{"id":5245,"date":"2020-01-24T15:40:30","date_gmt":"2020-01-24T15:40:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/expertcomment\/?p=5245"},"modified":"2021-06-15T16:34:06","modified_gmt":"2021-06-15T15:34:06","slug":"megan-laurence-and-question-time-the-unbearable-discomfort-of-disavowal-or-privileged-racist-moi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.canterbury.ac.uk\/expertcomment\/megan-laurence-and-question-time-the-unbearable-discomfort-of-disavowal-or-privileged-racist-moi\/","title":{"rendered":"Meghan, Laurence and Question Time: the unbearable discomfort of disavowal or ‘Privileged? Racist? Moi?’"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Dr Harshad Keval explores the issue of race, power and deniability following a recent episode of Question Time.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Social and broadcast media recently burst into digital\nflames with yet another scandalous story about racism and charges of \u2018privilege\u2019,\nall denied and decanted into convenient packages of \u2018ritual disavowal\u2019.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The case in question, was BBC\u2019s Question Time (16th<\/sup> January 2020), where in response to an audience question around the Duke and Duchess of Sussex\u2019s (Harry and Meghan) recent announcement of their departure and transition from active royal duties, including a home move to the US, another audience member made a very clear statement that Meghan\u2019s treatment at the hands of the media was outright racism. The response to this by a panel member, actor Lawrence Fox, was \u201cIt\u2019s not racist…We\u2019re the most tolerant lovely country in Europe…\u201d The audience member who made the statement  responded by stating that Fox was speaking from a very different position to one that was racialised as black, therefore could not legitimate such dismissal. Such a position as it intersected with his racial identity, class and gender, makes for a complex but ultimately weak position. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In other words, for someone not a member of a racial group that\ncontinues to be discriminated against at various levels of society, as\nProfessor Miri Song reminds us, it is\nnot possible to deny, dismiss and excuse charges of racism<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The audience member, Rachel Boyle happened to be an academic expert in the area, a woman, and a person of colour \u2013 someone who might have some legitimacy in the debate, one might argue, but she was silenced both by Fox, and by Fiona Bruce, chairing the panel. Indeed, Fox went on to appear on ITV\u2019s Good Morning Britain to criticise what he felt was \u2018diversity being forced onto him\u2019, at the sight of a Sikh soldier in Sam Mendes\u2019s new film 1917<\/em> (let\u2019s remember that 1.4 million soldiers in WW1 were from the Indian Army, including 124,245 Sikh soldiers). Fox\u2019s response to being quizzed was that he \u2018wasn\u2019t a historian\u2019. Perhaps more \u2018black\u2019 history in schools might help \u2013 especially private schools perhaps.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What\u2019s going on here? In simple terms, it sounds like playground banter of the \u2018you said, she said\u2019 type, and therefore of little consequence. However, the case is not peculiar, for it represents an analytical collage of concepts that yields a slightly more complex story of the power of deniability when placed in the arena of whiteness, racism, and the politics of ignorance.  <\/em><\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

The notion that a racialised subject can now in full,\nlegitimated, public view be \u2018argued\u2019 down from their experience of racism is\nnot new. Since the earliest days of Race Relations legislation in 1965 there\nhas been a troubled relation between understanding\nit<\/em>, accepting it exists, taking responsibility for it, and the\ninterpersonal, social and psychological need to accept the reality of racism<\/em>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2018Denying\u2019 racism requires a structural logic of racial\npower, which is fundamentally held within the seat of privilege. Racism\nrequires power, because as Patrick Wolfe argued incisively, race is a trace of history\n\u2013 the history of brutal oppression. But what is this privilege people keep\nasking about and denying?  Therein lies\nthe problem, and something W.E.B Dubois, the\neminent US Sociologist<\/a> wrote of in 1903, that the relative position of\nblack people in the US was, no matter which way one looked at the problem,\nalways structurally lower than whites in the US \u2013 a current structural racism\nproblem of monster proportions in the US prison system for example.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

One problem of course is that the idea<\/em> of privilege has \u2018baggage\u2019\n<\/em>in the UK which contains imperial and colonial histories of power, supremacy\nand domination, all underwritten of course by racial capitalism<\/em><\/a>.<\/em> Unfortunately, the politics of\nstructural white ignorance and denial work to disable an honest rummage around\nall the contents of this particular bag. Instead social agents \u2013 like the panel\nmember in Question Time but by no means limited to this figure \u2013 look to their\nown experiences only, and in consequence further perpetuate the racial logic of\nmodernity. Sociologist Charles Mills (2007) terms this \u2018whiteness as an\nepistemology of ignorance\u2019 \u2013neither passive nor innocent \u2013 as demonstrated in the\nabove exchange, and masks a psycho-social space where colonial history,\ngendered racial oppression and class subjugation collide. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Racial subjects, migrants, black and Asian minority people \u2013\ngroups who are racially \u2018othered\u2019 are always existing<\/em> at the heart of these intersections with power \u2013 despite\nthe denial of their existence. Neatly summed up by a relevant twitter meme then:\n\u201cWhite privilege doesn\u2019t mean your life hasn\u2019t been hard; it means your skin\ncolour is not one of the things making it harder\u201d.  To deny anti-black racism exists, is to deny\nthat the object of that racism exists. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dr Harshad Keval is Senior Lecturer in Sociology<\/a>.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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