“We don’t do politics here.”
“Personally, I don’t support any particular ideology.”
These are two phrases I’ve frequently heard when issues connected to discrimination have come up. Most recently, the first was shouted at me by a very irate building manager who affected not to understand why her migrant-background neighbours might feel upset by the Prime Minister’s racist, xenophobic speech from May. The second was uttered by a volunteer guide at an art gallery, as he introduced the idea that “some might find the practice of commissioning more art from women and minorities controversial.”
It has struck me that people are using the labels “politics” and “ideology” more and more to dismiss any experiences that make them uncomfortable – experiences of discrimination, of exposure to a hostile environment. These labels have become a blunt weapon in the hands of bigots and the disaffected, wielded against individuals belonging to groups that many find more convenient to continue to relegate to the margins: most recently trans+ folks and migrants, or people perceived as such due to the strong legacy of racism.
It’s very convenient to pretend that people who bring up discrimination are committing some kind of social faux pas, upsetting the social order by just opening our mouths to speak.
This practice, this pretense must stop. Labelling people’s experiences of pain, suffering, and rejection as “politics” and “ideology” is a thinly veiled tactic of aggression. It’s saying “your voicing your struggle and asking for acknowledgement and support is making us uncomfortable, and our comfort is more important than yours.”
Back in May, the PM’s inflammatory speech, which announced his Government’s deeply exclusionary Immigration White Paper, gave me a sense of suffocation. All of the xenophobic violence I had experienced came rushing back to me:
- being told, by a taxi driver in Coventry, “you’ve all moved over here now”, after he’d asked me where my accent was from
- coming out of the local supermarket the day after I’d moved to Brighton to find a note left on my windshield calling me a racist slur and telling me to go back where I’d come from (the car I was driving at the time had Romanian plate numbers)
- the charity shop cashier who asked me where my accent was from and then proceeded to comment on how poor folks from Romania were, and how people in Britain really don’t know how good they have it
- a man shouting at me and my parents on a busy Brighton road because he’d overheard us speaking a different language – “This is England, speak English!”
- the work manager who made a casual joke about picturing me and another Eastern European colleague as “overworked donkeys.”
These are all ghosts that haunt me still, and the list goes on. And I thought of all the people I know, and all those I don’t who have experienced far worse, all because we live in a society rife with racist and anti-immigrant discourses, where it’s become normal to refer to migrants as “an invasion”.
I felt small and powerless. I thought of some of my own neighbours and wondered if they felt the same. On a momentary impulse I left a note of appreciation for migrants on the building noticeboard. Within two hours, it was gone. I left another one, this time asking people to not be racist/xenophobic and leave my note in place. This message got a reply-note from another neighbour, horrified by the implication.
It all eneded as I expected it would: with the building manager taking down my message of support and solidarity. As luck would have it though, I walked in on her removing it and asked her why, which culminated in getting shouted at, threatened with a call to the police, and told that “we don’t do politics here”.
Had she not walked away, rolling her eyes in derision, I would have told her that the “politics” is people’s lives, our jobs, our well-being.
I couldn’t, so I wrote her and everyone else like her a poem instead. I left copies of it at seven different arts and culture hubs in Brighton, Chichester, London, and Manchester.
May they raise eyebrows, warm hearts, and stir recognition.
Encyclopaedia Vanitatum 