08.12.2022

Diminished responsibility

The high-profile cases of Lady Susan Hussey and Kanye ‘Ye’ West highlight the limits of official anti-racism, argues Paul Demarty

It has been a strange couple of weeks in the fractious world of official anti-racism.

Two scandals catch our eye - one on these shores, and one in the United States (respectively extremely British and American affairs all round). The first is the downfall of the royal courtier, Susan Hussey, Baroness Hussey of North Bradley, after a disastrous attempt to make small talk with liberal activist Ngozi Fulani spiralled into a culture war squall that forced her resignation.

The second is the ongoing self-character-assassination of Kanye West, the stupendously successful pop star, whose increasing identification with the political right has finally pitched him into the world of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, in a series of increasingly bizarre interviews with rightwing media figures. Both cast an interesting light on the ‘frothier’ elements of contemporary anti-racist discourse - how it works and how it does not when things go wrong. But both also cast light on how racism actually digs down into societies, in ways that tend to wrong-foot anti-racists who take their cues from the liberal, officially-endorsed version of the creed.

So, then, first of all to the rarefied world of Buckingham Palace.

Susan Hussey - a younger daughter of one of those ancient families that fill society columnist’s heads like London back roads do for black cab drivers - became a palace helpmeet in 1960. Most of her career there was spent as a ‘woman of the bedchamber’ - a prestigious post among Elizabeth Windsor’s various ladies-in-waiting. She was well-connected within her world, and presumably still is, and her main job was to take care of the queen’s private correspondence, keeping good relations with her various friends and retainers. After the monarch’s death, Hussey - along with her colleagues-in-waiting - were given pleasant sinecures by the new king, with some limited responsibility at public affairs like the one that caused her all the bother.

Hussey was one of several palace toadies at a gala reception for charitable efforts to combat violence against women (by now ‘waiting’ on queen consort Camilla). Among the commoners present was Fulani, chief executive of a charity called Sistah Space, which runs refuges for women of African and Caribbean backgrounds. Making small talk, Hussey asked Fulani where she was from. “Hackney,” came the reply. But she kept pushing it: yes, but where are you really from? And so on. Fulani, and friends of hers, began to feel distinctly uncomfortable, and complained about it on Twitter without naming the culprit, who was, however, quickly identified by others. The palace reacted with a grovelling press statement to the effect that Hussey had offered her resignation.

I called this a culture war ‘squall’, because, in this instance, the system (mostly) worked. The palace promised to do better. Rishi Sunak intoned gravely, in the time-honoured clichés of official anti-racism that, while we have made great progress, there is always more work to be done. Almost the only voice raised in Hussey’s defence was Petronella Wyatt,¹ the Tory journalist and sometime paramour of Boris Johnson, who offered a sob-story defence in The Spectator. Perhaps the Mail is on her side too, having published an enraged philippic from the byline of Peter Hitchens.²

Wyatt’s story has a fairly straightforward angle: what an awful thing to put a gentle old lady through! Her life is in ruins; she is in despair apparently. She does not have a racist bone in her body: she is merely of an older generation, where people said things slightly differently. The ‘victim’ of this supposed racism, meanwhile, gets to promote herself on every news show. Wyatt, however, at least accepts the apparent (and nowhere denied) facts of the encounter. Hitchens casts doubt on the possibility that Hussey could have done anything so “stupid”, given her long career in public life. By his conclusion, he is channelling the spirit of Joseph de Maistre. The “British revolution” has already happened (oh happy day!), although “nobody has actually guillotined the king, because he now has no power at all”. Yet if he steps out of line, the left will “tear him to shreds” … on social media, anyway. (Does he expect the palace to contritely offload itself in such a case?)

Beyond that, there is little pushback, except from the most usual of rightwing suspects. Interestingly, this relative unanimity has even slightly disquieted some of the participants of the drama (apart from the obvious one). Mandu Reid, a friend of Faluni’s who witnessed the troublesome encounter, noted in The Guardian that “the media furore feels disproportionate … It’s not that this one isn’t serious … But something about this media frenzy feels … off.” Confronted with several consistent accounts of what had occurred, the palace had simply tossed Hussey out on her ear - which, of course, left the wider institution off the hook, and also sets things up for a counterattack, of the sort offered by Wyatt and Hitchens.

