The violence of intolerance is damaging our children

Guilt-tripping woke moralists prey on the young and frighten them into falling in line.

Young children at a Black Lives Matter protest in St Louis, Missouri. Picture: AP

“You have to show that you are with Black Lives Matter, otherwise your mates will reject you and label you a white racist,” a 15-year-old schoolboy informs me. His friend, 16-year-old Lucy, struggles to express her feelings when she tries to explain her reaction to the pressure to fall in line. She supports BLM but has decided not to go to any of the protests.

When her friends discovered her absence, they let rip and attacked her behaviour. “I really resent being shamed and forced to apologise for not going on the demo,” she says, before adding: “Maybe I was wrong not to show that I care.”

Sadly, the global protest movement following the brutal death of George Floyd is proving to be no more tolerant than its target. I knew everyone from business leaders to celebrities had come under intense pressure to demonstrate they were on the right side of the angels, as far as the BLM protests were concerned. But I was not aware of the peer pressure faced by children to fall into line as well. A group of mothers told me their children appeared to be involved in a competition to demonstrate they were “more aware than their peers”.

Last week I talked to a mother who described how her 11-year-old daughter was at a loss to know how to respond to the pressure she faced from her peers and others on Instagram to include a BLM hashtag on her posts. “Can I just post a cake that I baked on Instagram?” she asks. Suddenly the normal form of peer pressure has become politicised to the point that some children experience it as an ultimatum to toe the party line. When young children are faced with the demand to conform or else, it becomes evident that cultural and political polarisation has acquired an unprecedented dimension.

The peer pressure to conform is not only politicised, it is also institutionalised. There are now organised groups of teenage vigilantes in the US who are devoted to the mission of exposing and punishing other children whose online posts they perceive as racist or insensitive. Anonymous Instagram accounts devoted to exposing supposedly racist comments made by fellow students have emerged in the US. Within a few hours one such account, launched at San Marcos High School in California, attracted about 900 new followers.

That children are under pressure to conform is not surprising given the speed with which so many prominent adults appear to have experienced an overnight conversion to the BLM cause. One of the most significant outcomes of the BLM protests is the rapidity with which its message became endorsed by virtually every powerful cultural institution in the Anglo-American world. Especially on social media, the failure to demonstrate solidarity with BLM is often regarded as akin to religious heresy.

Almost overnight, celebrities and cultural institutions — and ­especially the media — have declared to atone for the sin of racism by literally getting on one knee and begging for forgiveness.

I have stopped counting the number of films and television shows that have been cancelled since global media company HBO decided to pull Gone With the Wind temporarily from its HBO Max streaming service. This announcement was swiftly followed by the removal of TV comedy Little Britain because of the use of blackface by its main characters. