“White supremacy is certainly not what it was. … By the 1960s, it was widely accepted that overt racism was no longer acceptable in public… racial superiority had become discredited, ceasing to have any significant influence over public life.” Frank Furedi
‘Hate Speech Is Free Speech’
I’ve often wished that I could point people to a quick guide about the colorblind racism peddled by Spiked. A year ago, I’d never heard of the publication, but as I followed the debate about education in the UK more closely, Spiked popped up again and again in people’s Twitter feeds, usually as a sign that someone would act as if they cared about racism, until they started arguing that anti-racists are the real problem.
According to Spiked, we’ve achieved Dr. Martin Luther King’s dream, which Spiked takes to be a colorblind society (yes, this whitewashes Dr. King’s legacy). In the Spiked fictional world, where race no longer matters, then anyone who insists on talking about race must be racist: Both the racists who speak of a ‘white identity’ and the anti-racists who speak about ‘white privilege’ apparently play ‘identity politics’. The assistant editor of Spiked Tom Slater writes,
“The desire for a ‘colourblind’ society, the sort of society that Martin Luther King hoped his children would one day inherit, is now seen by anti-racist campaigners on both sides of the pond as a cover for unconscious ignorance. …. Meanwhile, it’s become common for censorious student campaigners to suggest that those who refuse to accept that we’re all, in the end, different, are ‘secretly racist’. Today, even MLK would be seen as ‘part of the problem’. Who knows? He might even be No Platformed.”
According to Spiked, it’s the anti-racists and the rest of the left – intersectional feminists, LGBTQ activists, and even environmental scientists – who create the real threat to society through their ‘over-sensitivity’. Slater raises the possibility that even Dr. King might be No Platformed by ‘censorious students’, revealing his strategically limited grasp of why students on the left have deployed No Platforming as a form of resistance and activism. More importantly, Slater reveals a limited knowledge of history: the FBI tried to blackmail Dr. King into killing himself, so it’s disingenuous to reframe him as a voice of the establishment. These days, it’s often instructive to keep track of whose free speech gets defended. Spiked did report on the FBI tracking of ‘Black Identity Extremists’ (a spurious concept), but somehow managed not to bring up ‘freedom of speech’ in the whole article, though they were critical of the FBI.
Spiked advocacy for ‘free speech’ has been revealed as nothing more than the factless fear-mongering that unites the right. William Davies writes about the concocted crisis:
“YouGov published polling data in June showing that British students were on average no less tolerant of opposing views than the general public. In the US, the political scientist Jeffrey Sachs has shown that there has been no generational shift in attitudes to free speech, contrary to what Haidt in the Atlantic and others have claimed.”As far as I can tell, Sachs is in Canada. Here is a longer piece.
But for Spiked, both in the media and on campus, it’s ‘free speech’ that must be defended, not the historically marginalized and oppressed communities. Spiked argues for a right to offend in the abstract – “hate speech is free speech” by appealing to the concrete victories of the past. For example, when Amnesty International campaigns against hate speech directed against women online, Joanna Williams argues that Amnesty does more harm than good because Amnesty’s campaigns and the growing culture of calling out sexism supposedly silences people. “One person’s abuse is another person’s criticism.” In fact, according to Williams, it’s even unfeminist to try to protect women against hate speech because “Women’s rights were won not by asking to be protected, but by offending.” Spiked will acknowledge the occasional sexist or racist individual, especially to distance themselves from something too egregious to defend in public, but systemic racism doesn’t exist in the Spiked editorial world.
