Identification politics and the retreat from motive

One of many weirdest issues about identitarian activists is that they hate being requested the place they’re from however they love telling you the place they’re from. Politely inquire about their ethnic or cultural origins they usually’ll rattling you as a racist. ‘How dare you, I’m as British as you!’, they’ll yell, both to your face or in a column within the Guardian through which they’ll doc at nice, yawn-inducing size the horror of getting some dim pleb ask about their household origins.

Then, within the subsequent breath, earlier than you’ve even had an opportunity to splutter your apology, they’ll inform you their complete ancestral historical past. You’ll know the place their nice grandmother was born, the precise amount of melatonin grandad had in his pores and skin, which maternal haplogroup they belong to, as revealed by 23andMe. Simply don’t say ‘Oh, that’s the place you’re from’, as a result of they’ll name you racist once more.

This political schizophrenia of taking offence on the query ‘The place are you from?’ whereas concurrently feeling a burning urge to inform the whole world the place you’re from was greatest captured within the Ngozi Fulani controversy. You bear in mind Ms Fulani: she’s the black charity employee from Hackney in London whose ‘racist’ run-in with long-serving royal aide Woman Susan Hussey hit the headlines final yr. Woman Hussey’s crime? At a Buckingham Palace do, she requested Ms Fulani the place she is from. Name the cops! What a bigoted previous bat.

Not so quick. Ms Fulani was adorned in African threads on the palace. She often decks herself out within the Pan-African colors and Africa-shaped earrings. To always recommend to the world that you’re from some other place after which attain for the smelling salts when somebody asks ‘The place, precisely?’ is a bit a lot, no?

Now, in literary kind, Afua Hirsch has achieved the identical factor. Ms Hirsch is an creator, broadcaster and author for the Guardian. Her first ebook, Brit(ish): On Race, Identification and Belonging, was all in regards to the horror, the sheer indignity, of ‘The Query’. The query, in fact, is ‘The place are you from?’. I’m requested this ‘each single day, typically a number of instances’, mentioned Hirsch. Actually? The place’s she hanging out? It seems like a ‘each day ritual of unsettling’, she wrote. Oh, please. If I penned a tragic ebook each time somebody requested me, on account of my very un-British title, ‘What a part of Eire are you from?’, or ‘The place have been your mother and father born?’, I’d be probably the most prolific creator in Christendom.

Now, now we have Ms Hirsch’s second ebook, Decolonising My Physique. And also you’ll by no means consider it: it’s an eye-wateringly detailed reply to… The Query! Right here’s my query: if Hirsch hates being requested the place she is from, why has she written an entire tome on the place she is ‘from’?

I now know extra about Ms Hirsch’s ethnic and cultural origins than I do about my very own. To her credit score, she admits that it is because she comes from a staggeringly privileged background. I ‘know rather a lot about my ancestors’ and ‘there’s a privilege hooked up to this’, she says. Her African ancestors weren’t the ‘enslaved’, however quite have been ‘antecedents about whom written information have been stored’. Fancy. As somebody who is aware of subsequent to nothing about his colonised forebears – largely due to the Potato Famine of the 1840s and the catastrophic hearth on the Public Data Workplace in Dublin in 1922 – I confess to feeling envy whereas studying Ms Hirsch’s complete story of her origins. How the opposite half dwell, eh?

After I say her new ebook is detailed, I imply it’s detailed. In her first ebook, she advised us off for being nosey about her household origins; in her new ebook, she’s telling us in regards to the time she received her butthole lasered. She finds herself in ‘the undignified place of spreading my butt cheeks below the coolness of a laser clinician’s hosepipe-like nozzle, as atoms are excised, electrons rise and fall, and lightweight beams are making their manner into my crack’. The entire thing price her £1,000. They should be paying properly on the Guardian if contributors can splash out a grand on having their anal fluff zapped.

Absolutely we have to discuss how simply the identitarian elites can shift from exasperation at being requested ‘The place are you from?’ to absolute blaséness about telling the world what their ringpieces appear like. Don’t you dare ask the place my household is from however please hearken to me describe the hair follicles on my arsehole. Excuse me, what?

As its title suggests, Hirsch’s ebook is a considerably narcissistic endeavour. It’s all about her physique. Extra particularly, it’s about how empire and colonialism interrupted the paranormal traditions by way of which Hirsch’s African ancestors marked and celebrated their our bodies – with tribal tattoos, menstrual festivals and whatnot – and the way Hirsch now desires to rediscover all that stuff.

