Escaping Tribalism

Many of my American friends have messaged me in horror about what has (and still is) happening on this island they once admired. One even offered me a chance to stay in New York for a few months, because she knows I refuse to start a family in the UK. And they don’t even know the darker details. Meanwhile, most British writers who fancy themselves as activist types seem preoccupied with Epstein’s island, forgetting that ritual child abuse and child murder happens at home, too.

I cannot scroll through my fellow British writers’ feeds without seeing some rant about Trump and Epstein, or memes satirising Working Class parents, calling them names, lampooning them for not being university educated, as if they should apologize for holding the country’s economy together, whilst we poets can languish in damp pub basements talking about our genders. There’s a hatred there, something performative and narcissistic.

But nowhere in this performance are British girls.

They can’t even pretend to care.

It is as if the ‘grooming gangs’, not being politically fashionable, nor popular enough on TikTok to make money from viral videos, simply do not happen in the personal universes of these writers. I have never felt more alienated than I have in recent weeks, never felt more disgusted, seeing people double down on their beliefs, on their ignorance, and name-calling anyone who isn’t in their cult.

I wonder how much of this is driven by algorithms. I wonder because, privately, I don’t want to blame individuals for their ignorance when I know, for example, that I never see posts about school shootings. Does that mean I am ignoring school shootings?

I so want it to be the case that my friends have been hypnotized by social media feeds into missing this. Because the alternative is that people I love have read about the mass human trafficking of British girls by a trafficking cult, and sometimes the deliberate hateful choosing of them because they are white, and have chosen to turn away and write smarmy little haikus about the ‘far-right’ instead.

I know there will be whataboutism. I know people will say “most blah blah blah is by white men” and I can reply with proper statistics, or perhaps individual cases where the men have admitted the crimes were racially motivated. But what good does arguing do? Why are we even trying to convince the ignorant to be anything else? What if it is who they are?

And as a genuine Liberal, who would I be to try to change them? They might identify as ignorant. It would be ignorantphobic for me to educate them.

I also know the reputational risk that caring about all children’s safety might bring. Lost gigs, lost agents, lost appearances on shows. It might upset the tribalists.

I remember the look of dismay, disgust even, from a poet friend when I told them proudly how I had interviewed WomenForIran before the BBC even picked them up. I suppose that poet was freaking out internally because I had done something which poked a hole in his worldview, a view in which foreign people are an unthinking monolith, a lump of clay for so-called ‘Liberal’ (by name only) hands to shape into whatever he wanted them to be.

To discover that some of them were violently oppressing others must have been very confusing. The news to these people must be like a video game. There are goodies, and baddies, and nothing in between. Faraway lands are just levels we’ve not unlocked, and like Star Wars planets, are predominantly mono-climatic, filled with cardboard cutout desert people, or cardboard cutout snow people. Individuals do not exist. Nuance does not exist.

So breaking the childish illusion must freak these types out.

And I know in posting this that I could lose some opportunities with these people, who invariably and inconceivably hold lofty positions in the Arts (which is why your TV shows have gone shit, by the way. It’s not ‘wokeness’ but piss poor writing, which I suppose are interchangeable). But I do not care. I do not want to work with the ignorant.

What I want is to live in a world where people are genuinely treated equally.

And that must include not being squeamish about dealing with child abusers just because they happen to pray to a different god.

It must include annihilating the soft bigotry of low expectations, stop allowing people to use ‘culture’ as an excuse for horrendous, evil behaviour.

It must therefore include expecting visitors to a country and culture to actually share important cultural goals with us, such as protecting children from abuse.

It must include weeding out hatred wherever we find it (you may recognize this as a supposedly Liberal idea, but they very rarely enforce it on anyone other than their own parents). This must include getting rid of homophobia, even if doing so necessitates the removal of hateful people or ideologies.

I leave on this note. The first hate crime I ever witnessed was a white girl in my school being set upon by three Pakistani girls. Seeing that did not make me hate people from Pakistan, but it did make me hate those three girls as individuals. And talking about it does not make me hate the entire group from which they owe their heritage. Because that would be insane.

Black and white thinking will doom us all.

In order for humanity to evolve further, for the world to become kinder and safer, we must agree, collectively, to see people as individuals. And that must include holding everyone to the same standards.

No more excuses.

No more social squeamishness.

No more turning a blind eye and pretending you are being “politically correct.”

Because I find that what is “politically correct” is so often morally wrong.

Wrong Speak is a free-expression platform that allows varying viewpoints. All views expressed in this article are the author’s own.