How the 2010s Hijacked Racial 'Woke Culture'

It feels like another world, now. At the start of the decade, for my sins, I had started to feel the tide of systemic racism turning. I’d like to believe I wasn’t alone. The London Olympics seemed to coat Britain in a rose-tinted gloss, a lacquer under which we all smiled and felt a sense of belonging while the country hosted other nation’s representatives. In the US, Barack Obama occupied the White House, leading some to confidently conclude the US had transformed into a "post-racial society". Soon, we’d begin a one-step-forwards, two-steps-back dance into whataboutery, distraction and the sort of gaslighting that forms the crux of a book like Nesrine Malik’s We Need New Stories (more on that soon).

The story of online race discourse this decade has been one of beating your head against a wall repeatedly, thinking you’re making progress, then realising that’s just the approaching slow warmth of losing consciousness. It has felt like walking through molasses. On the one hand, people who truly care about racial equality are told to “stop talking about race” or pulling the so-called “race card”. On the other, an increasingly stunted vocabulary on race and ethnicity has slid us closer to normalising anti-immigrant, Islamophobic, anti-black, antisemitic and other prejudiced views.

We’ve entered an age of falsehoods accepted as truth. Statistically, at least a quarter of the surveyed British public have consistently self-identified as racially prejudiced since the early 80s. If “not talking about race” is so effective at stamping it out, why hasn’t that worked yet? The difference in this decade was how these prejudiced ideas were expressed, churned up from what seemed like hidden corners for years. What will matter in the 2020s and beyond is how we tackle this blend of hatred, discomfort and fear.

Lady Warsi, a British capital-c Conservative, noted back in 2011 that Islamophobia had “passed the dinner table test”. By that she meant that you could now safely equate ISIS with an entire world religion, or imply the headscarf was a menace to society, without anyone tapping you on the shoulder and suggesting you might chill and re-consider the evidence. We’d been through ten, post-9/11 years of reacting to a fractured simulacrum of Islam. And around this time, author and Guardian columnist Gary Younge pointed out Europe’s shift back towards the political right, highlighting the impact that may have on Muslims.

“With extremist parties regularly getting more than 10 percent, and in some cases sitting in government, European fascism has returned as a mainstream ideology,” Younge wrote for The Nation, in 2010. “These movements start off on the fringes, but like arsenic in the water supply, their policies and rhetoric have a tendency to infect the broader discourse.” He also picked up on how Muslims reported feeling safer in the US than in European countries that had opposed the Iraq War, predicting “that paradox, too, is unfortunately set to unravel.” Sadly, he was right.

And that’s because we’ve been confronted with one public idea of what racism is, while its more insidious forms have multiplied under the cover of darkness. The more visible idea has sounded something like this: ‘straight white men are unfairly targeted for being who they are’; ‘wokeness is the new political correctness gone mad’; ‘you just can’t say anything now without some frazzled millennial jumping down your throat to correct you!!’ I mean… let’s take a step back. It’s easier to react defensively when confronted with the fact that whiteness is an identity, too. Robin DiAngelo labeled this often stroppy reaction as “white fragility”, a concept she expanded into a book published in January 2019. In her work as a diversity trainer, she’d observed “both knee-jerk defensiveness about any suggestion that being white had meaning and a refusal to acknowledge any advantage to being white”. That’s what you tend to see in the comments sections under articles or videos that are trying to unpack, and so untangle, ideas of more subtle, systemic racism.

As social media has amplified certain conversations, and given a voice to marginalised groups for the first time, some ethnic minorities have spoken up about non-physical discrimination. Some have questioned black deaths in police custody. Others have asked whether we might rethink implicitly celebrating Confederate generals or white supremacist imperialists via statues and monuments. More have asked why employment, mental health, maternal health and education outcomes have trended lower for the group into which they’ve been classified. The immediate response has been: sshh! Worse, these debates have been leveraged as proof that we’re all too woke, too sensitive to the little things, upholding the notion that the only “real” racism is someone spitting at you and calling you a slur.

Growing up as the second daughter of black South African parents who’d lived under apartheid, I’ve never struggled to understand that racism finds its real strength when it’s baked into institutions. That’s what activists refer to when they discuss “systemic racism”; when the justice system and access to housing, quality education, non-exploitative work and health services favour one racial group over all others. Physical or verbal violence is one part of that, sure, but we need to move beyond a one-dimensional understanding of racism as racial slurs, or brutal, unconscionable attacks perpetrated by ‘bad people’. That lets people who benefit from white supremacy off the hook – if they don’t consider themselves capable of hurling the n-word or p-word at a peer, they’re ‘good’.

Racism isn’t a moral issue – it’s a social one, and based on an invented social construct. But online, identity politics has become a sort of double-edged sword. You’re a tragically weak "snowflake" if you bring up how race and power are linked, an 18th-century remnant that Western Europe is yet to shake (read Angela Saini’s Superior, published earlier this year, for an in-depth look at that). But, at the same time, when newspapers or radio hosts conjure up images of the beleaguered white, working class voters, those white people’s identities are suddenly rendered both invisible and foundational. This is what Younge means by rhetoric seeping into life like arsenic in the water supply: this decade’s overarching mainstream ideas of race still ignored systemic problems, folding prejudice into everyday language until we couldn’t hear its violence anymore.

The fun side-effect of yelling at other people online is laziness. Between name-calling on one thread and policing language on another, few are willing to do the legwork needed to establish an accurate picture of race and the fight against racism. Luckily, anti-racists with growing platforms buck that trend. Take the Muslim Council of Britain’s Miqdaad Versi, who's tirelessly tracked Islamophobia in the British media for years, politely asking for corrections to inaccurate stories.

Historian and performer Akala has channeled the searing incision of his one-off TV appearances into insistent book Natives published in 2018. Nesrine Malik, who I mentioned at the start, spends her book pulling back from our eyes the wool placed there by distracting myths. Reni Eddo-Lodge wrote Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race to spare herself the chore of explaining why racial prejudice has linked arms with British history for centuries. Poor thing – she’s probably never had to explain herself as much since, while promoting the hugely successful book. Nikesh Shukla, Mariam Khan, Yomi Adegoke and Elizabeth Uviebinené, David Olusoga, Emma Dabiri, Chelsea Kwayke and Ọrẹ Ogunbiyi; all are adding to a growing non-fiction canon.

To really combat racism, we have to put in the work, log off and – at the risk of sounding like your stressful geography teacher – do the reading. Looking at a meme doesn't count. Reading a detailed thread doesn't count, unless you've checked out its references. Otherwise, we risk sliding back into old habits of the past. If you simply can't bear the idea of 'staying woke', stay vigilant and open-minded instead.

@tnm___