She says she desires to ‘decolonise’ her physique of its ‘Western’ expectations – thinness, hairlessness, white-defined attractiveness – and let it develop into extra African. Think about how time-rich, and actually wealthy, you’d must be to spend a lot power obsessing over your personal flesh and pores and skin. To publish a ebook about decolonising the physique of a privately educated Guardianista whereas everybody else is questioning if they’ve sufficient money to maintain the lights on speaks to the pathological self-regard of the brand new elites. On this period of financial, navy and ethical crises, Hirsch goes to need to work lots more durable to persuade me that the truth that her interval ‘nonetheless typically takes me unexpectedly’ is one thing we have to know.

Hirsch’s argument is that she has been violently ripped from the ‘magical’ traditions of her African historical past by colonialism and capitalism. So the place her historic forebears held menstruation ceremonies and celebrated girls for having furry legs and insisted upon the tattooing of feminine flesh, our new period heaps disgrace on girls for bleeding, discourages feminine hair development, and idolises ‘pure’ over ‘marked’ flesh. None of that is fairly proper although, is it? Interval chatter is in all places nowadays. You’ll be able to’t a lot as click on on Instagram with out seeing some feted feminine influencer displaying off hair-covered shins that might make Peter Sellers surprise if he ought to attain for some Veet. As for tats – not having a tattoo is the nice disgrace within the Twenty first-century West. What, you haven’t had a tribal slogan pasted in your pasty flesh by a needle-wielder in Camden? What’s flawed with you?

And but our body-decolonising Ms Hirsch perseveres, regardless. To counter the evil West’s disdain for previous African tribes’ celebration of menstruation, she takes her poor daughter to a tribal interval shindig in south London. They need to traverse the South Round, ‘one of the crucial congested roads not simply in London, however on this planet’, and Hirsch, below instruction from the London-based tribal priestess, should put on all-white clothes, which on this case means a ‘floor-length summer time gown, produced from gentle sheets of cotton’. Nonetheless, at the least it connects Hirsch to her tribal lineage, even when her daughter, by Hirsch’s personal admission, would quite be wherever else.

Hirsch’s favorite phrase is ‘conditioning’. She thinks girls like her – girls of non-British origins – have been ‘conditioned’ to discard the tribal rituals their elders engaged in. Maybe. Or maybe black girls and all girls in London in 2023 would simply quite purchase some tampons for his or her pubescent daughters than topic them to an old-world menstrual ritual in a complicated backyard in south London. Who can inform?

Hirsch says ‘the forces of globalisation’ result in a state of affairs the place ‘individuals like me’ – individuals of color – have been ‘conditioned’ to behave and suppose in a selected manner. That’s, in a Western manner. There’s a darkly ironic twist right here. Hirsch’s obsession with the thought of ‘conditioning’ means she finally ends up viewing African-origin individuals in an analogous method to how previous colonialists considered them – as vacant-brained entities swayed this fashion and that by the messaging of their superiors below capitalism. It smells like neo-colonialism disguised as anti-colonialism.

Hirsch thinks that even she – an expensively educated, profitable author – has been ‘conditioned’. She wonders if her submission to laser hair-removal is a craven acceptance of Western tradition’s white-supremacist loathing of feminine hair. ‘Why do I carry on coming again’, she wonders, ‘to uncomfortable and costly appointments, simply to squash the capillaries which nature, in its knowledge, needed us to have in our nether areas’? Once more with the nether areas. She finally ends up looking at her vagina and reminiscing about her misplaced hair. She beholds the ‘pathetic little tuft of hair clinging to my bikini space, with a forlorn sense of getting banished one thing which will have cherished me’. I can’t think about ever having a deep thought of my pubes – is that solely me?

Who’s answerable for the truth that even Hirsch, with all her schooling, has achieved issues to her physique that she later thinks she shouldn’t have achieved? It’s Charles Darwin. It’s at all times Charles Darwin. On the hundreds of kilos she’s spent on ‘pink-packaged razors’ and ‘painful, costly waxing’, Hirsch says, ‘The individual I do blame… is Charles Darwin’. You may consider Darwin as a very powerful scientific determine of the interval of Enlightenment, the sensible man who revealed to us the reality of each nature and humanity, however to Ms Hirsch he’s the bloke whose ‘paradigm-shifting work on evolution’ led to the inexorable destruction of ‘attitudes to physique hair [that] have been as various because the cultures [they were] rooted in’.

