Despite being vilified in the rightwing media, Black Lives Matter will endure
In the rightwing culture war that has subsumed our politics, a handful of key words depict “the enemy”, all of them increasingly interchangeable: political correctness, identity politics, #MeToo, cancel culture, and above all, wokeness. (You can tell when this category of terms is being used to this effect when they slot neatly in the headline “Now ****** really has gone too far!”) Collectively, the words have come to pose a threat to readers, ready to be outraged by an unwelcome change to our politics and society, hiding under the guise of equality and justice.
The terms have been subject to a successful rebranding exercise that started on the right, but then leapfrogged into the mainstream. As notions that began as efforts to redress imbalances in society, challenge embedded power structures, and organise effectively against them, the terminology of equality has since been savaged. “Woke”, a call to stay alert to injustices in society, is now almost exclusively a slur, a sneer at someone’s over-worthy and counterproductive politics.
If you get your news from one of Britain’s many conservative papers, you will encounter near-daily attacks on “wokeness”, “woke-ism” and the “tyranny of woke”. The Telegraph has tagged the phenomenon as “cancel culture” and runs content mocking, vilifying or scaremongering the issue on a regular basis.
The latest entry in this lexicon of terror is Black Lives Matter. In only a few months, a phrase that once depicted a solemn moment of silence and solidarity with the victims of racial injustice has become a symbol of censorship and reverse discrimination. Black Lives Matter is now dragged into controversies it has nothing to do with, shoehorned into debates it never started, blamed for moves it never demanded.
In the summer, UKTV removed an episode of Fawlty Towers due to language used against Germans, the move was immediately associated with the Black Lives Matter movement and set off the usual fireworks, including from John Cleese himself who called the decision “stupid”. But the episode was part of a BBC review of offensive language and it was soon reinstated with a disclaimer.
In August, newspapers such as the Times reported on unsourced speculation that lyrics to songs were to be dropped at the Proms because of racial sensitivity. As I wrote last month, despite the story not being true (there was an orchestral version online and singing will come back next year subject to the pandemic being over), the press ran with it.
This month, a relatively small number of complaints to ITV’s Britain’s Got Talent about a Black Lives Matter themed dance surged after the issue was picked up as red meat by the press.
There is then a sort of free wordassociation exercise in the media that hangs over the movement, darkening it in suspicion. The Telegraph has called its supporters “lockdown-busting statue-toppling anarchists”. “Far-left agitators” stuck in a “Marxist echo chamber” says the Express. Mention Black Lives Matter in the company of Marxism, lawlessness, boycotting Israel, and abolishing the police enough times, and the movement becomes defined by terms that push people away and bury its main cause.
Attacks on the movement’s leaders did the rest of the smear work.
The Sun located its deep concern for black people last week when it pointed out that a Black Lives Matter founder (a “trained Marxist”) had links to a “pro-Chinese Communist party liberal group”. The gotcha here from the paper is that black people are treated poorly in China, and so clearly the Black Lives Matter activist cares more about militant Marxism than they do racism.
For all the frightening talk of a radical woke Black Lives Matter agenda restricting our hard-won liberties, the only concerted campaign here is the one attacking a movement for equality. In the US, this has traditionally been the work of well-funded conservative thinktanks that presented this agenda as a detached academic exercise, rather than an ideological pursuit. Since the early 1990s, the rightwing Heritage Foundation, whose stated mission is to
“formulate and promote conservative public policies”, has published content criticising political correctness about 400 times a year.
In the UK, this well-resourced process happens via a media that is less explicit in its declared purpose of arresting progress the moment it looks like change is possible. But still, the pushback is relentless, its tone calculated to trigger a warlike combination of revulsion and panic.
The dividends, both real and political, are lucrative. Nursing a sense of alarm on a daily basis creates a feedback loop that sends consumers back to the panic merchants, guaranteeing rage views and clicks. Reassuring these consumers that they are right in their unfounded suspicions gives them licence and evidence to justify their prejudice. This serves the interests of everyone in the media and politics who stands to lose if the scales of power are rebalanced.
The purpose of this propaganda is clear: to diminish the moral power of demands for racial equality and social justice so that they are then easier to extinguish, and to depict them as a militant threat to life as we know it, rather than a belated, and in fact extremely fragile attempt to secure basic rights to life, representation and dignity.
Resistance to these legitimate historic endeavours is successful in the day-to-day, but will be stormed over time. The resonance of the Black Lives Matter movement globally proves that the spontaneous truth of injustice is louder than deliberate attempts to suppress it. Black Lives Matter may have fallen from its temporary grace in the summer, but it rose without the help of its new critics, and will endure despite them.
The purpose of this propaganda is clear, to diminish the moral power of demands for racial equality and social justice