UK racist riots: why they happened and what they are not
Gammon Krystallnacht is not that complicated.
Here’s a popular lie for you: Riots, looting and destruction of property are never acceptable.
Riots, according to MLK (sainted by centrists who never read him), are the language of the unheard. Sometimes.
Property, particularly in societies where most people have little of their own, is mostly thought of as sacred by those who have a lot of it. its loss is the only way to get the attention of a world that only values the welfare of owners. Sometimes.
Looting is selfish and opportunistic, an admission that crass avarice motivates us more than any lofty ideals. But only sometimes. After Katrina, ‘looter’ was a label nailed to every desperate person trying to survive when their government left them to die. The looting of a dictator’s palace is reparations. The wealth of an oppressor liberated by a revolutionary crowd is called ‘loot’ by those who supported him, and redistribution by the people.
Riots are complicated. They can be a force for good. Sometimes. Just ask a South African liberated from Apartheid by mass actions, Molotov cocktails and barricades of burning tyres (as well as boycotts, divestment and sanctions).
What is not complicated, what is not nuanced or in need of balanced narratives is the fact that the UK riots of the last week were and are repugnant. As are the people who support them in any way.
That doesn’t sound very Christian, I hear the contrarians and worshippers of Moderate Jesus (democratic and docile, white and wealthy) say, honestly crying out for some John 2:15 biblical rebuke.
Opposing and denouncing evil has a bad rap these days because it has been so consistently misapplied by apocalyptic delusionals and the purity police. But calling racism loathsome is nothing but reasonable. Calling those who lend legitimacy to xenophobic violence repugnant is only problematic if you don’t think racism, xenophobia and the violence they always beget are that big a deal.
Because, contrary to what media and senior politicians said (or didn’t say) as the thugs rampaged in multiple cities, there are not two sides or legitimate concerns at play here, any more than there are ‘two tiers’ to the policing of political protest* or legitimate types of bigotry.
These were not anti-immigration protests (or, as some media described them ‘rival protests’ with ‘pockets’ of disorder’).
These were lynch mobs, seeking out some of the most vulnerable in society (‘the least of these’ as the actual Jesus might have called people so regularly vilified), to bully, beat and burn them to death. They set fire to buildings they believed asylum seekers were in. They set up road-blocks and checked cars for anyone not white enough for them. They attacked people they thought of as ‘not being British’ and those people were pretty much always black or brown.
And as Christians in varying positions of privilege, we can tsk and tut and say isn’t all violence awful, but that is not enough. Because the lynch mobs also attacked mosques. They did so because, in some sense, the mobs identify as Christian. They invoke Crusader imagery in their terrible tattoos and their inarticulate online rants. They see any religion but Christianity as an invasion (and hate, particularly, religions that originated in the same region Jesus lived — they are not rocket surgeons, obviously). They presume to speak in our name and our silence, equivocation and lukewarm rebukes have only emboldened their evil.
The very least we can do is name the sin at the heart of these so-called protests. It is racism. It is Islamophobia. It is xenophobia. It is not 'a legitimate concern over immigration’. And to give that narrative support is to provide intellectual cover for the bands of aspiring Sturmabteilung thugs who attempted their Gammon Kristallnacht this week, and who plan to continue.
But, okay.
There are, I guess, concerns over immigration that are legitimate. Most of them involve a commitment to the status quo in terms of government spending, taxation and wealth inequality, so that ‘more people = less for everyone’. Most also lack broader perspectives, empathy that might extend beyond imaginary lines on a map, and any imagination around problem-solving. They also seem to wilfully ignore the last few decades of tightening restrictions on immigration (and the removal of any legal pathway to seek asylum). So they’re concerns that are hard to respect. But let’s assume there are, potentially, concerns about immigration that aren’t rooted in prejudice, selfishness and privilege.
Fine.
But those concerns, sure as Nigel F*rrage is a posh knob with a terrifying smile, had nothing to do with these riots.
The clue is in the fact that the incident that was used as an excuse for the first round of violence in Southport focused on a man who was born in Cardiff. Not an immigrant. Another clue is that the mobs were targeting ethnic minorities, regardless of their nationality.
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To be clear: to believe that British people cannot be black or brown is racist. To blame an ethnic group for the actions of one person is racist. To attack mosques because you think a Muslim did something bad is Islamophobic (and probably racist). To oppose immigration because some immigrants commit crimes is xenophobic, racist and Tommy-Robinson-level stupid.
So what was the cause of these riots, then, smartarse? Did the devil make them do it?
Myself, I think blame three things:
Media and political rhetoric for decades demonising Muslims, brown people, immigrants and ethnic minorities.
A toxic masculinity that not only encourages violence and domination, but is also easy prey for conspiracy-theory pipelines to the fascist Alt Right.
Legitimate resentment at a lack of opportunity and hope in a profoundly unjust and unequal system, hijacked by cynical and hateful grifters.
The rhetoric
The media aspect has been well documented. Right-wing rags using Rwanda genocide style language describing ‘migrants’ and manufacturing outrage and fear based on race and nationality is a known (if often euphemised) fact. And it is not limited to tabloids.
I listened in flabbergasted complete-lack-of-surprise yesterday, as some Radio 4 worthy asked question after question along the lines of: ‘Imagine someone’s nan lives on a street where a lot of people of different races now live, and she feels scared to go out and also sad her area has changed. What would you say to them?’
