We Need New Stories by Nesrine Malik

Author:Nesrine Malik
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Orion

Grievance flipping

The flip side of this coddling of white entitlement is a denigration of other groups’ expressions of (real) political grievances and accusing them of racism. In 2016, the Guardian writer Sir Simon Jenkins declared that ‘pale, male, stales’ such as him were the only remaining group that it is ‘OK to vilify’. When interviewed about the column, he said that the way he feels now, white, male and above a certain age is sometimes ‘like what it must have been like to be a black person 20 or 30 years ago’. There were no black women (or men for that matter) with two columns in mainstream newspapers, the Guardian and the Evening Standard, twenty or thirty years ago. In fact, at the time that Sir Simon Jenkins made his comments, there was not a single black woman columnist writing full-time for any mainstream British newspaper. He added that black women ‘slide’ into important jobs these days, that he generally feels like him and his cohort are being ‘squeezed’ out of the commentariat and that there are things that he used to be invited to that he is no longer invited to. At the time of writing, Jenkins remains in his column at the Guardian, his tenure still unthreatened by a ‘sliding’ in of black women.

He ended his column by contradicting all that went before it. ‘The stales, like the pale males, will have their revenge. They have the spending power, the pensions, the houses; above all, they vote. Call us hideous and disgusting if you want, they will say, and we shall honour your right to offend us. But prick us and we still bleed. We have our pride. We are going to be around for longer and longer – and we are going to cost you dear.’

This switching between pathos and menace, between plaintiveness and threat, between claiming dispossession and then bringing revenge to bear on those you allege are oppressing you with all the might of your vastly superior resources, is the doublethink that lies at the heart of the identity politics myth.

The writer Lionel Shriver manages an even more impressive contortion of logic by accusing non-whites both of racism and of triggering it in others. In a 2018 article in the British magazine the Spectator, she argued that a newfound attachment to race by white people was the responsibility of other racial minorities – ‘which have whipped up racial antagonism, encouraged nakedly anti-white bombast and ushered in a glaring double standard that’s unsustainable. You cannot have black identity politics, and Latino identity politics, without conjuring the pastel version.’ This is a myth. The reversal of that sentence, with the pastel version conjuring up the others, is the reality. ‘The sleeping giant of white identity politics?’ she asks, ‘thanks to misguided hard-left activism, it’s woke.’

What Shriver and her compatriots do not realise is that it is them who have been sleeping. Blaming identity politics for triggering white people has been, as mythical tales usually are, deployed for a long time.

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