White Noise

I have stopped sharing certain kinds of visual images on Facebook. Not because Facebook have sent me any message that anything I have posted ‘has breached their community standards guidelines’. But because the kinds of pictures that are being shared at this point in time are often so ugly, so revealing and so disheartening.

It’s an incredibly significant turning point for the human race. Glossy surfaces and whited sepulchers are being broken up and excavated, statues that have stood for certain symbols and beliefs are being  dismounted from their pedestals, and public figures who seemed culturally ensconced, embalmed in their own success, fame and iconic status are being investigated, through archival material.

Videos taken on smart phones and posted online without context are being circulated: African American men being accosted by police, tasered in the parking lots of fast food restaurants, set upon by attack dogs. Statues are defaced, covered with graffiti and splashed with red paint to represent the bloodshed and human suffering which resulted from the policies of the men whose image they embody. 

A picture of two little white girls in the Belgian Congo in 1955 show them playing with a tiny African child in a cage, as if the child was a pet animal. Human zoos existed until relatively recently in the world, thinly disguised as anthropological exhibits. Saartje Baartman, a South African woman, called the ‘Hottentot Venus’ was exhibited in Paris. 

Fact checking reveals that most of the icons that have been set in stone over the past 250 years have at best a chequered history, and that most of the stately homes of England, America and Europe have been built on profits from the unpaid labour of slaves, or poorly paid indentured laborers. 

Gradually, the public, most of us non-specialist historians, are realising that we have learned a very selective history, and believed a dominant narrative, and that, not very far under what we prefer to believe, there are further facts which are harder to reconcile with our preferred myths of how the human race has progressed. 

The Black Lives Matter movement has sparked a process of cultural reckoning and exploration of colonisation and its ongoing impacts in many countries. Euphemisms like ‘settlement’ cover the indecent rapaciousness and cruelty of what other historians’ term ‘invasion’ and ‘genocide’. A sort of diffused white noise, a fabricated, self-justifying vista of peace and serenity, seems to have absorbed all radical dissent until now. 

Sir Winston Churchill, for example, one of Britain’s ‘most loved’ politicians and statesmen of yesteryear, is known widely for his rallying speeches during WW2, particularly the ‘we shall fight on the beaches... we shall never surrender’ speech in The Battle of Britain. 

But he also said some other equally defiant words, in relation to colonial invasion of the territories of North American and Australian indigenous people, which have an ugly ring to them in our contemporary era: 

‘I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place’. 

When we turn off the computer or TV from which we get our news, and put down the newspapers, and look at the cities in which we live, we see the values of our society emblazoned on billboards, and indicated in the public honors we confer on our citizens. 

There’s a petition to change the Order of St. Michael and St. George in Britain, which contains an insignia showing a white-clad saint trampling a dark-winged devil, underfoot, literally with his foot on its neck and a chain leading from his hand to the neck of the black figure. The image of George Floyd is recalled by this posture, but so is the image of big game hunters, those grinning parasites and propagators of Empire, posing with their kills, in their solar topees. 

Racism operates by creating and imposing hierarchies of value, and assigning human beings into categories based on skin colour, and ethnicity, especially visible physical features. Beliefs about character and personality are imposed via stereotype onto these physical attributes. And these beliefs are reinforced and spread through propaganda, heavily infused with symbolism. 

Professor Priyamvada Gopal, an Academic in the University of Cambridge, author of the post-colonial critique ‘Insurgent Empire’ is currently under online siege by brazen and overt white supremacists who feel disrespected by her statements that Britain should re-evaluate its own history. I have heard Professor Gopal being interviewed on the BBC, in a conversation in which it was patronisingly suggested by an Anglo-Saxon English academic that she should ‘use the resources of Cambridge University which are fortunately available to her, to research the colonisation processes of other countries, not just Britain’. ‘Whataboutism’ and deflection on a truly epic scale. Also, condescension and mansplaining. 

The beliefs underlying colonialism were blatantly racist, white supremacist and overtly capitalist. And these beliefs are stated on record, where we can read them today. White people owned resources. Non-white people were owned, their cultures dismantled and their resources appropriated. Voices in favour of these ideas were so loud and numerous they drowned out all opposition. To suggest that these racist beliefs be re-evaluated now is only radical or threatening to those who benefit from their affirmation and continuation. 

The insults sent to Professor Gopal via Twitter must be seen to be believed. They are a perfect illustration of the state of cultural illiteracy and regress of Britain today. Anger, misogyny, outrage, xenophobia, hypocrisy, vileness, racial vilification – all vie for prominence in the comments threads. 

No amount of shooting the messenger is going to suppress the need for cultural evolution. The ideas of comparative racial supremacy and inferiority served the agendas of the nationalistic and competitive building of Empire for the past few hundred years. A global world which requires real co-operation and respect between peoples can only rise in the public space created by the dismantling of those ideas. 

It’s a big and colourful transformation. It’s something to make a noise about.