Duda's victory in Poland helps draw a 'pink line' through Europe
Last Sunday, the Polish president, Andrzej Duda, was reelected by a narrow margin with the help of an assault on what he styled “LGBT ideology”: he campaigned on a “family charter” to protect Poles from this new threat, worse than communism.
Two of Poland’s near neighbours have recently activated anti-LGBT politics in similar ways. In May, Viktor Orbán’s Hungarian government passed a law that makes it impossible for trans people to change their gender on legal documents. And last month, Russians voted by a landslide to approve Vladimir Putin’s Russian constitution: among its many amendments is one that marriage can onlybe between a man and a woman.
Already, Russia’s lawmakers are explicitly using the new constitution to threaten freedoms associated with the liberal west: on Tuesday, Yelena Mizulina, the woman responsible for Russia’s anti-“gay propaganda” law, proposed legislation barring trans people from adopting children, or from establishing families – including getting married – after transitioning.
For the first time since 1918, “God” is written into Russia’s constitution, which now also mandates the teaching of “patriotism”, and urges citizens to resist (western) falsification of their history. “We are not just going to vote on legal amendments,” Putin said. “We are voting for the country in which we want to live.”
For which read: not Europe. Leaders like Putin, Orbán and Duda use
LGBTQ+ people to draw what can be called a pink line against a western secular liberalism that allegedly threatens the “traditional values” of the homeland. This plays on deep-rooted anxieties about globalisation and the digital revolution, and the fear of a loss of control that comes with the opening of borders to new ideas and new people – or, in the case of LGBTQ+ people, those who have been there all along, but now demand to be seen.
This culture wars tactic has undergone a significant shift in recent years: whereas it used to oppose “lifestyles” or “rights”, it is now sets itself against “ideology”; this allows it to assume the status of a counter-hegemonic force – and also to claim, as more people come out of the closet, that it is “not personal”. “LGBT are not people, but ideology,”said Dudawhen he launched his charter.
In recent years conservative Christians have gravitated towards opposing “gender ideology”, of which “LGBT ideology” is a subset. The archbishop of Krakow, Marek Jędraszewski, encapsulated the argument last year: while Poland was “no longer affected by the red plague,” he said, there was a “new one that wants to control our souls, hearts and minds … not Marxist, Bolshevik, but born of the same spirit, neoMarxist. Not red, but rainbow.”
This call has particular power for east Europeans, given Soviet history, and so is useful to politicians like Duda or Orbán. But it has been deployed the world over, from Latin America to Asia.
In Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro attained his popularity in part by piggy-backing on to a powerful grassroots religious movement determined to expel “gender ideology” from schools by banning sexuality education. He promised to restore the natural order to a corrupt and decadent country exemplified by the way his leftwing predecessors granted rights to LGBTQ+ people.
And in the United States, Donald Trump’s government has played to its conservative base by withdrawing regulatory protections for trans children in schools, and banning trans people from military service. Last month, it ruled that they are not protected from discrimination in healthcare – even as the supreme court outlawed such discrimination in the workplace.
For populist politicians like Trump or Bolsonaro, this plays to a particular constituency: disaffected voters who perceive they have been marginalised due to identity politics gone mad, and that their needs have been subordinated to the interests of outsiders, foreign or dark or queer.
Little wonder that, in a survey last year, 31% of young Polish men said they believed “the LGBT movement and gender ideology” was the biggest threat to Poland – more than the climate crisis or Russia. Or that a fight against “LGBT ideology” helped bring out the vote for Andrzej Duda.
But despite Duda’s victory, the Polish election results could be read another way. Before the election was initially postponed in May, because of coronavirus, Duda was the runaway favourite, not least because of his government’s social welfare policies. And yet, last weekend, he won with a tiny margin in the runoff against moderate liberal Rafał Trzaskowski.
As Warsaw’s urbane mayor, Trzaskowski has (mildly) supported LGBT rights, and Duda used this to paint his opponent as Europe’s stooge. But the 48.8% of Polish voters who chose him did so in part because his pro-European modernism appealed to them: to many, particularly those younger and urban voters, an acceptance of gay and trans people is key part of that.
• Mark Gevisser is the author of The Pink Line: The World’s Queer Frontiers
ford-educated American. Grant Brooke, the co-founder, who is originally from Texas, said he is aware of “a lot of underlying biases and advantages” of his background.
“I’ve seen this in real time. When I talk to a venture capitalist who looks like me and has the same educational background, even when I mess up something, they’ll just correct me and write it off as a conversation among colleagues,” he said. “If a black African founder were to do the same, they would see him as ignorant and judge him differently. I don’t even think that’s conscious, but they do it.”
Brooke blames the tough conditions for outsiders on those who run funds and the investment committees that make final decisions. In 2018, there were just seven black decisionmakers at the 102 largest investment firms in the United States, a survey by theInformation showed. Only 1% of venture-backed founders in the US are black, according to the review website RateMyInvestor.
At 500 Startups, “the most active early stage venture capital firm in the world”, black people are largely underrepresented. It estimates that only 92 founders identified as Black or African American out of the 2,400 companies it has invested in worldwide. “We look for companies that are globally focused and can scale beyond their home country,” Clayton Bryan, a black Venture Partner at the firm said in a statement. 500 Startups had two African startups out of 29 in its most recent cohort.
Gap-year entrepreneurs
Senegalese technologist Mariéme Jamme accuses outsiders of bringing a neo-colonialist mentality to the African startup ecosystem and exploiting naive first-time entrepreneurs.