For people who are unfamiliar with Spiked, the magazine is part of a network of thinkers and lobbyists that goes back to the Revolutionary Communist Party (1978), which published Living Marxism (1988) later to be rebranded as LM (1992). In 2000, “a high court libel jury forced the magazine LM, formerly Living Marxism, into closure and bankruptcy.” Out of the collapse of LM, Spiked Online and The Institute of Ideas (which changed its name in 2018 to The Academy of Ideas, likely because it could not meet the legal requirements for calling itself an ‘institute’) rose to champion the freedom to offend. The central cast of characters in this network includes Claire Fox, Frank Furedi, Mick Hume, and Brendan O’Neill, the editor of Spiked.Even before the libel case, LM engaged in some dodgy journalism practices: “A 1995 piece by a writer called ‘Fiona Foster’ – ‘just back’, as the standfirst breezily put it, ‘from a visit to Rwanda’ – epitomises the problem. Foster took an unusual line on the massacres of 1994: she downplayed the genocidal aspect in favour of ‘the role played by outside powers’, and accused ‘aid agencies’ of ‘building prisons’ instead of bringing in food and medical help. Aid agencies, unsurprisingly, objected; Alex de Waal, an expert on Sudan, did some digging and discovered that Foster is really Fiona Fox. Her ‘visit to Rwanda’ took place while she was working in the media relations department for Cafod, the Catholic relief agency.”
One of the most prominent themes in Spiked suggests that the real injustices of racism and sexism only exist in the past, and so according to Mick Hume, “for all the shrill talk of a rising tide of racism and even ‘fascism’ today, Trump’s America bears no comparison to the virulently racist society” before the Civil Rights era. Spiked editor Brendan O’Neill writes in The Spectator: “There is a great disparity between the handwringing over hate crime and what Britain is actually like. The open racism even I can remember in the 1980s has all but vanished.” And since real racism is a thing of the past, Courtney Hamilton argues that only “someone utterly obsessed with skin colour could possibly see any racism” in a Heineken beer advertisement that claims ‘lighter is better’. “Sadly, this is the mindset of many anti-racists today. They can’t even watch an advert without looking for signs of either ‘white privilege’ or ‘black oppression’.” And if white people shouldn’t sing along at concerts with Black rap artists who use the N-word, then Christian Butler argues that anti-racist “suppression of the N-word” in fact “leads to audience segregation” and “to more division”, creating a taboo that will “actually increase its power to offend.” Similarly, Naomi Firsht claims that “the rage against cultural appropriation sucks the fun out of culture, and, even worse, encourages a new kind of segregation.”
Frank Furedi – who ran LM and now contributes to Spiked – argues that those who criticize ‘white privilege’ engage in a “relentless racialisation of human experience”, and are a “potentially far more corrosive force” than the Nazis that marched in Charlottesville. People who talk about whiteness “are indifferent to the fact that an externally imposed identity always violates an individual’s personhood. In this sense, the imposition of white identity is morally equivalent to colonialists imposing a racially inferior status on the colonised.” Spiked’s claim that real racism and sexism only exist in the past sidelines and attempts to silence the voices of young activists since they can’t possibly have anything to complain about. And if young activists do raise their voices, they are the ones who are creating ‘a new kind of segregation’, which is exactly what the activists of the past worked against! There’s no outside to Spiked’s self-enclosed logic: when ‘free speech’ is at stake, young activists are reduced to listeners who must respect the ‘free speech’ of others; and then when young activists take the mic, they are reduced to whiners who adopt a ‘victim mentality’ without actually having been victims. Claire Fox argues that this generation suffers from a unique narcissism:
“I think it’s a problem with this generation. This generation is not arguing a coherent opposition to the previous generation. It’s actually arguing a narcissistic version of the previous generation’s ideas. They’re just making those ideas more about themselves. … All they do is just make everything more about them.”
