The Dossier of White-Hot Hatred
Stare Into the Sewer — but only if you can bear it. But do so before it disappears.
This decision has not been easy: to publish a large selection of hate mail and threats that I have received in the wake of deliberate and wide misreporting of a tweet that I put out in the wake of the racist White Live Matter banner that was flown over Burnley Stadium a few weeks ago. A tweet challenging racism was consciously and viciously presented as itself racist. This is a familiar move, presenting anti-racism as the ‘real racism’ and the perpetrators of racism as the ‘real’ victims. Indeed, this twisted ideology is currently in power, both in Britain and in the United States, supported by openly racist tabloids and only marginally less open Twitterati.
If you are horrified by some of this content — viciously misogynist, deeply racist, some of it graphically violent — then know that they began to come in the wake of misleading tweets (including posting a hoax tweet attributed to me) by the likes of Sarah Vine, Daily Mail columnist and spouse of a cabinet minister, Allison Pearson (Telegraph columnist) and David Vance, right-wing ideologue at large. There were others but as I don’t have the screenshots, I will not name them. All familiar names on the British and American right.
Hurt and Misunderstood ‘Ordinary’ People?
Are those who objected to my three-sentence tweet (pointing out that whiteness should not be the basis for valuing lives) really advocating ‘All Lives Matter’? Are they misunderstood nice people who were simply hurt by what looked like ‘reverse racism’? I think these missives to me will settle that question once and for all. What they make very, very clear is an absolute conviction not only, as we suspected, that white lives matter most, but perhaps that only white lives matter. Read them for yourselves and judge. Some of this white supremacism comes in the form of frothing inarticulate screaming, others in more educated prose. The latter are more chilling. They are written by dentists, insurance agents, bankers and school board governors. People you and I know. Certainly a chunk of it comes from people— clearly men in many cases — who work in the technology industry.
It is a comforting thing to tell ourselves that these letters come from a ‘small minority’, a lunatic fringe who are louder and more motivated than decent ordinary citizens of British, European or American cities.
I am taking the risk and the painful task of publishing this because I want you to understand that this comforting myth is not true. These missives are coming from people you and I know, people we exchange good-mornings with, people we buy our fruit from in the market, people we speak to at call centres and people who you wave cheerily to across the fence, our neigbours. For the record, I do not hold the anonymous mailers to be any more disgraceful and racist than those who chose to launch the witch-hunt on their blue ticked Twitter accounts. The former are more cowardly, that’s all, though the latter are hardly brave, especially, I found out, when six magic letters are brought to their attention: L.A.W.Y.E.R.
It’s Not All White
Here’s another sobering truth. Not all of my bilious correspondents were ‘white’. Not a few frothing emails came from Indians, mainly Hindu chauvinists, who, true to form, not only denounced me for being critical of ‘whiteness’ as ideology but took the trouble to offer caste-based slurs, confirming what we always knew: that ‘Hindutva’ or Hindu supremacism is not only deeply allied to white supremacism but profoundly caste-ist in its manifestations. I had, of course, also tweeted that Brahmin supremacy must be abolished and this, unsurprisingly, ruffled not a few Indian feathers.
Some of the nastiest and most racist email appeared to come from Eastern Europe, specifically Poland. This will not surprise anyone who has followed the recent elections there. But I did pick up on an edge of anger from some of those missives which were different from the more standard British and American ones. It struck me as the anger of those who espouse white supremacy while knowing, at some level, that within whiteness itself there are gradations and that Western Europe sits ensconced at the top of that pyramid. That although there is a European Union in which Poland is a member, that Union is a far from equal one. The howling was, in part, a howling desire to belong to the top echelons. Personally, I found myself reflecting on how much those of us who opposed Brexit stood up for our Eastern European friends, co-workers, and neighbours in the face of the xenophobia they have faced in recent years — from the same quarters which were sending me racist emails. Such is the nature of irony, of course.
Good Ole-Fashioned Woman Hate
I had women correspondents. Several. They were perfectly capable of misogynist slurs, generally mild with asterisks. One, who fancied herself an author, used her own name and no slurs, but had the chutzpah, as a Brit living in the United States, to invite me to leave Britain.
We have to assume, however, that the colossal misogyny of many of the letters to, in fact, come from males. One graphic sexual humiliation fantasy was removed by Facebook before I had time to screenshot it. The misogyny, laced with occasional homophobia is not of a routine kind but extensive and enraged. We must pay attention to it for it walks in our midst. The ‘whore’ and bitch’ and the c-word are the routine version, and many missives are peppered with these. But you’ll also see something more graphic and developed, and it should worry anyone who thinks that we are anywhere near a post-patriarchal order in the West.
So here we are. Here is the link. I expect there to be various attempts to take it down and it will be taken down before long — white supremacists are nothing if not snowflakes who will complain to Google about my posting their own hate mail as they did to Twitter! — so if you want to read, do so in short order. But in the long term, we have no choice but to acknowledge that we are swimming in a sea of race hatred, religious bigotry, misogyny and more. Averting our gaze is not really an option.
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1EOhQ2-LLPeaTtqjrUWQjp7nlYB0LL95H?usp=sharing
CONTENT WARNING: Misogyny, Sexual Humiliation, Racism, Casteism, Anti-Black and Anti-Asian Slurs. PLEASE do not open it if you wish to be shielded from any or all of these.
Thanks: to all those who assisted with the emails, with downloading and filing, with putting this document together, especially SAM, MC, JP1 &JP2.