According to Reid,

The ‘bad apple’ narrative is potent not only because it masquerades as taking responsibility without the institution having to do any such thing, but also because it often helps drive a backlash against the ‘woke brigade’ for cancelling yet another innocent … Neither Ngozi nor I wanted Hussey to receive the grand order of the boot. Ngozi didn’t even name her publicly; it was social media that did this, immediately seizing on the story as another chance to form into polarised rival camps.³

What would Reid and Fulani have preferred? Instead of stepping down, Hussey should have stepped up - and ‘done the work’, as the woke cliché goes. Not just her, but Buckingham Palace as a whole. The latter has set the usual bevy of diversity targets, but really it needs “cultural competence training. I know just the organisation to provide that. Sistah Space … offers such courses to institutions that don’t know where to begin.” Now that would be quite an olive branch.

Kanye agonistes

Our second case is a little more dramatic.

Kanye West may once have been identified simply as a run-of-the-mill Democrat celebrity. It is 15 years or so since he appeared, in a visible state of intense agitation, on a post-Hurricane Katrina charity telethon, in a spot with the Canadian comic actor, Mike Myers. As Myers attempted to divert his ruminations back to the topic of viewers reaching for their credit cards, West shouted: “George Bush doesn’t care about black people!” It went viral - more of an event in those far-gone times, without the accelerant of mature social media. But it would not be the last time he made a fool of himself in the most public settings: such interventions have become something of a calling card.

Over time, we have learned at least part of the reason why. West suffers from bipolar disorder. We do not see his depressions, in the peanut gallery of celebrity culture; only his manias (he is rumoured to go off his medication when he is in a mania, as indeed many bipolar sufferers do). And, of course, we consume them as entertainment. Outbursts like this and his notorious interruption of Taylor Swift at an awards show - “Now, I’ma let you finish” - is one more nugget of content in the unstoppable total flow of contemporary culture.

West has had a rough patch. He is now divorced from fellow super-celeb Kim Kardashian. His star has been on the wane, in the minds of those who pitched him as the voice of a generation of black Americans, since he began flirting with rightwing politicians - notably palling around with the Trumps. In his current state of mind, this has curdled into a persecution mania. In October, he tweeted that he was about to go to bed, but when he woke up, he was going to “go death con three on the Jewish people”. His subsequent interventions got his account suspended. He had his first of many car-crash interviews with Tucker Carlson; unaired footage leaked, in which West accused various institutions of amounting to Jewish conspiracies against black people.

He faded out of the news for a short while, only to reappear at Mar-a-Lago, in the company of a certain Nick Fuentes. The latter is a second-string, alt-right personality - a vigorous anti-Semite, whose following is largely cultivated among the incels, whom he reassures by telling them that having sex with women is gay. This idiotic, borderline-Nazi YouTube grifter was now, apparently, West’s brains trust; apparently this hook-up is the bright idea of Milo Yiannopoulos, the disgraced alt-right media goon, who - after a brief stint as Kanye’s presidential campaign manager - is otherwise now reduced to hawking tat on a traditionalist Catholic infomercial slot, and trying to make money from the ‘ex-gay’ conversion therapy circuit.

The dinner with the Donald seems to have gone terribly: West demanded Trump drop out of the presidential race and become his own running mate; West, now permanently flanked by Fuentes, walked out of a softball interview with far-right podcaster Tim Pool, before appearing on The Alex Jones show in a peculiar balaclava-type mask, where he put in a few words in defence of one Adolf Hitler. This was too much even for Mr Free Speech himself, Elon Musk, and he is now back off Twitter after posting an image of a star of David with a swastika in the middle of it.

Case histories

West’s degeneration poses a couple of obvious and related problems for mainstream anti-racism. The first is that - especially in America - the paramount question is the historic injuries dealt to black Americans. Kanye is black; but - in his current condition, anyway - meets the definition of the word ‘racist’ used in common speech.

In this regard, unfortunately, he is hardly original. The civil-rights and black-power movements had their reactionary wings, typically characterised by anti-Semitism. The Nation of Islam (NoI) is the most famous, although Kanye seems more influenced by the Black Hebrew Israelite movement, which sees black people as descendants of the ancient tribes of Israel, and contains fringe groups of an astringently anti-Semitic character. He has also latched onto some of the conspiratorial conservatism associated with the even stranger Hoteps, who base themselves on a pseudo-history of ancient Egypt.

