamic regimes; the use of the death penalty for apostasy is totally unacceptable; what about the treatment of homosexuals? The conversation then moves on to sharia law or jihad or the burqa, not all of it entirely well informed.
And then and then and then it falls right off a cliff into just plain hating Muslims, so the fact is, you can’t talk about the we might reasonably share items either, because if you do, an invisible cable will attach itself to your ankle and drag you inexorably over that cliff. No discussing women’s rights under Islamist regimes, no discussing the death penalty for apostasy, no discussing sharia or the burqa. Just don’t talk about it at all, if you please, because you do it rong, or you risk doing it rong, and therefore you have to stop before you start.
What can begin as a perfectly legitimate conversation about, say, religious belief and human rights, can drift into a licence for observations that in any other circumstance would be regarded as tantamount to racism. Like the 19th-century link between anti-Catholicism and racism towards the Irish, one can easily bleed into the other.
Racism towards the Irish? “Irish” is a race now?
Never mind. The point is, talking about one thing can lead to talking about another thing, and the other thing is bad, so talking about the first thing is forbidden, lest it lead to the other thing. Clear? And fair? And compatible with notions of the value of free speech and free inquiry? Certainly.
“I treat the Islamic religion with the same respect as the bubble-gum I scrape off my shoe,” suggested one contributor to the website of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science, in response to Warsi’s speech.
He means commenter. If it were a contributor, he would of course provide an actual name. He’s so hard up for examples of his one thing leading to another thing that he offers an unnamed commenter on Dawkins’s site. He feels justified in ruling a large and important subject out of bounds because of an anonymous comment on Dawkins’s website.
I think we can safely discount his advice.
Race and ethnicity are sticky. “Irish” is definitely an ethnicity since they’ve got their own unique language and culture, and I guess it could also be “a race” if they have sufficient genetic difference from nearby population groups (English, Scots, Welsh). I don’t know what would be “sufficient” or why it matters at all, since “race” is a completely meaningless concept biologically. For instance, there’s more genetic difference between different African tribes than between Africans and Caucasians.
Anyway. There is this intense fear among some liberal circles of being labeled “racist” (all earlier confusion aside, “Muslim” is most assuredly not a race) for criticizing Islam. Sometimes specifically anti-Arab, which is funny to me because, statistically, only about 20% of Muslims live in the Middle East (and contrary to popular belief, not everybody between Israel and Uzbekistan is an Arab). I think that the right wing lacks this crisis because they don’t worry about coming off as racist or non-inclusive of minorities to begin with, really.
Slippery slope arguments are, well, slippery. They can slip in both directions. Like trying to stop certain kinds of nasty speech in a heavy-handed way can slip into stopping perfectly legitimate and socially useful kinds of speech. In fact, given the human tendency to want to shut up people with ideas that we don’t like, and given the willingness of governments to pander to this, I’m much more afraid of slippage in the direction of eroding free speech.
This is Giles Fraser in full bigot mode, although I guess he forgot that he was writing his article on Comment is Free rather than appearing as an anonymous troll on some website.
You see, he’s not very bright, and doesn’t understand that he is simply projecting his own prejudices onto groups of people he hates, such as atheists. He doesn’t seem to understand that the tone of nice gentler TftD is not the tone he decides to make in this same hateful article. He confesses that he is speaking on behalf of a body of opinion, whereas atheists are not. Yet he selects the worst comments he can find, ignores the rest, and then conflates that this is the voice of atheism.
I have a word for the likes of Giles Fraser. It’s atheistophobe. Atheistophobia, the irrational fear or hatred of atheists. Not atheist beliefs or lack of beliefs, but atheists as a group of people or as individuals.
Was it Cath the Canberra Cook again?
[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Wayne de Villiers, Ophelia Benson. Ophelia Benson said: Giles Fraser warns against slippage http://dlvr.it/DtPxy […]
For what its worth, if you’re using “race” in the sense that its popularly understood, then yeah, Irish can be a race. That’s because “race” as popularly used is a socially determined grouping that only loosely aligns with actual objective categories.