The racism inherent in a question that fails to see the racism being described is bad enough. The context of a week when black and brown people, immigrants and Muslims have concrete reason to fear for their lives, makes the alleged journalist asking them to sympathise with racist paranoia and hypothetical danger impressively insensitive. But it’s part of a larger pattern of lazy sin.
Politicians, including beloved haircut and shirt Keir Starmer, have been in a race to the bottom around immigration, asylum and global causes often championed by Muslims over the last few years, each trying to outdo the other on how tough they can be on border control and pro-Palestine activism. While their rhetoric has been sophisticated and careful to avoid slurs, the common factor is an identification of ‘foreigners’ and ‘outsiders’ (including British born people who vaguely ‘don’t hold British values’ whatever they may be) as ‘the problem’.
Terrorists. Invaders. The bad guys. The existential threat.
The combined effect is a majority population primed to hate and scapegoat. And as soon as that hate explodes into violence, those politicians, editors and pundits wring their hands and talk about how terrible it all is. Their sad faces and denunciations as powerful and meaningful as contrite German tears in 1946.
Christians need to stop being silent consumers and accepters of xenophobic (and particularly Islamophobic) scapegoating. We need to reject, repudiate and critique.
The pipeline
Toxic masculinity isolates men. It’s one of the crimes patriarchy commits against the male side of humanity. Vulnerability, empathy and any emotion but anger are rejected along with anything else perceived as ‘feminine’, leaving young men who are hungry for connection to seek it in the comforting certainties peddled by jags like Andrew Tate, Jordan Peterson and their slippery ilk.
That ecosystem then takes men into the orbit of more overtly political right-wingers, and surprisingly quickly, the alt-right pipeline delivers them to a place where far-right assumptions become their entire ideological world.
These people are easily influenced and primed to be angry and ‘fight back’ against perceived and imagined threats to ‘their culture’ and ‘their people’.
What makes it easier is that many of them have some legitimate right to anger.
We could all help by keeping an eye on the young men in our lives and offering them alternatives as they seek meaning and narrative. Zizek, Chomsky, Che Guevara, and leftist meme pages exist. Let’s use them.
The legitimate complaints
The narrative occasionally used to excuse these riots (and working-class right-wing populism generally) is that the white working poor have been left behind by society. Setting aside the obvious privilege of white heterosexual maleness (because you can still have a shit time and be oppressed while being all of these things), this is a narrative with some merit, but it does not excuse racism.
An argument can, however, be made that those of us on the Left (or just decent people who recognise the world is not as it should be) have failed the people who make up the working and non-working Right, because we have not offered them a convincing, inspiring alternative to fascism, racism and xenophobia.
Capitalism exploits the poor, regardless of their skin colour. The plastic carrot of social mobility offered by the Pull Yourself Up By Your Bootstraps Brigade leaves people angry when they recognise it for what it is. And then they look for someone to blame.
The Pentecostal in me suspects that evil ideologies will always enjoy an advantage over righteous ones that seek equality and mutual care. It takes effort (and Spirit) to turn the other cheek, to forgive and include. Grace might be as unnatural as it is costly. So, like advertising appealing to pride and envy with great success, so fascism can appeal to those same vices, as well as fear and the anger so abundant among the exploited and forgotten.
But that’s no excuse for the failure of the Left (or even centre political parties like Labour) to offer an alternative analysis that is generous, internationalist and redistributive. Hopelessness and grievance are the soil in which fascism grows, but they are also where most positive revolutions germinated.
And none of this is an excuse for racism, xenophobia and targeting people because of their religion.
We need to reject the cowardly idea that Christians should not be political. We need also to reject the more insidious and damaging idea that ‘Christians should be involved in all kinds of politics’ as if all politics are equal. Christian nazis are not a win, lads.
Anyway.
It’s all been so depressing. From the videos of seemingly ordinary people in the street encouraged or affirmed by the mobs, shouting racist abuse at people (from Belfast to Bolton) to liberals praising more draconian powers for police and politicians acting as if ‘extremism’ was the problem (as if intensity rather than the nature of the motivations were the problem).
And I speak as someone safe (currently) from the mob. I can’t imagine how scary this must be for those who have been scapegoated for years and now face greater threats.
If you’re a praying person, pray for safety. Pray for opening of eyes to the deceit of hate. For truth to triumph over euphemism and spin. And for all of us to do better.
* Peaceful environmental protestors (who never set out to harm a single human being and are actually trying to save us all from catastrophe) are currently receiving draconian sentences on a similar scale to what the literal lynch mobs are being promised and the nauseating F*rrage and those who enable him are talking about ‘two tier policing’ that is somehow harder on conservatives or white people or whatever little in-group these grifters are trying to manipulate this week. It makes me want to vomit.
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Hey! So I was gonna draw parallels between the ‘nobody is white or British enough for us’ lunacy of racists and the ridiculousness of transphobic misogyny around women’s boxing in the last few days but it just didn’t work out that way. I may write something else about it later this week. As them angels say: BE NOT AFEARED if you see it. It’s not spam. Probably.
Also, I’ve been thinking about the need for a Christian magazine that isn’t con-evo dominated. What would you call that mag? anyway thanks for reading, you’re a babe. xxx