He is hardly the first black celebrity to have been seduced by this sort of thing: the classic political rap group, Public Enemy, were connected with the NoI and its spinoff groups, and their MC, ‘Professor Griff’, blamed the Jews for most of “the wickedness in the world”; Alice Walker, author of the classic novel The color purple, has taken up with the British lizard-monger, David Icke, whose theories are usually and not unreasonably interpreted as anti-Semitic in tendency. Others could be named.

Yet it remains a sticky wicket for anti-racists. In so insistently framing racism as such as a pathology of ‘whiteness’, the racism of a member of an oppressed group who misidentifies some racial category as his oppressor (the black anti-Semite, or even the black person who believes that white people are intrinsically evil qua ‘biologically’ white, but also the Asian bouncer I once met who, unbidden, launched into a bitter diatribe against Arabs, seemingly inspired by the now notorious kafala system) becomes unintelligible.

We Marxists have the felicitous, if unfashionable, concept of false consciousness to deal with this issue. We can simultaneously denounce such views as false, while accepting their apperceptive adequacy - that is, accepting them as at least a sign of awareness that there is something there to be conscious of. But this is unavailable to the liberal anti-racist; for, if we accept that the racism of a black anti-Semite is false consciousness, why should we not apply the same logic to the white resident of some post-industrial hellscape, who blames ‘immigrants taking our jobs’ for all his woes? Are we not then essentially accepting, as rightwingers do in a mealy-mouthed fashion, that such people have ‘legitimate grievances’, and thereby signalling our agreement, whether we like it or not?

All this, of course, also comes with the corollary that there is some true consciousness possible - something like Lukács’s imputed class-consciousness. That, however, would shift emphasis to the material conditions of life - those things that confront us and about which we can be right or wrong. Yet that immediately poses the class contradictions involved, and it is not clear that there could even be an imputed consciousness common to Kanye West (or, for that matter, Alice Walker) and some random black worker in Amazon’s Alabama warehouse.

As I have argued before in relation to the concept of structural racism, the structures must find their root somewhere. If racism is false, ‘structural racism’ cannot really be about race (whatever that is: liberals and Marxists agree, at some level, that it is some form of social construct). It thus becomes occluded, and anti-racism is merely circular. This circularity must itself be concealed, something achieved by the reduction of anti-racist praxis to various forms of language policing. As such, it becomes a praxis definitionally of the professional middle classes, whose differentia specifica is credentialed expertise and therefore control at the level of language and culture.⁴ (Pace modern reactionaries, there is no reason why control should be in the hands of liberal professionals: the equation of homosexuality with perversion, deviancy and mental illness is homologous to ‘woke’ language policing, and maintained by similar institutional supports.) Hence the increasing obsession with ‘microaggressions’, which in the end are largely transgressions of speech codes.

The other problem with the Kanye case is that his actions plainly find at least some of their basis in something outside of the true/false consciousness altogether: his present psychological state. This has caused some discomfort, as it often does, because to attribute his behaviour to mental illness is thought by some to stigmatise mental illness, and by others to let him off the hook. I do not propose to give a detailed ‘medical’ argument as to why this reticence is wrong-headed - for one, I am not a doctor, and for another, it is as close to self-evidently preposterous as you can get. Why is the obvious truth, documented in mountains of case histories going back centuries, that particular kinds of mental illness can predispose individuals to believe themselves to be the victims of vast conspiracies and take harmful actions as a result, such a bitter pill to swallow? Partly because the language-policing discreetly assumes the rational liberal subject in order to work - it plainly cannot be just to ‘hold someone accountable’ if they are in a state of diminished responsibility.

It is also partly because mental illness has been dubiously reinvented as a marginalised identity, like black people, women, sexual minorities, and so forth. The approved solution to marginalisation is to ‘centre the voices of the oppressed’; but in this particular case the result is even worse than when it comes to race, where middle class ‘voices’ are inevitably ‘centred’. That dynamic is in place, of course, but also relatively high-functioning sufferers of less severe mental illnesses tend to predominate.

Thus self-appointed ‘voices’ who, typically, have the combination of mild-to-moderate depression and anxiety that is utterly endemic in advanced capitalist societies, pronounce solemnly that a man apparently in the grip of a self-destructive mania must be in his right mind when he tells Alex Jones (Alex Jones!) that he loves the Jewish people and Nazis. This is not to make light of these milder conditions - I myself suffer from that combination of symptoms, and let the record show that it sucks. It is merely that identity politics is more than usually misleading as a construction of the political issues at hand - which, naturally, are legion, but not to our point here.