Its kind of like religion in its own way- you can argue until you’re blue in the face about who’s “actually” a christian and who isn’t, and it may seem like you’re arguing about something objective since there’s a pretense that christianity is an objective thing… but its not. And in the end you’ll find you’re really arguing about who gets to use a label and who doesn’t, and that’s just a social convention. Its like trying to figure out who’s “white” by investigating genetics, when the question is really answered by who gets less crap from the cops.
Giles Fraser is an arrogant Anglican cleric. You can get a little feel for the religious idiocy behind his tirade when you look at this (from the the piece that Egbert links):
Let’s get this straight, folks. I’m going to say it once! Religions have definable literatues, have major places in world history and billions of adherents — so they’re really dangerous. Got that? This man really is contemptible. (And they say he teaches philosophy at Oxford! English education is surely going through a trough at the moment.)
About slippery slopes. They almost always slip the wrong way. It is usually rated as an informal fallacy, and although some “Experts” claim that they put the onus on the other person to justify the action concerned, slippery slopes usually depend upon empirical data which is either not available or the one who uses the argument has not bothered to find. In that sense it’s almost always a trick argument, and has little probative value. The trouble with using it in the case of problems with Islam is that the problem with Islam is the fundamental basis of Islam. I’m not particularly interested in Islam as it is practiced. I think the Bible is a dangerous book, and there is sufficient evidence of this. The Qu’ran and the hadith are even more dangerous. Has no one noticed? Or are we just to accept religions because they have a long history and have billions of adherents? Isn’t this a problem, given the books they are based on?
Who says that’s how “race” is popularly understood? I don’t think it is. I think it’s understood that way among woollies, but no one else.
That earlier gem of Fraser’s…I’m pretty sure I did a post on that at the time.
Heh. Yup.
http://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2009/this-is-our-thought-for-the-day-god-damn-it/
I’m either predictable, or thorough. The choice is yours.
Only not from you, dear reader.
Speaking of tests, is there perhaps one I could take that would provide me a license for freedom of speech? No? I thought not.
Well you see it’s up to Giles Fraser to decide. He is a vicar in the church of England after all.
I suggest that the word ‘race’ does have validity, though it has fallen out of fashion since the Holocaust and WW2.
For the word ‘racism’ to have legitimacy and meaning, as in
then the word ‘race’ must have legitimacy and meaning likewise. Proof of this is that the euphemism ‘ethnicity’ is identical to ‘race’ in meaning.
‘Racism’ is a word very sloppily used, and splashed all over the place in the process. It means assertion of superiority by virtue of race, (= ethnicity) and that only.
While one race has no necessary or intrinsic superiority with respect to another, the same is not true regarding cultures. So when failure to ‘respect’ a given culture results in accusations of ‘racism’, we can be sure that the race card is being dealt off the bottom of the deck.
Well, there is a legitemite issue that xenophobes and racists often hide behind a criticism of Islam to advance their agenda. Some Europeans and Americans are conscientious of this, and I don’t think it’s a bad thing to be aware of. But I also don’t think it’s bad to be aware that Islam as such has been and continues to be a dangerous belief system that is a threat to freedom and life wherever it establishes a strong foothold.
In the C19, to which he is referring, the Irish were generally regarded by English opinion as constituting so much of a ‘race’ that they were, like Africans, not even quite human. See for example the images here, which generally depict Irish features as those of a rather aggressive gorilla:
http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2008/10/06/negative-stereotypes-of-the-irish/
What Fraser is doing there, however, is to suggest that this racist-therefore-bad attitude grew out of anticatholicism, and that therefore, “Islamophobia” will/can/must breed a raaaacism!!! all its own, which must be fought off, and therefore nobody is allowed to criticise religion….
In other words, you can’t dislike anyone for your own motives, because then you might end up disliking them for the wrong motives…
Ophelia Benson-
“Race” is popularly understood in two ways. One is some idea of genetically different groups of people that have similar skin tones within their groups. This popular conception of race is in conflict with the second way of understanding race.
The second way of understanding race is to imagine people just going outside and pointing at people and telling you what race they are. And when people are doing THAT, then Irish can be a race. In fact, when people were doing that, Irish was a race for quite some time. When people are using race in that sense, genetics stops mattering. Skin tone matters a lot, but isn’t always conclusive. When people are doing this, when people are using ideas of race on a day to day basis with specific applications, what matters is social consensus on who goes in what group.
Since that’s the sort of definition of “race” that is used when people discriminate against one another, that understanding of race is often used by academics interested in studying discrimination.
What I find interesting here is that Fraser takes this to be a self-evident example of horrible awfulness beyond the pale of any decent human being to say. Bullshit! The quoted insult does not express contempt or lack of respect for any PERSON, only for a set of ideas. Those ideas are, frankly, almost entirely false (except for the merely historical bits), they encourage and embody massively immoral ideas and behaviors, and thus they are completely deserving of contempt. I also treat the Islamic religion — and the Christian religions, and most other religious traditions and ideas — with the same respect as the bubble-gum I scrape off my shoe… because that is how much respect they deserve.
Those who want to erect unassailable walls of protection around truly awful ideas are compelled to conflate criticism and even contempt for bad ideas with criticism and contempt for the human beings that hold those ideas because the ideas cannot be defended on their merits. This also rather neatly explains why Giles Fraser and other religious authority figures are so frequently concerned about criticisms aimed at other religions they view as not merely mistaken but heretical: They know their own religious beliefs are no more justifiable or defensible than the next fellow’s, so their own authority is at risk when any religion is criticized.
It’s all self-serving, self-aggrandizing twaddle couched as deep concern about the slippery slope to racism and oppression — and transparently so. I don’t buy it for a second.
Patrick, I still don’t know where you’re getting your certain knowledge of what the popular understanding of “race” is. It looks just made up, to me.
That describes a universe I don’t recognize. (I also don’t understand how imagining people doing something [especially something insane] can be a way to fix the social meaning of a word or concept.) I can’t (realistically) imagine people going outside and pointing at people and telling me what race they are that would include “Irish” as one of the “races.”
G – quite so. And to the extent that that’s true, and religious people feel compelled to repeat it and act on it, it is yet another reason religion is inherently an anti-liberal force. If believers can’t help but conflate opposition to ideas with opposition to people, then believers are inherently enemies of open inquiry and discussion.
Ophelia
I think it’s reasonably clear that the Irish in Britain have faced pretty harsh discrimination historically; it’s quite a common observation that Irish and black people have frequently found common ground for this reason. Perhaps ‘racism’ isn’t the right word, but ‘racism’ is always problematic. Isn’t ‘anti-semitism’ a form of racism? But then, Jews aren’t really a race however you think race is usually defined.
(Same goes for anti-Muslim prejudice. Of course Muslims aren’t a race by any definition; and I agree there are problems with the term ‘Islamophobia’, too. But since the majority of people who experience anti-Muslim prejudice are non-white – and there clearly are forms of such prejudice – and since sometimes, if not often, the motivation behind the prejudice is precisely that they are non-white, it doesn’t seem too much of a stretch to call it racism).
Clive, sure, I know all that – but it’s still not a good reason to call anything and everything “racism.”
If what Patrick is saying is that “Irish” has stood for an out-group, then of course I agree, but that still doesn’t justify turning “Irish” into a “race.” Women are an out-group too; so are atheists; so are gays; that doesn’t make any of those categories a “race.”
Ohhhh yes it does. Since the motivation behind the putative prejudice will be exactly what’s at issue, it’s simply question-begging to call it racism.
