People seems to believe I am a nice person who either won’t challenge the unhinged shit they say, maybe because I am a woman, or that because I am white I will agree with them. In any cases, they are wrong, I am neither nice nor agreeing with your racist beliefs and I won’t let them get away with it.
foreword: I don’t think I’m the best person to talk about racism but I also think silence is worse. I talk from my own experiences and what I have witnessed over the years. I talk because I know my privileges and what they grant me. TW: racism, hate crimes.
Last week I shared a quote by Naomi Shulman stating that nice people made the best Nazis. I wrote, “Niceness is terribly close to complacency”.
Long-time readers may remember what I wrote about an interaction I had with a racist guy at the pub:
I remember a conversation or rather an argument, I had at the pub last year. Some guy in favour of Brexit. Some old white man explaining to me I wasn’t an issue. Some racist cowarding in front of me as I refused to ignore his comments. I remember someone telling me it’s not that deep, and why couldn’t you just ignore him? I think some people tell themselves that as a reassurance, some people ignore racism because it’s easy. I think some people tell themselves that because they agree a little bit. I remember my anger blinding me, I think I went home, clenching my jaw; at least I didn’t bite my tongue.
If you wonder why I come across so many anti-immigrant/racist people, I wonder the same. I suspect it is a cocktail of having conversations with strangers at the pub and the political climate, a fertile soil for racists to be proud of their beliefs. Sick. I wonder if so many people are self-proclaimed racists so loudly, so proudly because they know they won’t be challenged, because they believe everyone thinks like them, because they found a twisted community. The truth is, they may only be comfortable saying it out loud in front of white people now, but racism has been visible all this time. Shocker.
Over ten years ago, when we were about 15, my friends and I got kicked out of a party because of a racist altercation. A white guy had called our friend by a racist slur, a fight started and we got kicked out. But not the racist.
I think a lot of people are scared. Life has been getting harder and harder; everything seems to be falling apart and everywhere we look we see horrors, we see pain, we see hardships. Fear is a valid reason to be angry but it isn’t, and never will be, a valid reason to be racist, and just to be clear there are no valid reasons to be racist. Anger, as opposed to fear, gives the impression of power and people will retreat in their anger to regain a sentiment of control.
In conversations I try to understand, are they actually racist or have they been manipulated? I’m not trying to be nice. I am not a nice person, nor am I agreeable and to be truthful, I’m kind of a bitch. But I think it is important to challenge those beliefs. There are a lot of arguments for not engaging in conversations with such people, and for some, I agree, but now is not the time to back away from a difficult conversation. It is not the time to retreat but the time to convince, to argue with compassion. It is not the time to be comfortable in our privileges but the time to stand up to protect those who don’t benefit from those protections. Don’t believe one day you won’t be stripped of yours, no one is invincible.
Because I’m talking about racism now, but misogyny has become so banal I can’t imagine how comfortable some men are being degrading women. I’m talking about women but look how comfortable the rich are at exploiting workers, how easily they criminalised homeless and how complacent we are about it.
While writing our media thesis, in 2018, we interviewed dozens of Muslim women in Belgium and the UK about their lives and their experience wearing the hijab. I wrote a piece titled “25 points for a veil” on the violence they experience: from insistent looks, insults, ‘cold shoulder’ attitudes to difficulty getting hired or finding a school, and full on physical aggression, pulled veil and threats. The title of the article itself refers to a letter that circulated at the time, “Punish a Muslim Day” encouraged citizens to attack Muslim people for a few points. This incitement to hatred was a joke to the writer, David Purnham. A joke to incite people to beat up a Muslim for 100 points. A joke to insult them for 10 points. A joke to rip the hijab of a Muslim “woman” for 25 points. And yeah, he wrote woman in quotation mark. This was the year Boris Johnson compared women wearing the niqab to letter boxes. That year there was a 40% increase in religious hate crimes in the UK.
Last year racist rioters tried to burn people alive by setting the fire to a hotel accommodating refugees.
Nothing is just words or just a joke or not that deep.
Being nice to keep peace is not an act of niceness, it is complacency. Being nice is dangerous, not challenging those ideas, being complacent, is dangerous.1
It is easy to speak up to strangers, it is much harder when it is to a friend or relative, harder even when it is an acquaintance - you know that friend of a friend you just met at a birthday dinner, or that colleague you usually have a quick banter with in the elevator. We need to have the hard conversations, draw bridges, do our best to explain - it is time to be kind and empathetic even when we don’t want to, or when we feel it isn’t our place nor our job. It is also time to leave those conversations when they don’t deserve anymore time, no I won’t let you be the ‘devil’s advocate’ when I can see clear.
But don’t be nice.
/on the list/
the tulips on my desk
analogue media, especially the radio and CD player I just got
how to survive the broligarchy by Carole Cadwalladr
the communist manifesto, Marx & Engels
that one minute of sun through the rain
everything clicking
(very much not on the list: the dog shedding all over my black clothes, the hairdresser butchering my haircut, fascism inc.)
Saying this, it’s important to be safe when doing so. I know I am privileged to being able to challenge those ideas without risking my life for most of it, but situations can quickly escalate and I’m well aware of it.
Many years ago I was in a supermarket carpark, getting my shopping and my baby into the car, when I saw a taxi pull in near me, and an Indian family got out. The children were laughing and the dad was promising them ice cream. This white guy in his ute next to me scowled at them and said to me, "never used to see people like that round here, this country has gone downhill". I was so shocked that someone would see a family laughing and not only think something nasty like that, but actually express it out loud, and I told him "I'd rather have them in my country than you," and got in my car and drove off. Just because I'm white doesn't mean I'm going to agree with your racism, old man.