If you live in Britain and unless you are Sikh or Muslim, you are a Tory. I've not excluded black people and Jews from this sweeping generalisation as it's a bit more complicated for us. White supremacy made it more complicated.
My friend Nate, who I occasionally do podcasts with was over at my place yesterday.
He's American Jewish and was going to a Seder (a ritual meal where the story of the liberation of the Hebrew slaves from bondage in Egypt is retold), that night, so we were chatting about British Jews and what a small community it is, at least in the media. I had also just commissioned an old acquaintance to write a manifesto for the 'left’ to be actively not anti-Semitic.
I said that black people and Jews had always had a natural affinity and solidarity. It was a Jewish man who wrote Strange Fruit after all.
I asked what happened? He told me at least for American Jews when the Black Panthers supported the The Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) and the PLO/ Black Panther conferences held in Algiers in the 60s/70s, a split occurred and the wounds haven't been healed since, sadly.
Anyway if you read to the end of the post you will understand why I exempted British Muslims and Sikhs (in the main) from being Tories, so stick with me. This is all fresh. As usual.
Recently (and not entirely unusually) we gotta into a bit of bother on twitter over @WritersofColour. The cookbook writer and crusader for eating cheaply, Jack Monroe wrote an article. She tweeted excerpts.
I took umbrage at one particular tweet and followed up by asking the following question
Who exactly is her audience with these tweets and what is her overall rationale? That poor people eat within their budget? Sure. That's practical but shouldn’t the overall goal be that everyone is lifted OUT of poverty? I’m sure she’s not against that, but the rhetoric obscures it.
Charity is no solution. And liberalism certainly isn’t. As Assata said:
“I have never really understood exactly what a ‘liberal’ is, since I have heard ‘liberals’ express every conceivable opinion on every conceivable subject. As far as I can tell, you have the extreme right, who are fascist racist capitalist dogs like Ronald Reagan, who come right out and let you know where they’re coming from. And on the opposite end, you have the left, who are supposed to be committed to justice, equality, and human rights. And somewhere between those two points is the liberal.
As far as I’m concerned, ‘liberal’ is the most meaningless word in the dictionary. History has shown me that as long as some white middle-class people can live high on the hog, take vacations to Europe, send their children to private schools, and reap the benefits of their white skin privilege, then they are ‘liberal’. But when times get hard and money gets tight, they pull off that liberal mask and you think you’re talking to Adolf Hitler. They feel sorry for the so-called underprivileged just as long as they can maintain their own privileges.
Assata Shakur
In fact in it’s overall essence, Charity is an insult. We won't get out of this mess by accepting the condition we find ourselves in. Few paid attention to the last line of my tweet saying ‘hit the streets’ instead we just had white saviour after white saviour protesting us maligning the dignity of Jack.
I was inspired by an event I went to in Glasgow, text below:
In the mid-nineteenth century, churches, charities, and well-meaning philanthropists did what they could to aid the plight of the poorest in the city of Glasgow, but industrialisation was bringing thousands more to the city every year, all of whom needed to be fed, however unscrupulous wholesalers made that task very difficult, and many suffered.
The Co-operative movement was still in its infancy and had yet to achieve a wide-spread impact, so there was still room for innovative approaches. In 1860, an establishment opened on the Broomielaw called The Cooking Depot. This was essentially a people’s restaurant, the first of its kind, providing nourishing food at an affordable price for hundreds of workers and their families, and not only that, it also provided a sense of dignity, enabling people to face the day with a full belly.
So successful was the Cooking Depot, that within a few, short years dozens of branches had opened around the city and even beyond the boundaries, including one in Govanhill. At its peak, The Cooking Depot was serving over 20,000 people every day
The Depot had many admirers, including Prime Minister William Gladstone, and even spawned several imitators around the country, but none quite matched its success. There was even a music hall song celebrating the Depot, and a parody in Punch magazine.
The historian said that charity had felt like an insult and that this gave dignity to impoverished people.
So I posted a follow up tweet:
Whilst twitter ignored my urge to hit the streets in response to calls for charity, I was thankful that many did come out to the protest outside the Home Office against offshoring and the deportations that seem imminent. As @CensoredHead said on twitter “I don't know how many times this needs saying, but people do not still understand it.
The Rwanda proposal is not for processing. It is a permanent transfer. They are not be being processed to see if they can live here. They are being moved to another country against their will.”
I've written before about the shock doctrine. We are its living and currently breathing victims. Whether it’s fuel or food. A society should be judged on how its most vulnerable are treated. Thatcher, of course famously disagreed:
"They are casting their problems at society. And, you know, there's no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look after themselves first. It is our duty to look after ourselves and then, also, to look after our neighbours." – in an interview in Women's Own in 1987
If we take it literally and to make my point I will, trickle down economics has worked. I.e the rich are just fine and the trickle is just about sustaining the rest, if you don't look at how many people have been literally pushed into poverty whilst the Tories have been in power and how many people have been made homeless.
Of course the Tories tried to hide these horrors by changing the level at which one is deemed to be in poverty. Bait and switch, shock and awe
I wrote about the shock doctrine in my blog post 'Criminals’:
The energy crisis, all the crises that the Tories have engineered in their continued war on the working class CANNOT be solved by charity.
’What we have been living for three decades is frontier capitalism, with the frontier constantly shifting location from crisis to crisis, moving on as soon as the law catches up.’ ~ Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism
This is disaster capitalism. This is the shock doctrine.