It’s not a bit clear to me that the motivation behind the prejudice is precisely that they are non-white. I’m not at all sure of that. I think racism is all mixed up with class and cultural stuff, and that it’s often the other way around – that class and/or cultural stuff is mistaken for mere skin-color preference.
“That describes a universe I don’t recognize. (I also don’t understand how imagining people doing something [especially something insane] can be a way to fix the social meaning of a word or concept.) I can’t (realistically) imagine people going outside and pointing at people and telling me what race they are that would include “Irish” as one of the “races.””
It was an example of a hypothetical informal experiment.
When people call me “white” they don’t do so on the basis of a genetic test for some set of alleles that define who is white. They look at me, consider what they know about me, and decide what group to place me in.
To the extent that “what race you are” means “what group people typically put you in,” there’s no reason Irish couldn’t be a race.
To give a simple example, I know black people who had relatives who “passed” as white back in the 50s. This is because they look white. Genetically, the reason they look white is undoubtedly because they have a lot of white ancestors, which might make you think they were actually white… But socially in certain parts of the country they were considered black and in other parts they were considered white. In fact, in the parts of the country where they were considered black, they might be considered as white by a person they just met, but that opinion would be revised if it were discovered that they had any black ancestors. This wasn’t just some weird hypothetical concern- being outed could have serious consequences for employment, personal safety, and social status.
The only way to make sense of this is to acknowledge that the word “race” was not being used in any sort of scientifically objective fashion, but rather to refer to social groupings. And as it happens, at one point one social grouping that was considered to be a separate category and not part of regular “white” people was the Irish. That’s… just kind of historical record, and not really debatable. In fact, due to the weird social pathologies of American culture, there was a period when a lot of people went through a lot of effort to come up with pseudo-scientific arguments for labeling the Irish as another form of black people. The term “white negroes” was even invented.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Irish_racism
Skip to the section on the 19th century for examples of how this worked.
The issue is not whether Muslims have faced discrimination. They have and still do, I’m sure all will agree. The issue is what if anything this has to do with opposition to Islamism, Christianism and the wielding of state power by these ideologies? I think there’s very little connection, but it’s in the interest of believers of a certain persuasion, along with their secular allies, to conflate these two very different phenomena for the obvious purpose of shutting off legitimate criticism. I don’t buy it and it looks like it isn’t being bought.
There reason why this charge is not sticking is that the arguments of the bigots of the right are very different from those of the secular left, they are intended for a different audience and, equally important for distinguishing the phenomena, the right hates the science-minded seculars. The seculars are and have always been the chief opponents of religious bigotry, and liberal toleration is largely due to the efforts of the seculars allied with religious minorities. So the charge that atheists are bigots fails, and the charge that people will take atheist opposition to religion as bigotry also fails, because history up to the present day tells a different story.
Patrick, I already said if the idea is that there are social groups, I agree with that. I don’t agree they are just “races” and that’s all there is to it. It is debatable. I don’t think Giles Fraser gets to decide that “Irish” is a race.
If you want to say “Irish people have been treated as if they were a race, and an inferior race at that,” fine. But Fraser simplified it more than that.
If Irish isn’t a race why do so many Americans insist that they are Irish? They can’t be Irish by nationality because they are American.
And prejudice against the Irish isn’t only a British issue. What would you call it, if not racism? Perhaps you can also tell us what we should call the more recent prejudice against Polish immigrants, because we’re generally using the R-word for that too. *taps foot*
I don’t think Giles Fraser gets to decide that “Irish” is a race.
You realise that Giles Fraser didn’t write that whole wikipedia article himself right? Prejudice against the Irish has long been considered racism. This isn’t new….
I don’t have a dog in the fight about Fraser. I think that once you see that his whole argument is a slippery slope, you can dismiss it.
I was just pointing out that race, as its used in the context of racism, is a social convention overlaid onto material facts, not the material facts themselves, and that at times that overlay has in fact treated the Irish as a race.