‘The Erosion of Cultural Authority’
Spiked advocates for freedom of ideas, but sharply changes the narrative when talking about youth and schools because aside from facing a crisis of ‘free speech’, society also faces “the erosion of cultural authority” according to Furedi, a speaker at the first ResearchEd conference. Incidentally, Claire Fox’s Battle of Ideas also held a session on ‘The New Crisis of Adult Authority in the Classroom’ based on Furedi’s book. Furedi and Fox have a longstanding relationship, though as Jenny Turner recounts, Fox presented the theme of the session as completely coincidental with the release of Furedi’s book. Writing about the LM network more broadly, Turner says “they still have a habit of sitting on panels together, pretending they don’t already know each other.” In an interview with Spiked about “the crisis of authority of the classroom,” Tom Bennett, the soi disant ‘behaviour tsar’ of the U.K. and founder of ResearchEd, says there is a “chronic” “crisis of adult authority” in the broader culture and classroom, and he believes children want a restoration of adult authority because they are “waiting to be told what to do.”LRB: ”Fox introduced the first event in the Keynote Controversies slot: ‘Rethinking Education: The New Crisis of Adult Authority in the Classroom’, based on the book by Frank Furedi, out that same weekend. ‘We’, apparently, were ‘very excited’ when ‘we’ realised Furedi’s book was being launched at the same time as the Battle of Ideas; Furedi is ‘one of the UK’s, indeed Europe’s, indeed the world’s leading public intellectuals’, Fox told us, besides which she’d read the book already, and was glad to say it ‘doesn’t disappoint’. Which is just as well, given that Furedi, it is said, has been for the past 40 years or so the RCP’s leader and theoretical guru.” Many issues of expression that might be defended as ‘free speech’ in other contexts are treated quite differently by Spiked when they put students into conflict with ‘adult authority’. For example, when a Black Rastafarian child wore dreadlocks to school as an expression of his culture and beliefs, apparently thus violating the school’s policy on appearance, Courtney Hamilton argued that “He needs to cut off his dreadlocks and return to school for the sake of his education. … And the school should stick to its guns, for the sake of the authority of schools everywhere.” On this premise, if youth feel like they are oppressed in any way, it’s because they don’t understand history. Nancy McDermott claims that “There are signs that a significant section of young adults today do not value or necessarily understand the freedoms upon which previous generations were willing to stand or fall.”
While Spiked claims to be a free-speech advocate, in fact the publication ”provides both an apologia and a platform for corporations and right-wing individuals and groups.” Both Furedi and O’Neil deny climate science in favor of siding with corporations. Furedi tries to cover his intellectual sham with claims climate scientists stifle ‘free speech’ and he invents a tyranny of “narrow-minded principles of environmental correctness”. O’Neill follows a similar script, criticizing the
”true intolerance of the eco-lobby, their real censorious urge — which is not merely to ringfence science from ridicule, which is bad enough, but to prevent the expression of contrarian ideas. For years, greens have presented themselves as merely the rational, reasoned defenders of science against gangs of charlatans, when in truth they were all about protecting an ideology: the ideology of no-growth, of anti-development, of anti-progress, of population control, of modern-day misanthropy, fortified with bits of science but really expressing an underlying, elitist, growing contempt for humanity and its achievements.”
To make a space for ‘free thought’ that is supposedly quashed by the misanthropy of climate scientists and the racism of anti-racists, The Institute of Ideas, run by Claire Fox, holds a regular forum entitled Battle of Ideas. An upcoming session called “Decolonising our minds: radicalism or racism?” promises to examine a movement that seeks to “racialise the world, to entrench racial thinking and to present a degraded view of people of colour as constantly vulnerable to being assaulted by the past.”
“And are decolonisers really voicing the concerns of the voiceless and underrepresented? The first decolonise campaigns came from the most elite universities and each student-led push to decolonise generates vast swathes of media coverage. … Should we heed the demands of the decolonisation movements? Or should we be worried that calls for decolonisation are colonising more and more aspects of our lives?”
