The tyranny of racial groupthink
by Remi Adekoya, spiked:
One of the few things we all seem to agree on today is that we live in a polarised age. Polarisation cements groups while pressurising the individual. I was persuaded of this time and again while interviewing mixed-race Britons for my new book Biracial Britain, which explores a category of individuals obliged from birth to navigate various racial groups in their everyday lives. ‘The politics of today complicate the lives of mixed-race people. Some see this as a crunch moment where you have to declare which tribe you are loyal to’, Ralph, the 23-year-old son of a white English father and Nigerian mother, told me. ‘I’m against racism and the far right, but that doesn’t mean I’m for identity politics. They both share the same thought patterns, they both seek to essentialise human beings, to put us in racial boxes’, he added. Many other mixed-race Britons I spoke to voiced similar sentiments about the stifling atmosphere of our current race debate. One that submerges the individual in generalisations and elevates groupism.
‘White privilege’, ‘black oppression’ – these are the kinds of grand generalisations with which we are all familiar by now. They are the sweeping concepts we are encouraged to use to interpret our world – a world in which we don’t realistically live as individuals, but as ‘black people’, ‘white people’, ‘Asians’, ‘people of colour’ et al. The only ideas that are deemed to matter are the ‘structures’ and ‘systems’ that underpin the Big Picture, while everything else is deemed pretty much irrelevant detail. In the world of these grand theories and totalising narratives on race, the individual is relegated to the background.
The important question, of course, is why this has happened, especially given that the desire to be treated as individuals, not nameless members of this or that group, is a pretty universal one. I find it difficult to imagine there are people of any ethnic or racial background who do not want to be viewed primarily as individuals, including those most responsible for popularising the sweeping groupist language of our times. I find it hard to believe many would disagree with the words of Czesław Miłosz, the Polish Nobel-winning writer, who, in reference to the soul-numbing language of the communist ideologues who ran Cold War Eastern Europe, said: ‘The true enemy of man is generalisation.’ Nothing quite diminishes us more. So why then has language obscuring our individuality taken such a strong hold in what is supposed to be an age of empathy? After all, to empathise requires, by definition, seeing a human individual, not a group or statistic.
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