I said that charity won't save us, I believe the Trussel Trust and those like them are a pernicious cancer in our society, suggesting our condition is both immutable and inevitable. It is not.
Recentli I told my energy company to not individualise their price increases, stop tweeting me and go lobby the government if they are so ethical.
Charity and this supposed ‘taking one for the team’, is inextricable from conservatism. Because it individualises the problem and the supposed solution.
When I lived in Uganda the only NGO I had time for was staffed at ground level by one man driving thousands of miles to give isolated villages and their residents chalk boards, chalk and seeds.
He gave us a lift once from Karamoja back to Kampala. Otherwise all I saw amongst NGOs and charities was graft and excess. And complacency. And little actual interaction with the people in need unless they wanted to make another fundraising video. Then they would go and 'mingle’.
I give homeless people money even if i won't have anything left because that is social relation. It is not charity, in my opinion. The only charity I have ever considered giving to is MSF Sea as they do life saving work against all odds.
But I see The Trussell Trust and how they operate on a sliding scale of what Bootstrap Cook does and what Zoe Gardner did here:
Forgetting or ignoring that there are volunteer collectives doing the work who would appreciate your support or pushing yourself forward as an authority when the work is already being done by those with less profile but more sensitivity to people in need is lone wolf culture. It is Conservative. And they have Conservative thinking.
It's why I took umbrage with George Monbiot and have done many times before.
Lone wolf thinking: Proclaiming this and that, but working with no one.
As an exercise I recommend everyone watch Barbarians on Netflix. I'm told by my best mate who is a teaching assistant but really is a historian that much of it is true.
I came back online as you know in December because of an article I read in the new Statesman about the Nationality and Borders Bill.
I felt I had a duty and it would have been an abdication of it if I didn't, first spread the word and then fight against it with all the power I had at my fingertips. We closed in 2019. Our twitter and Instagram bios suspended in time our as was my email sign off; a quote from Toni Morrison, which we have used since 2015
“We don't need any more writers as solitary heroes. We need a heroic writer's movement: assertive, militant, pugnacious.”
I made a conscious effort over years to build a collective, not of individuals but of a society that lifted and raised each other up. It's always macro to me.
In the first years we asked all writers to read our charter and to support each other by tweeting each others work out. After all who is the mainstream when we all support each other? Who is the minority? There are no borders on the Internet. But one can weald influence when you have numbers.
This was part of the text which we called a charter :
Thanks for your interest in becoming a featured writer on Media Diversified.
The campaign aims to reinvigorate British media by promoting the many excellent writers of colour working in the UK.
Media Diversified officially launched in November 2013 but has already had 340,000 views to its articles and pages and has helped writers publish work in The Telegraph, The Guardian, the New Statesman, and The Independent.
As a writer featured on the media diversified website you will gain:
Engagement
You will get to discuss your articles via our twitter account, which currently has over 7,000 followers (it's now over 605k so this was very early days), who are active and keen readers and supporters of our work. Followers include editors and deputy editors of most of the UK newspapers. Our existing writers will also promote your work through their networks and your articles will be promoted from our facebook account.
Community
There will be networking opportunities with other writers and editors, via our meetings, events and workshops. You will also be part of a large and influential community of writers that provides a supportive space where issues can be discussed out of the public glare
Opportunities
You will have access to multiple requests from publishers and commissioning editors asking for writers to submit various book reviews and articles.
Support
You will get access to any necessary advice and support for your articles from our team of expert editors.
What we require from our writers:
Promotion
Media Diversified is a community and all accepted writers must commit to reading and promoting the work of their fellow writers. Where possible, writers are expected to read at least two articles by other writers and share this with their own networks.
Writers should also be proactive in promoting their own articles via their own social media accounts as well as sharing tweets from Media Diversified's account.
We understand the difficulties with asking for a full time commitment to promoting articles but ask that writers remain aware of their promoting contribution to MD and their fellow writers.
As our numbers increase our presence and influence will continue to grow, it’s important that we support each other now.
If your work is published or republished after appearing on our site, or following a contact provided by us, writers should make sure Media Diversified is mentioned either along with the piece or in the writer's profile.
At Media Diversified we realise that writers come from a variety of backgrounds and have different commitments and so we are flexible when it comes to the above responsibilities. However, the community will only thrive if all writers are committed to supporting and promoting each other.
And that’s it. Society. Solidarity. I may bring back the charter. They are my values. And the values of community. We are on the shoulders of the giants who came before us.
Let's stop this lone wolf culture. Sikhs and Muslims have been tireless in fighting against the Nationality and Borders Bill as a group. They campaign collectively and raise funds collectively and distribute it directly. If you are not Muslim or Sikh and are reading this, let's all learn from their actions!
Since publication, I got some great feedback that will help develop my thinking on all of the above.
A selection:
Planning to expand on this post and tease out my theories some more for a chapter in either of my books, Radical Empathy: Class, Egos, columnists and accountability or The Wannabe, (the name has now changed to Between a Rock a Hard Place and a Dystopia) Chapter is likely to be called Lone Wolves.
Here’s some collective action for ya. Enjoy!
Have a good day.
Sam
P.S I know there is going to be some non-black women and /or middle class women who try to take my experiences and use them as their own. Trust me, I will hunt you down if you do and you will catch these hands.