In the Spiked worldview, much like that of Jordan Peterson, it’s ‘political correctness’ or ‘identity politics’ which has ruined the left, both codes that ‘free speechers’ use to oppose any discussions of racism, transphobia, homophobia, sexism, or ableism. As part of Spiked Magazine’s Unsafe Space Tour (Dec 11, 2017), Steven Pinker claimed that “political correctness has done an enormous amount of harm”, playing a role in radicalizing the alt-right; “when they are exposed for the first time to true statements that have never been voiced in college campuses, or in the New York Times, or in respectable media,” Pinker argues that they are not “inoculated”. As an example of ‘true statements’ that people won’t have heard either on college campuses or in the respectable media, Pinker uses this : “Men and women are not identical in their life priorities, in their sexualities, in their tastes and interests.” Really? ‘Sex differences’ has never been given widespread voice? Contrary to Pinker’s seemingly sheltered experience , it’s absurd to think that the majority of people are not exposed to what is in fact a dominant ideology about differences in men and women despite the best attempts of an allegedly repressive ‘PC culture’.I borrow this paragraph from an earlier essay that I wrote
In an interview with Claire Fox, Lizzie Soden and Greg Scorzo claim that “In a bizarre way, identity politics is kind of taking people from the left and bringing them into the Spiked magazine world.” Fox replies that,
“The horrible thing about identity politics is how much it’s a shift away from what progressivism traditionally stood for. Progressivism was originally about transcending biology, transcending one’s personal culture, and going beyond the colour of your skin. Now if you say, “I’m colour blind” people will call you racist. The whole thing is crazy. And it’s created a really unpleasant atmosphere on the left.”
Actually, calling ‘color blind’ ideology racist isn’t crazy at all since structural racism hasn’t gone away. Eduardo Bonilla-Silva (2015) argues that at the core of colorblind racism is a commitment to abstract liberalism, a decontextualized view of agency that allows “whites appear ‘reasonable’ and ‘moral’ while opposing all kinds of interventions to deal with racial inequality.” That is to say, whites can argue that they have no problem with ending the segregation of schools, however, they refuse to commit to a concrete path – such as busing, “the only effective program we have in place to address school segregation” – “that would create increased interactions among racial groups.” The appeal to liberal ideas such as ‘freedom of choice’ – or freedom of speech – ensures that abstract commitments to the de-segregation of schools never come to fruition, thus in fact limiting the ‘freedom of choice’ for African Americans and other racialised peoples. Abstract liberalism is a “laissez faire” version of white supremacy because whites can count on the status quo benefiting them.
Ideas not worth debating
So why do I recoil when I see educators Tweeting Spiked articles, celebrating the Battle of Ideas, or inviting Furedi into ResearchEd? Am I trying to silence the ‘free speech’ champions? Absolutely not. I did argue that someone should not be given a platform at a ResearchEd event in Canada because to elevate their views on genetics, race, and IQ to the level of research would be a disservice to the educational community. The event withdrew the speaker, but this is of course not an issue of freedom of speech any more than the initial selection of speakers by ResearchEd constitutes an issue of freedom of speech. As Jane Fae argues, “Speech is, in fact, also about space.We need to look at the meta-communication. That is, we need to consider not simply the intellectual argument being presented, but also the implications of particular speech in particular circumstances.” Speech comes with real consequence – colorblind racism materially impacts people’s lives – and educators have a moral obligation to stand up for the most marginalized students.
There’s no credible prospect that Spiked is in any danger of experiencing censorship by government; as a recent article by William Davies puts it, “The proliferation of platforms that grant anyone a public voice should, in principle, have put concerns about censorship to rest.” Davies argues that “the defence of free speech promises to restore a traditional cultural order”, which resonates with Fox, Furedi, and Bennett’s claim that there is some erosion of cultural or adult authority in schools. If youth push back against having to listen to this garbage about the erosion of adult authority, then as Kieran Devlin argues, “Perhaps it’s this notion that the free speech zealots find truly frightening: that their ideas simply aren’t worth debating.”
In the case of Claire Fox’s Battle of Ideas, Devlin’s assessment doesn’t seem so far off the mark. Fox recounts how youth challenged her during a panel about ‘the crisis of democracy’:
“Some kid stood up and said, ‘Let’s have votes for 16 year olds’ in a debate on democracy. Then nearly every kid kept asking that same question, over and over again. Finally, I said, as the chair, ‘Believe it or not, this session is not just about you. Can every 17 year old stop standing up and asking for the vote. This session is about the crisis of democracy, and that’s not just about the rights of 17 year olds.’ They were outraged when I did that.”
Why would a 16 year old feel that their vote might be materially important for democracy? Likely because the youth vote would have changed Brexit. For consistency, it’s hard to imagine how Fox can justify her refusal to give these youth a platform and debate them properly, instead choosing to deflect them and silence their concerns. The anecdote aptly illustrates whose outrage counts and whose doesn’t, who gets to define the crises we face and who don’t. Sure, we can battle ideas, as long as we don’t stray from what a session is supposed to be about. Yes, there’s irony in Fox’s hypocrisy and in the conflicting Spiked narratives about freedom of speech and restoring adult or cultural authority. And there’s also irony in the idea that conservative voices & their cultural authority have been marginalized by young activists who want to decolonize the curriculum at Cambridge: the young activists do not have institutional power on their side, otherwise they would not have to work for changes. In the U.S. context, Tressie McMillan Cottom dispels the myth that universities are “as radical as the alt-right believes. They are, if anything, the finishing schools for conservative economics, social science and social policy. A handful of gender studies courses could not begin to check the power of an economics department or a business school at any university in the U.S.”
Hypocrisy and irony don’t stop the Spiked narrative from taking hold. Is the popularity of Spiked in education circles connected to the reassurances it appears to offer teachers who prefer to inhabit illusions of absolute control over the work of recognizing student agency? The answer to that question really can’t be separated from an imperative that faces all educators who take comfort in a colorblind mythology: learn to do better.
Notes:
Thank you to Diane Leedham for offering critical comments on a first draft. I’m happy to correct any factual errors in this piece.
In part, I’m writing for an audience outside of the UK who has never heard of Spiked before, or is just encountering them for the first time. If you want to learn more about racism in the UK, I highly recommend two books: Kalwant Bhopal, White Privilege ; and Reni Eddo-Lodge, Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People about Race. Eddo-Lodge has this to say:
“Colour-blindness is a childish, stunted analysis of racism. It starts and ends at ‘discriminating against a person because of the colour of their skin is bad’, without any accounting for the ways in which structural power manifests in these exchanges. With an analysis so immature, this definition of racism is often used to silence people of colour attempting to articulate the racism we face. When people of colour point this out, they’re accused of being racist against white people, and the accountability avoidance continues. Colour-blindness does not accept the legitimacy of structural racism or a history of white racial dominance.
Repeatedly telling ourselves – and worse still, telling our children – that we are all equal is a misdirected yet well-intentioned lie. We can just about recognise the overt racial segregation of old. But indulging in the myth that we are all equal denies the economic, political and social legacy of a British society that has historically been organised by race. The reality is that, in material terms, we are nowhere near equal. This state of play is violently unjust. It’s a social construct that was created to continue racial dominance and injustice. And the difference people of colour are vaguely aware of since birth is not benign. It is fraught with racism, racist stereotyping, and for women, racialised misogyny.”
The Runnymede Trust (2016) has an excellent paper on the shortcomings of the UK Government’s ‘colour-blind’ approach. In UK schools, Black Caribbean students are 3 times more likely to be excluded, while Gypsy/Roma and Irish Traveller students are six times more likely to be excluded. When people talk about the ways that the UK education system fails white ‘working class’ boys, it’s a good counterpoint to read David Gillborn’s Monsterisation of Race Equality, in which he also tackles Brendan O’Neill’s claim that activists who protest the killings of Black people by the police in the U.S suffer from a “powerful strain of racial superiority.”