Look then at what is happening now. Only the intelligent creatures have forgotten the urge to be unified with each other: only here will you have no confluence
BOOK 9 - 9.3
Based on what I witnessed and experienced, growing up around Horley and Crawley, there was a lot of low-level isms - racism, sexism, classism, homophobia - ism and probably more isms - maybe even Marxism, but I didn’t know what that was until after I’d left the place, and too many people had done alright off of Maggie Thatcher and bought their council houses for that ever to take hold. There was one guy I remember, who was the father of a kid I went to cubs with and a nice man. He had a long beard and wore sandals with his socks; maybe he was a communist lone-wolf, quietly and unsuccessfully trying to lead local workers away from Benidorm, towards a glorious workers revolution. Alas, I digress.
Most of the racism, seemed to me, to take two forms: the first being jokes: which mainly saw Pakistanis, reduced to the P-word and serving as the main ingredient for crass punchlines, sometimes just puns on typical names, sometimes about skin-colour and culture. The P-word would get thrown around a lot, and was often just a lazy, very ignorant, catch-all term for brown and also darker-skinned people in general, not just limited to Asians: this could include people from Greek, Turkish, middle eastern or Portuguese backgrounds, or sometimes it was just aimed solely at Muslims. Perhaps this was relative to the area I grew up in, as Crawley had large Indian and Pakistani communities. It also had a big Irish community, and there were plenty of jokes about them too.
Some of these jokes were fairly innocuous, some were plain nasty, and sometimes they weren’t even jokes, it would just be the P-word hurled casually out of a car window, speeding passed some ordinary person just going about their day.
The second form would take the lazy parroting of thought-lacking negative tropes, to diagnose broader social-ills, like immigrants our taking our jobs etc. I heard these sorts of ones quite a lot. My guess was, looking back, that a lot of these statements, or accusations, were sometimes made out of fear - fear of losing something, like employment, or identity, but more often than not, like the above jokes, were made innocuously and in ignorance, with very little thought given to the consequences of saying those things.
When I was in cadets, I once got caught telling a P-word joke to another kid, and was made to stand-up by the commanding officer, in front of the group and given a severe bollocking. He was a white guy, but he was really angry about it, and fair enough, though I meant nothing by it, I learned my lesson. I remember feeling ashamed, and wished I hadn’t said it. I certainly wasn’t thinking about what the kid sat in ear-shot of me, who was from a Sri-Lanken background, might be thinking or feeling.
There was a third and much nastier form too, which from what I saw, was a lot rarer, but I encountered a few people who would probably fit into this category – and that is those who actually believed in the supremacy of white people, but more relevantly, had a severe hatred of those that weren’t them. That also included gay people, Jews and the Irish. There was a pub in Crawley which I forget the name of, which me and my mates would often drive passed, which had a reputation for housing BNP meetings; we never went in to validate those claims, we just knew to stay well away. The couple of people who I came across, who would fit into this category, were as you might imagine, pretty scary. There was occasionally one or two of them in the pubs I’d drink in; and there were always stories that accompanied them - doing jail-time in this prison or that, or running with the Chelsea hooligan firms in the 80’s. One of them had a spiders-Webb tatoo on his forehead. Again, just steered well clear of them.
Though Horley was predominately white, Crawley was a lot more ethnically mixed, as was the friendship group I grew up with; and I’m all the better for it. We naturally learned things about one another and absorbed aspects of each other cultures. When I first met my wife, who is Goan, she was pleasantly surprised that I knew a little bit about her very nuanced culture. My oldest friend from school is from a proud Goan family, and I knew other Goan families in the area too, as we all went to school and church together. That definitely won me some brownie points with her; no pun intended; but amusing none the less.
Of course we didn’t all grow-up the same, and our experiences would’ve varied, especially when it come to any sort of discrimination; but we all had lots in common. Went to the same schools, wore the same clothes, listened to the same music, worked the same jobs, had to avoid the same rude-boys trying to shake you down in the underpass and on the trains, and the same wide-boys looking to fight anyone that accidently stepped on their loafers in the pubs. Regardless of our differences, we came-up together.
The other isms, typically tended to involve making sexist comments towards women, or referring to them as birds, middle class kids calling working-class kids townies, which later morphed into the more pernicious chavs. Middle class kids just tended to be referred to as posh, sometimes followed by the C-Word. Depending on who I was with, and where I was, I was one or the other; chav or posh, I could never figure it out; trapped in some undefined class-purgatory; like a dull lesson in school where nothing gets learned. Pun intended.