In brief, Darwin’s exploration of the origins of species, of the origins of man, helped to nurture a colonial discomfort with tribal tradition. Think about witnessing the epoch-shaping discoveries of a person like Darwin and pondering: ‘He’s the rationale I really feel compelled to get my butthole lasered.’ The narcissism of it, the anti-Enlightenment of it.

Anti-Enlightenment is the precise phrase for the place Hirsch finally ends up. All through the ebook she dabbles not solely with tribal cultures – which, in my opinion, declined and fell for good motive – but additionally with astrology and even witchcraft. She quotes authors who bemoan the disdaining by ‘clever individuals’ of ‘witchcraft, magical therapeutic, divination, historical prophecies, ghosts and fairies’. It falls to her sensible-sounding mother and father to maintain a test on her descent into pre-modern hysteria. Her father, the esteemed geophysicist Peter Hirsch, responds to her pleas {that a} planetary ‘conjunction’ within the sky should be an indication that she ought to change her life by saying: ‘It’s simply from our arbitrary viewpoint that the planets seem shut collectively… It doesn’t imply something deeper.’ Sure, dad!

Her mum is even higher. Requested by Afua why girls of African origin don’t put on ‘waist beads’ anymore, her mum basically says: ‘As a result of now we have good knickers now.’ Hirsch discovers, alongside the surprise of menstrual rituals and tribal tats, that sporting beads throughout one’s stomach is a good African method to show a) that you’re fertile and b) you’ve got a chunky ass. Why don’t you put on them, she asks her Ghanaian-British mum? To which comes the wonderful reply: ‘As quickly as we heard about Marks & Spencer’s underwear, we stopped sporting beads…’ Precisely. All these desperately poor African women who maintain up their sanitary / undergarment tools with beads round their bellies would love a pair of cozy high-street knickers, even when rich writers like Afua Hirsch frown upon such fundamental needs. Give me good underwear over tribal realness any day of the week.

Basically, this can be a daft ebook. It bemoans Western capitalism whereas singing the praises of billionaires like Oprah Winfrey and Rihanna. (And the individuals, black and white, whose labour is exploited by Oprah’s media machine and Rihanna’s make-up machine? Shush! Don’t point out them.) It assaults cultural appropriation whereas telling the story of this hyper-privileged Londoner who will get ‘adorned’ within the fashions of historical Africans.

I hate to be the one to ask this, however how is it any totally different for a privately educated girl of color from Wimbledon to experiment within the cultures and jewelleries of African nations than it’s for a right-on white ‘appropriator’ to do the identical? It could be like me donning the animal skins my ancestors wore as they searched excessive and low for grub within the wilds of pre-modern Eire. ‘Wanker’ can be the cry of family and friends if I have been to placed on the tough uniform of my tragic, regressive forebears.

Hirsch’s retreat from modernity into the witchy traditions of previous is a few wealthy girl shit. Anybody who can traipse by way of London to attend menstrual rituals and traverse Africa to look at beads and pants is clearly somebody with an excessive amount of time on their fingers. And that’s the rub. Identification politics is a essentially privileged pursuit. Certainly, it’s the means by way of which the well-off launder their class privilege and switch it into oppression. There may be nothing in Ms Hirsch’s plush, beautiful life that may be described as oppression – other than being requested The Query, in fact… – and so she plunders historical communities for little items of victimhood she may declare as her personal. And thus is her cultural energy within the right here and now fortified, with extra of that hottest foreign money of all: ethnic struggling.

Hirsch’s ebook confirms that the brand new elites have retreated from motive, fleeing from Enlightenment into the tattooed arms of modern tribalism. ‘Educated individuals, and folks like me, [were] introduced as much as find out about, perceive and respect science’, she writes, however now many people are ‘following our curiosity’ and embracing ‘programs of ancestral information’. Sure you’re. From ‘decolonise the curriculum’ to the upper-middle-class fads for all the pieces from African jewelry to Tibetan spiritualism, the right-on and wealthy are turning their backs on modernity and its positive aspects and information. Knock yourselves out. The remainder of us, nonetheless, who haven’t any cultural clout to realize from dabbling in magic and different historical bullshit, desire science, civilisation and comfy undergarments.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political author and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Present. Subscribe to the podcast right here. His new ebook – A Heretic’s Manifesto: Essays on the Unsayable – is out there to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And discover Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy