Going back to the roots
Jo Phoenix wrote an article a week ago titled Talking about Asian grooming gangs: some history and a few realities.
On Sunday 4th August I accused Kellie-Jay Keen (KJK) of being a populist extremist hell bent on inciting violence. She reposted a video made a few years previously about Asian grooming gangs in a tweet that said “the left would rather you be a rapist than them be accused of being racist. Women and girls don’t matter. # Rotherham”.
At the time she posted this tweet and video, a group of approximately 750 anti-immigration ‘protestors’ had surrounded a Rotherham Holiday Inn which accommodated asylum seekers. The ‘protest’ had already turned violent. The hotel was in the process of being smashed up and rioters were trying to set fire to the hotel. I was horrified both at what was happening in Rotherham and by Kellie-Jay Keen’s tweet and video.
So that’s part of the background to this open letter I blathered about earlier. It makes more sense of it.
Just to remind readers – the recent riots were started by disinformation about the identity of the boy in Southport who attacked a girls dance party, knifing many and killing three small girls. The disinformation was that he was Muslim, a migrant, on an MI5 watch list. Many of the populist extremist accounts spread this disinformation. As of today, there has been at least one arrest for incitement to racial hatred and false communication.
I received a lot of criticism for my tweet, most of which boiled down to this: you can’t call us racists for talking about Asian grooming gangs. Some of the responses horrified me almost as much as KJK’s original tweet – especially in relation to the highly negative racial stereotyping (let’s call it what it is – racism) that was [in] play. Asian grooming gangs and ‘Muslim Pakistani’ men were treated as though they were to blame for the problem of child sexual exploitation in England and Wales and the tragedy of Rotherham was treated as an example of the problems of immigration.
So I tweeted a few of these responses and said that I considered them racist. I was asked by one individual how we are supposed to talk about Asian grooming gangs if even mentioning it is seen as racist. This blog is my attempt to answer that question. It is long but the length is necessary so as to counter the misinformation that extremists are using to manipulate people’s discontents.
I recommend it, length and all.
I second the recommendation. This article needs to be read by everyone who has even the slightest interest in the issue (which should be everyone, but sadly isn’t).
I take issue with one point:
The second sentence doesn’t follow from the first. “Social care staff” are one thing, the police are another. And it looks to me that the police were so bound up in their contempt for the victims who they saw as worthless members of the underclass that they were willing to put their racism on the back burner. The Muslim “community” had a voice and were listened to, disadvantaged female children not so much. Bureaucrats, and the police are just bureaucrats just with, in this case, a big stick, like the easy life just as much as they like covering themselves in fashionable bunting.
I’d be happy to be proved wrong. Maybe Rotherham was just a random peak in a very nasty (and very real) mountain range. But we learn from specific instances as much from broad patterns and ruling out lines of enquiry because the results might be unpalatable generally doesn’t end well. If the police looked the other way because they shared Islam’s contempt for those that they considered unworthy that needs to be understood. And discussed.
I hope Professor Phoenix is not equating criticism of Islam with racism. It certainly looks as if she’s not interested in making a distinction but perhaps that is just a British thing. Either way it’s dangerous. Telling people that criticism of any religion is racist or even implying it isn’t anti-racist. It gives the racists excuses and that gives them power.
I don’t want this comment to come off as overly critical of what Professor Phoenix is saying. It’s a good article – it explains so much. I just think it doesn’t go far enough.
I’ve seen commentary today saying she is equating criticism of Islam with racism. Rummaging around on the subject I’ve also seen a lot of commentary that seems to consider Islam a race as opposed to a religion. That’s an old story, of course, but here it is again. Muslims tend to be less pale than Xians therefore Islam is a race therefore Islam must not be criticized.
This, though? This is utter nonsense gibberish.
Violent murder of women and girls is violent murder regardless of whether it’s committed by Asians, Europeans, Africans, Christians, Jews, Muslims, transwomen, men, women, or any other group, so we shouldn’t speak of male violence against women. To hold up the victims of male murderers as more offended against does a tremendous disservice to all those who are murdered by women.
What the actual hell? I guess we shouldn’t talk about Islamist terrorism, because terrorism is terrorism no matter the bomber’s religion, so don’t mention the affiliation of those involved in October 7th. This is the same sort of reasoning for not recording racial and ethnic information in medical surveys. It’s the same sort of flattening that hides the importance of sex and refers to “pregnant people” because pregnancy is hard no matter how you identify. This is the problematic caricature of colorblindness deployed by people like Kendi and DiAngelo, the willful blindness to race that causes blindness to racism.
Really? She’s really pretending not to know what parties are generally Left or Right? To say that those on the Left fear being called racists is about as accurate as saying that they fear being called transphobes. That is,really quite spot on.
Yes, the “offended against” comment stood out as weirdly inappropriate (but I had already said enough). The violence these girls endured has nothing to do with offence and the idea that a concern about giving offence should take precedence over seeking the understanding needed to effectively combat that violence is exasperating. But understanding can so easily be portrayed as indulgence. And no one is immune from the “be kind” mind virus.
I think she meant “offended against” in the sense of “criminal offender”. As in “wronged”.
It’s pretty clearly what she’s doing. In this comment, she says,
(NB: “Heritage” appears here because the commenter she’s replying to referred to culture and religion as heritage.)
She appears unwilling to separate cultural artifacts from the races with which they’re associated. That is, Chinese religions are part of Chinese culture, and criticism of Chinese culture is criticism of the Chinese, and criticism of the Chinese is racism. Using a race and an ethnicity (a very racially homogeneous ethnicity, at that) in her comparisons makes it clear that she sees no difference in kind between that which is Muslim and that which is black or Irish.
But why does she bear such antipathy toward generalizations? Generalizations are useful tools. “Men are larger, stronger, faster, and more violent than women,” is a generalization. Are all men larger, stronger, faster, and more violent than all women? Obviously not, but that doesn’t make the generalization invalid or inaccurate or problematic. A generalization is not a universalization.
In any case, criticism of Islam is not a generalization. It’s a criticism of a specific religion. If criticism of Islam is verboten on the grounds that such criticism would constitute generalization, then criticism of literally anything (aside from an individual specified with infinite precision) would be forbidden on the same grounds. We certainly would have to give up criticizing all ideologies, including both Trumpism and Genderism, and that’s going to be a really hard sell.
Fun fact: she can object to Islam’s hatred of women AND the Magdalen laundries in Ireland. I should know, I co-wrote a book on the subject and did just that.
I see she’s getting pushback on that one. Good.
@Nullius
It’s the “more offended against” idea that is weird. As if it actually matters if it’s some kind “hate crime”.
@Ophelia
I didn’t read the comments there before I posted mine. I’m confused enough as it is! But it good to see she’s getting reasoned pushback. And I’m hopeful she’ll take the arguments on board.