Tag: dogwhistles

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2017 rewind: The immigration “debate”

Boy, this issue never goes away. Wait, am I talking about toxic immigration narratives, or mainstream media pundit-dudes making prats of themselves?

Originally published 8 October 2017

There were a few drafts of this post, as I struggled with how to address Duncan Garner’s blatantly, deliberately, openly, provocatively racist column (no one makes that much effort saying how not-racist they are if they aren’t about to be super-racist). Deconstruct line-by-line? Parody (unnecessary given this excellent piece)? Flowchart showing all this has happened before and all of it will happen again (everything’s better with a Battlestar Galactica reference)?

I settled on a bingo board.

Because I am tired. I am so very tired of this little dance we go on, every single time a Pākehā dude (usually) opens his mouth to complain about “floods” or “waves” of immigrants or wants to start off “an important conversation” about immigration by observing that the queue at KMart made him feel like he was in South East Asia. I am tired of the disingenuous defenders insisting that we stop talking about the actual words the grown man who works in a communication-based job actually wrote. I am tired of the expectation to buy into the charade that he just doesn’t understand the basic implications of his words, to soothe the troubled brows of people who think being called racist is the literal worst thing that can happen to a living being.

I am tired of having to explain incredibly basic concepts like “referring to groups of people in animalistic terms is dehumanizing” or “criticising racist rhetoric does not mean I believe in a fully open borders policy and what the hell are you smoking to suggest that I am, you obvious deflection tactic?”

I am tired of the constant threat: actually I’m one of the good ones and if you alienate me I might not support good things any more.

And I am afraid. Haven’t we seen this happen already? Don’t we know what direction normalising this kind of rhetoric, and shutting down of criticism of it, takes us in? Haven’t we all watched what’s happening in the United States and retweeted Sarah Kendzior enough to read the signs? Didn’t we just learn that pandering to the “less-bad” agitators – saying “oh sure Milo’s transphobic but at least he’s not an actual Nazi” – is part of the problem?

Weren’t we all guilty of laughing at Trump’s buffoonery and assuming he was harmless, and just coincidentally aren’t we all waiting to see which way Winston Peters will go, gosh isn’t it funny how he mocked that journalist for being Australian?

And I’m rolling my eyes at myself right now because come on, Stephanie, this is just one silly Duncan Garner column, it’s not an impending seachange in NZ politics towards the openly white-supremacist authoritarianism of Trump and Breitbart, be reasonable.

But being reasonable and giving people an endless supply of second changes or infinite benefit of the doubt is how people like me – people who aren’t directly threatened by this rhetoric – end up saying “I woke up one day and realised I was living in a dystopia” – while those who faced genuine harm from all those “poor choices of words” or “unintended implications” are screaming we told you so, why didn’t you listen?

This is how hatred and hate-filled politics becomes normal: not because there are people deliberately pushing a racist agenda, but because a much wider group of people ignore it, or reinforce it by parroting its tropes without thinking about it. And when they’re called out, they’re outraged, because they’re not racist and how dare you say so you basement-dwelling loser, and their indignation is another piece of the puzzle, because now the conversation is about whether those stupid social justice types on Twitter are just too sensitive to have mature conversations about serious issues facing our nation.

And I’m tired. But I had to say something. Because you can never see where it all started to go wrong until it’s too late.

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The immigration “debate”

There were a few drafts of this post, as I struggled with how to address Duncan Garner’s blatantly, deliberately, openly, provocatively racist column (no one makes that much effort saying how not-racist they are if they aren’t about to be super-racist). Deconstruct line-by-line? Parody (unnecessary given this excellent piece)? Flowchart showing all this has happened before and all of it will happen again (everything’s better with a Battlestar Galactica reference)?

I settled on a bingo board.

Because I am tired. I am so very tired of this little dance we go on, every single time a Pākehā dude (usually) opens his mouth to complain about “floods” or “waves” of immigrants or wants to start off “an important conversation” about immigration by observing that the queue at KMart made him feel like he was in South East Asia. I am tired of the disingenuous defenders insisting that we stop talking about the actual words the grown man who works in a communication-based job actually wrote. I am tired of the expectation to buy into the charade that he just doesn’t understand the basic implications of his words, to soothe the troubled brows of people who think being called racist is the literal worst thing that can happen to a living being.

I am tired of having to explain incredibly basic concepts like “referring to groups of people in animalistic terms is dehumanizing” or “criticising racist rhetoric does not mean I believe in a fully open borders policy and what the hell are you smoking to suggest that I am, you obvious deflection tactic?”

I am tired of the constant threat: actually I’m one of the good ones and if you alienate me I might not support good things any more.

And I am afraid. Haven’t we seen this happen already? Don’t we know what direction normalising this kind of rhetoric, and shutting down of criticism of it, takes us in? Haven’t we all watched what’s happening in the United States and retweeted Sarah Kendzior enough to read the signs? Didn’t we just learn that pandering to the “less-bad” agitators – saying “oh sure Milo’s transphobic but at least he’s not an actual Nazi” – is part of the problem?

Weren’t we all guilty of laughing at Trump’s buffoonery and assuming he was harmless, and just coincidentally aren’t we all waiting to see which way Winston Peters will go, gosh isn’t it funny how he mocked that journalist for being Australian?

And I’m rolling my eyes at myself right now because come on, Stephanie, this is just one silly Duncan Garner column, it’s not an impending seachange in NZ politics towards the openly white-supremacist authoritarianism of Trump and Breitbart, be reasonable.

But being reasonable and giving people an endless supply of second changes or infinite benefit of the doubt is how people like me – people who aren’t directly threatened by this rhetoric – end up saying “I woke up one day and realised I was living in a dystopia” – while those who faced genuine harm from all those “poor choices of words” or “unintended implications” are screaming we told you so, why didn’t you listen?

This is how hatred and hate-filled politics becomes normal: not because there are people deliberately pushing a racist agenda, but because a much wider group of people ignore it, or reinforce it by parroting its tropes without thinking about it. And when they’re called out, they’re outraged, because they’re not racist and how dare you say so you basement-dwelling loser, and their indignation is another piece of the puzzle, because now the conversation is about whether those stupid social justice types on Twitter are just too sensitive to have mature conversations about serious issues facing our nation.

And I’m tired. But I had to say something. Because you can never see where it all started to go wrong until it’s too late.

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Migration, taps and growing pains

I keep promising to review Anat Shenker-Osorio’s book Don’t Buy It. I’m getting there, I promise. My copy is almost more Post-It Note than paper at the moment.

But there’s a chapter in which she discusses different ways to frame talking about the economy and the country, and one example cropped up almost word-for-word in New Zealand politics yesterday, so I thought I’d give a sneak preview:

Little says Labour would cap migration

Labour leader Andrew Little says ethnic restaurants should be employing New Zealand Indians and Chinese chefs instead of bringing in staff from overseas.

…

“At times when our economy is creaking, we need to be able to turn down the tap a bit,” Mr Little said.

…

“Immigration is positive for any country. But there are times also when our country’s going through some growing pains … and it is right to say ‘let’s just turn the tap down a bit’.”

It’s interesting to think about how Andrew Little is using language. What’s the subtext? People who migrate to New Zealand are a flow of water, a natural thing, but a bad thing if too much of it happens, you end up with extra Chinese and Indian chefs all over the floor. And we’re at risk of that happening, apparently, because we’re “creaking” under the pressure of all this water.

The “growing pains” phrase grabbed my attention, because it’s one Shenker-Osorio specifically addresses (not that I can find the relevant quote in amongst the forest of Post-Its):

Once we’re primed to understand the economy as most aptly akin to a body, periods of good and bad health are natural and therefore expected. Moreover, we know most conditions a body experiences go away unaided. So by applying body language, we’re telling audiences to expect that periods of prosperity and recession are normal and emphatically don’t require government intervention.

This is kind of bad news for a party whose foundational principles are all about the ability of the government to intervene, to stop ordinary people getting smashed under the wheels of capitalism.

I don’t think New Zealand is undergoing “growing pains”. I think we have a government focused on  short-term business profits, neglecting the important social services which keep people happy and healthy, and stripping back the rights which keep people healthy, safe, and unexploited at work. There’s nothing natural about that, and it’s clearly not going away by itself if the Opposition stops scratching it.