As I got older, I began to develop a very basic understanding of how politics worked in the UK – broadly meaning, I got as far as working out that Labour was left-wing and Torries were right-wing, this also coupled with other simplistic notions of social issues, like classism, racism and sexism, and things like history – understanding that Britian was a colonial power and their involvement in the slave trade. All contributing towards my ideas of what discrimination is, and what pernicious forms it can take, and the different groups it can target. I would much later come to realise, that my understanding was grounded in an idea of liberalism, and stiving towards equality.
Though I didn’t know a great deal about politics and society etc (and would sometimes get very frustrated by this lack of knowledge) I considered myself left-wing. Though generally speaking, it was an affluent area, Surrey and Sussex, but I could see the effects of poverty around me. My family didn’t have a lot of money growing up, so I thought things like the NHS and social security were important, and every now and again, Mum and Dad would school me on things like this. They listened to Radio 4 and encouraged me to read books, which is probably where the posh slur came from, as that was seen as a middle-class thing. And of course, we were also Catholic - for us, there was a duty to help those less-fortunate, even if we ourselves didn’t have much.
Leaning left, felt like the right to do; no pun intended. I knew people who went either way; but I also knew a lot of people who just didn’t care for politics. Though Crawley was pre-dominantly working-class, or upper-working-class, there were lots of people there who’d done well for themselves- setting up building firms and the like or bought their council houses and got on the property ladder, so they would tend to swing right, but not always. The town often went from Labour to Torries then back again.
I was interested in trying to understand how the world worked but had no idea where to start. I began to read books, but when going to the library, or going into a book-shop, I just didn’t know what it was I was looking for; I just had this feeling that I wanted to learn some stuff… whatever that stuff was.
From 17, I had a job as an apprentice in an IT firm, where I was left to my own devices a lot. I had access to the internet, which was still a novel thing for me, and via a Drum and Bass message board that I wasted a lot of time posting on, I found another message board, which would put-up political content. This is where I first learnt what the word subversive meant.
At the time, the UK had just gone to war in Iraq and I remember feeling quite strongly against it, probably influenced by the stuff I was reading, but also many people I knew were against it. It didn’t feel right, and of course, they lied about the weapons and that. However, I was conflicted, as I’d also spent a few years in Marine Cadets and at one point, when I sensed I weren’t going to achieve much at school, I was all-set on joining the Army (easier-going than the Marines.) Through cadets, I probably knew of people who went out there to serve; it was a job after-all, and I had a little bit of appreciation for what they were doing and how dangerous it was. I also didn’t like the way some elements of the more middle-class left, would demonise soldiers, who were often working-class; just for doing a job.
Though there was no way on God’s earth, I was ever going to swap my Nike Air’s for sandals, at some point I figured out what Capitalism was. With the irony fully lost on me, I decided it was a bad thing. Using my generous 30% discount from working in huge-retail-chain-store HMV, I went into huge-retail-chain-store Waterstones, who were owned by an even an even huge-er-parent-company; I bought some more books by the likes of Michael Moore, and another one about the Bush Administration rigging the election in America; further solidifying my slant-left. I was finding causes which evoked feelings in me; which at the time of reading felt right, no pun intended. This was even followed by a stint of using a biro to write pseudo-radical messages in public karzis about TV-brainwashing us, and McDonalds-eating-greedy-Americans exploiting everyone. I’d graduated from the fine-art school of Millwall Run From No-one and a crap-tag called Luna, to full-blown political sloganeering.
I was 27 by the time I started working professionally in the arts. I felt like I’d already been round the block a bit - had multiple different low-paying jobs, multiple different addresses and had been almost permanently skint since the age of 17, but for the first time I was encountering people who were around my own age, who were themselves not long out of university and had barley ever worked a normal job; which for me, was eye-opening. Though I felt way out of my depth, not really knowing anything about the arts; theatre, poetry or literature, I had lots of opinions and thought I’d be alright as I assumed, and rightly so (no-pun intended) that in these circles nearly all of these people were loud and proud left-wingers. Even though I refused to play-down my love of getting tanked-up on lager, donna-kebabs, football and Nike Air Max - I definitely thought we had something in common.