“Many Africans have had their intellectual property stolen so they don’t own their ideas or their companies,” says Jamme, the UK-based founder of the non-profit iamtheCODE. She says some have nicknamed her an “angry black woman” for calling out the power imbalance.
Twiga’s Brooke, who met his Kenyan co-founder while studying for his doctorate degree at Oxford, understands why it is easy for expatriates to set up shop in Kenya. “There’s a lot of young westerners who can afford to take off a year or two of their life and not have income and try to start something because their parents will support them,” he says. “Kenyans can’t even move to America without having a job, yet Americans can move to Kenya legally.”
Stephen Gugu, a co-founder of ViKtoria Angel Business Network in Kenya, has followed the flow of capital into the so-called Silicon Savannah but noticed that foreigners sell their vision better. “In all honesty, the expatriate founders pitch better than we Kenyans do. They’re able to paint this picture of an Africa that is full of opportunity,” he said. “Local founders are not as aggressive in their pitches. At times there’s no substance but they [foreigners] are good at telling the story even when they have no context.”
A white founder is 47,000% more likely to be funded in Kenya than in the US, the Seattle-based author and entrepreneur Roble Musse calculated based on 2018 disclosures. White people make up less than 1% of the population. He discovered that 65% of expatriate founders – mainly from the US, the UK, Italy, Denmark and Germany – had not even lived in Kenya before they started their companies.
The ignorance about the African market by the deepest-pocketed investors has stunted many indigenous youths on the continent with promising ideas. “If I was white, my idea would have been taken at face value. But because I’m black, I need to go the extra mile, I need to make sure that my education level is right, that my product actually does what I say it does,” says South African polymer technologist Nomahlubi Nazo.
She quit her job and took a cosmetic formulation science course before launching her startup, Foi Science. But three years later she is still bootstrapping and looking for seed funding to carry out clinical trials before she can get approval to sell her products.
Iyinolowa Aboyeji blames the structural issues with capital on the continent on local banks and pension funds that have not embraced venture capital. The 29-year-old Nigerian is one of the most successful African entrepreneurs of his generation, having cofounded two of the continent’s bestknown startups, the payments company Flutterwave and Andela, which outsources African software developers to global companies. “I think it is too easy for people to make this a white or black issue but that only benefits privileged Africans with Ivy League degrees and MBAs who believe funding should be given to them on a platter just because of their skin color,” emailed E, as he is known.
“Two of my six co-founders for Andela might have been white but I actually think it hurt our earliest fundraising almost as much as it might have helped us. It is not easy to believe a white man or woman will know what they are doing in Africa. Our presence actually helped assuage a lot of investors that they weren’t throwing money into some white savior project.”
His financing initiative, called Future Africa, allows anybody to fund the continent’s innovators with at least $10,000. The first deal was fully funded within 72 hours, the second in six hours, both for over $100,000. “If we in Africa keep denying young people opportunities to make mistakes and impact and then go on to blame racism for the discrepancies in funding, we are only interested in point[ing] fingers, not in the deep structural changes that are in our power to make to turn the situation around,” he wrote.
Jesse Ghansah has recently just closed a round of funding from both African and foreign investors for his second startup and believes the tide is slowly turning. He is now the founder and CEO of financial technology company Swipe but the Ghanaian knows there is still work to do. “The yardstick used to judge African founders is really different. Most of the investors are white, so having a white founder on your team helps,” he said.
More local venture capital funds and angel investors are getting started on the continent to address the absence of patient capital and the funding disparity.
Ingressive Capital by Maya Horgan Famodu, a 29-year-old Nigerian American, is one of them. It just doubled the size of its three-year-old fund to $10m to invest in “early stage techenabled startups” in Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, Egypt and South Africa. “There are so many brilliant youths across the continent who just need a little bit of access and introduction or seed financing to build the next billion-dollar business,” she says of her mission.
If a black African founder were to [make a mistake], they would see him as ignorant and judge him differently
hawked by Infowars grand poobah Alex Jones.
Brady’s evolution into the Nietzschean superman, the touchdown-tossing übermensch who believes the rules don’t apply to him, has come to divide public opinion but failed to meaningfully undercut his celebrity and commercial appeal. For those who are able to put aside or compartmentalize the pattern of rule-bendingandskulduggery that has resurfaced throughout his career, including a quarter-season suspension for being “at least generally aware” of plain old cheating in 2015, it’s hard to begrudge him the spoils of his success and right to leverage his brand for supplementary financial gain, even in the peddling of baseless health claims. Caveat emptor, no? It’s an industry at least as old as Be Like Mike. Buy the sneakers.
Eat the cereal. Not only can you watch me, you can be me.But at a time when anti-science sentiment has been mainstreamed to an alarming extent (see: the flourishing anti-vax, anti-GMO and climate crisis denial movements), it’s equally hard to ignore where Brady’s racket fits in with the broader trend of influencers selling products under the “wellness” and “lifestyle” categories because they don’t meet the higher criteria of science.
And yet still: Is this not only another iteration of the American dream? These United States carry a long and often amusing tradition of rapscallions, hucksters and charlatans who have made their bones by trading on glamour, charisma and the promise of miracles: from Professor Harold Hill to PT Barnum to John R Brinkley to Elizabeth Holmes to Brady’s good friend Donald Trump. If ever there were a grand unifying theory to this improbable experiment, it’s this: you can’t knock the hustle. Brady’s junk science is on the whole no more pernicious than the televangelists or carnival barkers who have separated generations of marks from their money. The American dream is hard enough to achieve the first time. Leave it to the golden boy from San Mateo to manage it twice.