Beyond the narrative metaphor-building nerdery, though, there are two more tiny problems with this rhetoric,.

The first is that it’s racist dogwhistling gutter trash.

The second is even if that doesn’t bother you, there are no votes in racist dogwhistling gutter trash as long as Winston Peters breathes.

~

After drafting this, Labour put out a response to the general commentary. There’s a whole other post’s worth of stuff to say, but it’s late, I’m tired, and all I can say is this: there’s a reason people find it entirely plausible that Labour would engage in race-baiting rhetoric. And it’s not the media’s fault.

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How to respond to Charlie Hebdo?

Twelve people have died in the attack on French satirical paper Charlie Hebdo, and the response from many people – from a New Zealand perspective fairly divorced from the immediate impact – is familiar.

We’ve been here before, with violent extremists attacking media organisations for publishing inflammatory cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad, though this attack is far more serious. And with the “benefit” of distance, there’s a lot to unpack – about the nature of satire, about the targets of satire, about the freedom of the press, about the right to cause offence – but what worries me is the instinctive reaction many Westerners have to declare “these people died because of these cartoons, ergo these cartoons should be published everywhere!”

It’s especially concerning in the context of this excellent article from Informed Comment, which posits a more complex explanation for the Charlie Hebdo attack – beyond just “they hate our cartoons and attacked us because they hate us”:

This horrific murder was not a pious protest against the defamation of a religious icon. It was an attempt to provoke European society into pogroms against French Muslims, at which point al-Qaeda recruitment would suddenly exhibit some successes instead of faltering in the face of lively Beur youth culture (French Arabs playfully call themselves by this anagram).

If we accept this explanation, then the cries to republish the cartoons as widely as possible simply play into the extremists’ hands. Likewise demands for greater government surveillance and further compromises of civil liberties can actually make us less safe by making it a hell of a lot easier for violent extremists – of any persuasion, because there’s nothing unique to Muslim extremists about hating governmental authority – to persuade others that hey, you’re in a fight for your very existence here.

And I just don’t know what the point of republishing the cartoons is. Many journalists have already shown solidarity with the victims at Charlie Hebdo. Many cartoonists have already created their own works in support of the freedom to satirise. Without context – and especially, as I’m seeing in a lot of places, without even a translation of the original French – the cartoons don’t serve as satire, and publishing them seems to simply be “neener neener neener, look at this picture of Muhammad, you can’t stop us” thumb-biting.

As Fredrik deBoer notes, the question of whether we should crack down on violent extremists in defence of the freedom of the press is a “dead moral question”:

Of all the things that you should fear your government will lose the resolve to do, fighting Muslim terrorists should be at the absolute bottom of your list. There is no function that our government has performed more enthusiastically for years.

So any talk about needing to steel our nerves or reinvigorate our efforts against terrorism is frankly a smokescreen.

What really worries me is that none of this is new. We know that aggressive responses just breed more conflict. We know that trying to “bomb them back into the Stone Age” just creates more violent extremists.

In the Informed Comment article above, Juan Cole notes that we have an alternative model to dealing with these kind of acts: the approach taken by Norway against Anders Breivik, which steadfastly denied him the opportunity to become a martyr for his cause.

So why don’t we take it? Why is the first instinct to say let’s arrest them, expel them, and drone-strike their families?

The depressing reality is that in the West, Islam is our generation’s Communism. “Foreign fighters” are our “reds under the bed”. There are many authoritarian people – across the political spectrum – who simply want to increase the reach and repressive power of government (as long as their particular end of the spectrum is in office).

They may paint themselves as moderates, liberals who just really, really love freedom of speech – but you just have to look at the kinds of comments their followers leave and upvote (and no, I’m not linking, but you know exactly what I’m talking about). They know the score, and it isn’t about a careful, thought-through reaction to the acts of a specific, tiny minority of the Muslim population.

It’s only natural to react with abhorrence and disgust at the violent massacre of innocent people. It’s natural to take up the rallying cry of “Je suis Charlie” and march in the streets against acts of terror.

What I fear is that abhorrence being manipulated to justify further erosion of our basic rights and freedoms – the very things George W Bush told us the terrorists hate us for.