yeah, I don't love to argue stuff like this. in fact closely reading the tweets of a famous-by-association teenager to debate whether he is racist/islamophobic/anti-immigrant or not is the opposite of what I love to do. There's lots of places online where you can do that, lots of places that are just a google away that will lay out how exactly the kind of stuff Stan and others were spouting are racist, islamophobic, xenophobic, and contribute to making the lives of immigrants, Muslims, and racialized people that much worse.
I mean, there will always be people denying that racism and hate crimes are going on until there are men in hoods burning crosses, and even then, there will always be excuses made. and it's like, 4 for u coco chanel, you keep living your white-supremacist collaborating life, accidentally on purpose or not. maybe Searchlight* or the Southern Poverty Law Centre will come up with a better strategy to deal with it, because until then I'm not going to be arguing about racism willy-nilly on the internet with everyone who don't see anything wrong with the EDL or UKIP positions. (ETA: but all the more power to those are doing the hard work of entering into conversation to provide a counter narrative for the untold number of anonymous eyes reading along on their screens. I definitely don't want to disparage the efforts of people engaging in dialogue - I'm just no good at that kind of thing myself these days.)
I posted the screencaps because it was similar to the kind of stuff that was being said and written on fb, twitter, whatever, everywhere in the UK. God knows most of us don't need another demonstration of someone being awful and hateful cause that happens all the time. but it was still a punch to the gut for me, and judging by the reblogs, to many other 1D fans, that such a hateful position can be proclaimed so loudly and so easily, with so little push back - either from fandom, or from people directly in Stan's life. Contrast these tweets with what happened when Stan argued against the legalization of same sex marriage in England and Wales - Gemma gave him a stern talking to over twitter. I think there were people hoping that something similar would happen this time. I didn't really expect a repeat because from what I can tell, the general attitudes towards these two issues are trending in opposite directions: while it's increasingly unacceptable to be explicitly homophobic and to have that homophobia enshrined in law, it has become increasingly acceptable to be explicitly islamophobic and anti-immigrant and to have that enshrined in law. The deafening silence in reaction to Stan's more recent outburst speaks to the degree to which such views are being normalized in British public life as 'legitimate' political positions.
And for non-British 1D fans, it might be important to realize this, and to be able to make connections between what's going on in the UK with whatever local dynamics of racism/islamophobia/anti-immigrant sentiment they are more familiar with.
I don't really know what to do or where to go beyond that.
Anyway, to be clear, I'm not British, I don't live in England, and I'm not Muslim. I decided to write this up after reading on tumblr the following facebook status written by Ash Sarkar and reposted at Laurie Penny's blog:
I feel exhausted. I’ve been at work all day so the only interaction with the events of today has been through the news and social media. Like everyone else, I’m horrified at the murder that happened today. But I also feel tired, demoralised, and exhausted in advance at how often I’ll have to repeat that fact. I’ve seen people call for hanging, torture, extra-judicial killings, locking up/deporting all Muslims and attacks on mosques. These aren’t strangers on Twitter, but people I’ve grown up with: gone to school with, babysat for, and (in one case) kissed. I haven’t blocked any of you so there’s a human face attached to the group that you hate so much. You’re talking about people like me, my mother, my grandmother. I haven’t blocked any of you because I want you to know that I’m calling you out as fascists. I hate that I’ve seen friends change their FB names to sound more anglicised: I hate that so many POC I know are rushing to assert “Britishness” as their primary identity. I hate that I feel like I have to insist on the “due process” of law (which I think is fundamentally violent and unjust anyway) because people are calling for torture. I hate trying to pretend like torture and killing aren’t things that the police do everyday anyway. I hate that this is happening in the city where I was born, where I grew up, and that I love so much. I hate that this is occurring against a backdrop of the increasing militarisation of the urban space, the violence of dispossession and austerity. That this act of violence is seen as worse than the acts of violence that occur every day in areas left to rot, than the acts of violence committed by the British state. (x)
*should have googled. taking advice from Searchlight would be stupid. I just went to their webpage and someone thought an appropriate response in the aftermath of Woolwich would be to advocate for the two-state solution and condemn the left for being anti-israel. 0_0