I don’t think that’s very common in the year 2011, mind you. But it happened.
It seems to me that “races” do not try to convince people to join them by making persuasive arguments. As long as Islam proselytizes, converts, and keeps cranking out apologetics designed to show why it’s the most sensible, reasonable viewpoint out there I don’t think its defenders are doing it any favors by pretending that it all “bleeds” into being just like race.
Giles Fraser’s article seems fine to me. He doesn’t say that you can’t criticise Islam, but that such discussions need to go into sufficient detail. It’s the problem of people talking about how awful “Muslim Countries” are, as if they were all exactly the same. If you can’t point to specific examples of how Islamic interpretations have been used to justify political oppression and can do nothing but generalise about “Muslim Countries” then you are more likely to be engaging in xenophobic bigotry than serious discussion about religion and politics.
Fraser also notes the ridiculousness of the term “Christianophobia” (and Warsi has supported the whole “Christians are persecuted” line in the past, so this is very relevant). He also notes that Warsi’s decision to blame criticism of religion for anti-Muslim bigotry is misplaced. Of course this should be clear to those of us who have heard the rhetoric of Christian fundamentalists in regards to Islam.
Fraser also rightly notes how anti-Muslim rhetoric is often a cover for racist views. This is well-known in the UK. 9/11 was a gift for the BNP because suddenly they could change their normal racist views into anti-Muslim views. Most of the races they hated the most were mainly Muslim anyway, so it suited them down to the ground.
Nevertheless, good catch on the “contributor” thing. I think Fraser will find that there are occasionally some pretty horrendous words from “contributors” in The Guardian too, in spite of the heavier degree of comment monitoring.
Patrick – there’s at least one more definition of race used in some areas e.g. UK schools, the NHS and the criminal justice system – where people are asked to racially self-identify from a menu of ‘races’. I think that’s also what the census does.
Ophelia – couldn’t you call the (Catholic) Irish a race, in the sense of being a particular kind of extended family—one that is, over many generations, partly inbred (because you can go back to 4 grandparents, 16 great-great-grandparents, but this doesn’t go back indefinitely and exponentially – at some point you find that nth grandparent might be your nth grandparent twice (or more), through different children)?
“All the children of the Gael, Heed O’Brian’s banners Rooster of the fighting stock, Would you let a Saxon cock Crow out upon an Irish rock, Up and teach him manners”
Sure, I could call the Catholic Irish a race, but it would be totally confusing and woolly! And no, “Polish” is not a race either. Nationality is not race and vice versa.
Fatpie,
The post has nothing to do with wikipedia, it’s about Giles Fraser and a piece he wrote.
But speaking of the wikipedia article, Patrick, did you look at the discussion? “racism” is far from self-evident and in fact it’s decidedly contested. Take a look if you haven’t.
Maybe there are circles where “racism” is just uncontroverisally used for national groups too (but then is it used for all of them? is blanket hostility to Americans called “racism”?), but they don’t include everyone.
Irish may once have been considered a race, but nowadays “ethnicity” would be a less loaded term.
What is wrong with the word you used just now, “prejudice”? Or “bigotry”?
<blockquote>is blanket hostility to Americans called “racism”?</blockquote>
Only if a group of Americans form a minority group in another country. And even then, only if the hostility can be linked to bigotry against that minority group in particular.
The bigotry against Poles is harmful to the Polish minority groups in the UK. Bigotry against Muslims can lead to xenophobic attacks against immigrant families.
Do you remember the occasion in America where a tea party protest against the New York Islamic Centre led to a black non-Muslim man becoming subjected to their wrath. Their response was along the lines of “but he was wearing that hat, so how could we have known?” It seems like Americans can understand that there’s something wrong with racism when it’s against black people, but if the non-whites are Muslim suddenly they don’t recognise it as racism anymore. Sorry, but racism is about more than skin colour.