So constructing the problem, however, has another consequence: it introduces yet another axis of oppression, which, according to modern liberal mores, must be dealt with intersectionally - that is, with due attention to all the others. Each form of oppression has its own logic, and thus functions as its own language game. Yet, whenever there is a disagreement, we have no means of resolving it: between equal rights, force decides.

Power struggle

We turn back, perhaps with some relief, to the milder goings-on on these shores.

We might consider the defence of Hussey offered by Hitchens and, especially, Wyatt - that she is merely guilty of being old, and inculturated into a set of norms that are different to those proposed by liberal anti-racists, but essentially benign. That is a little too easy. The truth is that her ‘culture’ is that of the aristocratic demimonde she inhabits. She is a member of a tiny class that exists largely ornamentally, on past glories (imperial glories). Her interactions with Fulani are not actively malicious, so far as we can tell, but bespeak a mindset of patronising fondness and aristocratic grace towards ‘the natives’. It is a window into the utterly aloof, entitled culture of palace toadies, and a reminder where all the money for these charity galas ultimately comes from: plunder, massacre, conquest - and finally complacent entitlement.

We have seen that Mandu Reid’s favoured tonic for this is “cultural competence training”: whereas effectively sacking Hussey risked inflaming culture-war backlash politics, how much better would it be to resolve things positively? The obvious problem with this is that this sort of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) training is also a culture-war wedge issue already - more so in the States, where it is identified with such figures as the world-historically tedious DEI consultant and bestselling author, Robin DiAngelo. Attempts to ban ‘critical race theory’ from school curricula get a lot of their momentum from occasional leaks of the content of these trainings, though they have nothing to do with what is actually taught in schools.

But there is a more fundamental problem than that - for all that the idea of a gang of ultra-conservative, aristocratic palace cronies being subjected to a Robin DiAngelo struggle session is pleasantly hilarious to imagine. What are people taught at these things? Broadly, that there is ‘structural racism’, and an account of how it works along liberal lines, and a list of instructions for how to behave better. There is a logical gap there. We have vastly unequal structures in society, and the fix is - what - to teach some novel etiquette to an old, rich, white woman? If racism is structural, somehow, then the trainings are inadequate; if it is not, per impossibile, then they are unnecessary, since racism would merely be a trivial epiphenomenon that could be tidied up as and when appropriate.

Getting at the deep structures of anything - in the case of racism in Britain and America, the aftershocks of global empire and chattel slavery respectively - cannot be a matter of an endless series of single issues, in light of which some kind of accountability is to be sought and perhaps DEI training administered. It demands an account of the mutual determination of social structures, and therefore a total alternative, a programme at the level of high politics. Recommendations of the sort we see in Socialist Worker frequently (though, as I write, it has not made any comment on the Hussey case) for more radical forms of action (militant street protests and the like) do not fit the bill either. It is worth noting that Hussey and Fulani had their fateful meeting at a royal gala in the name of fighting violence against women. In the 1970s, radical feminists built a militant politics around this question. They were thought of as mad extremists. This is what it has come to - a cosy evening with the queen consort, to congratulate charities for doing good work to combat a bad thing. It would be nugatory to point out that, in spite of this ‘progress’, many men still assault and murder their partners.

Truly moving past the residual imperial racism of British society would ultimately mean leaving that whole imperial legacy behind, which poses the abolition of the monarchy and the early (or, in Hussey’s case, overdue) retirement of its coterie of hangers-on. It would, furthermore, pose the end of Britain’s post-imperial role in the world system as a money laundry and nerve centre of offshore finance. It poses, thus, the need for a British revolution - a real one, not a figment of Peter Hitchens’ imagination, one that would break out of the frame of the ‘national interest’ altogether. How much more is that true of the United States, the current hegemon! That is not the work of a charity, but a party.

paul.demarty@weeklyworker.co.uk

www.spectator.co.uk/article/in-defence-of-lady-susan-hussey.↩︎
www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-11498729/PETER-HITCHENS-Lady-Susan-youve-cancelled-Twitter-No-defence-allowed-Goodbye.html.↩︎
www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/dec/01/lady-hussey-resign-monarchy-race-remarks-institution.↩︎
‘Manufacturing consensus’ Weekly Worker September 2 2021: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1361/manufacturing-consensus.↩︎