#race traitor

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New Andy Hurley 07.09.26

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Alhamdulilah for Muslim Men

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Pete Wentz performing in a hardcore show

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This Egyptian Man is ordering you to do what you were made for. Alhamdulilah for Muslim Men.

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Pete Wentz

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Can’t fuck with little Asian boys. Their little dicks can’t open up me up like I need. I need a man to help me stretch my body open.

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A person’s colour is no clue to their opinions

We should never assume that someone is, or ought to be, progressive by virtue of their race

By: Tomiwa Owolade

Published: May 13, 2024

Zadie Smith seems like the poster girl for progressive ideology. She is mixed-race. She was born and raised in London. The characters in her fiction are ethnically and religiously diverse. She hates Brexit. She is deeply worried about climate change. She thinks a ceasefire in Gaza is necessary and has condemned Binyamin Netanyahu’s Israeli government. Tick, tick, tick.

Smith published an essay in The New Yorker last week in which she praised the “brave students” in Columbia University and elsewhere who demand that Israel should end its military attacks on Gaza. She argued that to “send the police in to arrest young people peacefully insisting upon a ceasefire represents a moral injury to us all. To do it with violence is a scandal. How could they do less than protest, in this moment?”

She argues that just as “there was no way to ‘win’ in Vietnam” in the 1960s, Hamas will not be “eliminated” today. That a ceasefire is not just politically wise, it is also an “ethical necessity”.

This did nothing to stop many people on Twitter/X from denouncing Smith as an apologist for Israel. This is because she also argued in her essay that words like “Zionist” should not be treated as a “monolith”. That Jewish students should not be made to feel unsafe on university campuses. And that the conflict can’t be reduced to rhetoric and buzzwords: it is too grave and complex for that.

Smith was castigated for ignorant fence-sitting, for undermining the cause of justice, for being a stooge of the establishment. We have lost Zadie, some of them moaned, as though she belonged to their tribe and has now run away. Others proclaimed that she has always been a liberal, not a progressive, as if this constitutes a definitive mark against her. But the most striking responses were from those who argued that Smith had betrayed her racial identity.

“I am not quite sure why people are shocked,” one account said about Smith’s article. “This is the price of admission into elite white literary and institutional circles.” (The person who posted this, Priyamvada Gopal, is a professor of postcolonial studies at that famously marginalised institution the University of Cambridge.)

Another individual, mentioning Smith along with the head teacher Katharine Birbalsingh and the novelist Bernardine Evaristo, affirmed “there is a very specific reason why the British establishment selects these women”. The “establishment will never select anyone who will quake the foundation”.

Smith’s liberal politics — with her novelistic taste for nuance — thus renders her unfit to be at the vanguard of progressive politics. Someone of her race, it is implied, should know better.

But no one should be a poster girl or boy for left-wing ideology, or any other kind of politics, simply on the basis of their racial identity. The prime minister is an Asian man and leader of the Conservative Party. The mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, is an Asian man who represents the Labour Party. Until very recently, the first minister of Scotland was an Asian man who led the Scottish National Party. None of these men are any more or any less Asian than the other.

The majority of ethnic minority people in Britain support the Labour Party but before Jeremy Hunt the last four chancellors of the exchequer were called Kwasi, Nadhim, Rishi and Sajid. The favourite to be the next leader of the Tory party was born Kemi Adegoke and spent most of her childhood in Nigeria.

Diversity and progressivism are not the same thing. London is one of the most diverse cities in the UK but it is also one of the most socially conservative: polling for the Christian think tank Theos found that 29 per cent of Londoners, for instance, believe that same-sex relationships are wrong in some cases; only 23 per cent in the rest of the country think the same. London is conservative because of its diversity, not in spite of it.

Rather than being progressive and secular, many ethnic minority people in the UK are more socially conservative and religious than the rest of the population. This is true elsewhere: 92 per cent of black Americans who voted in the 2020 presidential election supported Joe Biden. But this does not mean that black Democrats constitute the most left-wing base within the party. They are on the right of the Democratic Party, not the left.

The overwhelming majority of black Americans support the Democrats but Donald Trump increased his vote share among black Americans between 2016 and 2020, particularly among younger and male black voters. These trends are holding up for the election this year.

Inferring political opinions exclusively from someone’s background is an abdication of curiosity. Anyone who cares about diversity ought also to care about pluralism: the principle that people who share a cultural background can nevertheless differ in their beliefs.

We should never assume that someone is, or ought to be, progressive by virtue of their race. Some black and brown people are progressive. Others are liberal or conservative. Some are ideologically indifferent. Others shift from one position to another. But this is not because of their race. It is because of their personality, their upbringing, their interests: that irreducible quality inherent in all of us that should never be forsaken for a narrow fixation on group identity.

Eldridge Cleaver was a spokesman for the Black Panthers in the 1960s. He called for a militant revolution and described Ronald Reagan (at that time the governor of California) as a pig. By the 1980s Cleaver was a Mormon and endorsed Reagan to be president of the United States — a fascinating narrative arc worthy of exploration by a novelist as finely attuned to the ironies and complexities of life as Zadie Smith.