Indeed. Racist prejudice and racist bigotry. No problem with those terms at all.
Now you’re just confusing the issue further, racism is not directed exclusively against “minority groups” (see for example: Birmingham, Alabama, or South Africa if you prefer a country example)
My point still stands. Black people are a minority group in America and the fact that they might not be the minority within a particular area makes no difference to that.
This is, of course, about the balance of power, which makes South Africa during the apartheid a very interesting exception. In that case a minority had ensured the oppression of the majority. This is quite unusual, hence why it is a general rule that the minority group will be the subject of abuse, but it is the exception which proves the rule.
Dear god.
Nooooooo kidding!
Do you seriously think I don’t understand that and need you to explain it to me?
Notice that you managed to say that without once using the word “racism.” Bigotry against any group can lead to bad things; that does not mean that all bigotry against any group=”racism.”
Yeah, I can also talk about the bigotry against black people in America. I guess that’s sorted then. Bigotry against black people isn’t racism. Thanks for that… *sighs*
I didn’t say that. That’s exactly what I didn’t say.
But presumably you think you can’t be racist against Pakistanis. After all, Pakistan is a nation, right?
In the UK there has historically been racism against the Irish, there has also been racism against Indians and Pakistanis (“Paki” is most definitely a racist slur) and there currently exists racism against Poles. This is simply the case. All this whining about how it’s not really racism because a nation isn’t a race is just silly. There are only races to the extent that we label people as such. We all have mitochondrial DNA which means that if you go back far enough, we all have a common ancestor, so “race” in the end is a man-made concept. Racism is about any bigotry against groups from particular ethnic backgrounds, not simply against people with particular skin colours.
No, Fatpie, that’s not what the word means. “Racism” is not a synonym for “prejudice against groups of people.” And I’m not “whining”; I’m attempting to use words with precision.
Prejudice against groups of people from particular ethnic backgrounds. I made a point of phrasing it that way.
So anyway, according to you “Paki” isn’t a racist slur. Naturally I’m going to have to strongly disagree due to its longstanding use as a racist slur. *shrugs*
But again, “ethnic background” is not identical to “race.”
Sure, “Paki” makes more sense as a racist slur (in the UK) than “Irish” does. But it’s not literally racist. On the other hand I wouldn’t bother to point that out if Giles Fraser called it racist. But “Irish” is a good deal more absurd (and so is “Polish”). *dances a jig*
I must be having a conditioned response from playing on a pub trivia team, but pop culture trivia point:
The theme song for the Fox network animated show American Dad includes the line:
The sun in the sky has a smile on his face
And he’s shinning a salute to the American race!
I’ll grant that the use is, no doubt, intentionally ironic, but I’d be surprised if some of the viewers don’t take a literal interpretation.
In the 19th century, many race theorists thought the Irish were a race. Today, referring to “anti-Irish racism” would be anachronistic unless used to describe 19th c. views, which seems like exactly what the disputed line was doing.
See also this series of podcasts and contemporary cartoons: http://ashp.cuny.edu/2009/05/mid-19th-century-irish-immigrants-and-race/
And this paper: http://ajph.aphapublications.org/cgi/reprint/90/11/1735
This (presumably including quotations) is cited to: Ignatiev N. How the Irish Became White. New York, NY: Routledge; 1995.
This historical sidebar seems tangential to the rest of the original post, but it’s an interesting historical note, and worth getting right, especially in the context of a broader discussion about the ways that criticism of Islam can shade into anti-Islamic rhetoric and on to anti-Muslim prejudice, and what critics of Islam can do to prevent that (surely undesired) outcome.
That seems like what the disputed line was doing, or rather, like what Fraser was attempting to do in the disputed line. But he did it sloppily, with the result that it was ambiguous. It is indeed worth getting it right, not least because of course criticism of Islam is systematically and pervasively conflated with racism as a way to pressure people not to criticise Islam, and by god it works.