Zadie Smith On why she’s sick of being lectured by young radicals
WRITER Zadie Smith has said she’s sick of being “lectured” by young, “often white”, radicals who criticise “liberalism” but will end up getting married “if the polyamory doesn’t work out” and sending their kids to private school.
Speaking of coming from a normal background, Smith said: “I really object to being lectured by people who had no place in the commons, who went to private schools ... telling people who lived and benefited from the commons that it’s insufficient that that pact was nothing, it was just hopeless liberalism.”
She continued: “It’s in no way perfect... but to dismiss it and from a position of rhetorical radical thought without any idea of what it is to live in government housing, to go to the state schools, to participate in state health care, this drives me up the wall”.
Smith, who was born to a Jamaican mother and an English father, grew up in Kilburn and went to comprehensive school, before going to Cambridge. She now lives in New York.
Real action, she told the Adam Buxton podcast, was “so much harder” than just changing “the picture on your Instagram.”
The proof will be in the pudding.