What a lot of them had, and what I didn’t have, was a university education, which often seemed to come with a set of very specific set of ideas around isms - like racism and sexism; which I came to learn, were very different from the ones I grew up with. I can remember starting to hear terms like white privilege, toxic masculinity, the patriarchy, decolonisation etc, a lot of which, I had to look up their meanings. Another term I learned was Imposter-syndrome which was definitely something I felt, being in that world. Whilst I had this near-constant thirst for knowledge, and ideas and opinions always swirling round my brain, I felt in no-way confident enough to discuss any of these ideas that evoked something in me. I just felt like I didn’t understand them, because I wasn’t smart or educated enough; or people would think I was an idiot, or worse, a bigot, who was way out of his depth; certainly on the last point that was true; but like before, I was interested in learning, and assumed, that these ideas were the right ones, no pun intended, as everyone leaned-left.
However, what I began to notice was that lots of these terms and phrases were getting thrown about very casually, and similar to the discriminative slurs I heard as a kid - became catch-all-terms to describe very complex situations; and in some cases, terms like white – would even become a pejorative in and of itself. The more I’d hear them, the more I’d get these moments where my brain would go wait a minute, what?
I can remember someone once remarked to me, in what I took as a joking-but-not-joking way – what would a white-privileged-male-know-about-police-brutality?! I immediately had images of those coal-miners getting cavalry-charged by mounted-police in the 80’s; and I’d witnessed on a number of occasions truncheon-swigging old-bill getting handy at the football, plus I knew of a few lads who’d been indiscriminately thrown in the back of bully-vans and given a shoeing; as well as the numerous times I’d personally been thrown up against fences or walls to be searched, for no good reason; all courtesy of the police.
Another time I was at a poetry event, where a female read a poem out, about going to a party with a male-friend, leaving together then going their separate ways. She went on to describe her having to endure creepy-men harassing her on the tube– which I fully sympathised with - until it got to the end bit where she went into an invective about men not having to endure this when travelling around London. I had another one of them wait, a minute what?! - moments. So many of my mates, including me, have been either robbed, physically attacked or both, whilst on public-transport, especially when we were younger. It was something I used to have to factor in when going out - playing cat-and-mouse on the slam-doors, just to avoid the gangs going up and down the trains, robbing mostly young-guys of their wallets and phones. It was around this time, I learned another term whataboutery – which normally was followed by a sigh and an eye roll if I, or someone else was to ever push-back a bit on some of these very broad and unnuanced claims.
What became more and more alarming, was not just the demonisation of people that pushed-back on some of these ideas, by claiming they were right-wing or worse, especially people like me, who was never right-wing - it was the near blanket adoption by seemingly everyone in the arts, into what I think George Orwell described as Group Think. And the more these ideas spread, the more divorced from reality they became. To me, this definitely has aspects of classism to it.
With most of these ideas, whether it’s queer-theory, whiteness, anti-Racism, post-colonialism etc, they all seem to have some tenets in them, which make me think yea, fair enough, mate. During 2021 when there was a lot of discourse around the BLM movement – lots of black people were talking openly about their experiences of racism – things like having their hair touched by random strangers, I thought, yea, fair enough, mate, that’s not on and shouldn’t be happening. Most of these theories start from a place of anti-discrimination; so I’m on board with that, and I think most people are. But some of it, is just so wound-up in highly-theoretical academic concepts, it’s lost all sense of reality. That feeling I had as a kid, growing up with friends from different backgrounds, that despite our differences. we had many things in common - we had a togetherness - I don’t feel that with this stuff, it’s highly divisive, putting people into their different categories. My mates used to laugh when I’d tell them about some of the wacky things I was hearing in the arts, until over-time, it started coming into their workplaces too; probably unchallenged.
There are much better-placed people in this world, who can provide decent, valid criticisms of a lot of this stuff, without going into the youtube territory of right-wing-anti-wokeness and all that. It took me a long-time to learn that a lot of it, has a foundation in post-modernism, and not liberalism, but the two get conflated; which is perhaps by design. I think most people out there, who don’t know the origins of this stuff, and some of the table-turning philosophical mind-bombs, like there’s no such thing as objective truth - will just assume it’s liberal; when it quite often isn’t.
What I can say, from what I’ve seen, it can certainly make for crap-art. When people feel they have to crow-bar these messages in all the time, into whatever it is they’re making, or worse, they see themselves as high-priests having to educate the great unwashed with their righteous art, to me, it’s no longer art, it becomes something else, like activism, or worse, propaganda. There’s a time and place for both of those, of course, just not everywhere and in everything from poetry to theatre to Netflix and Nike adverts. It’s not left, and it definitely ‘aint right. Pun intended.
If you’re able to, these are ways you can support my work
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https://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/whats-on/family-young-people/pied-piper-hip-hop-family-musical
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THE SUBURBAN BOOK - My 1st book collection of stories and poemswww.paulcree.co.uk/shop
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On Discrimination - Old vs New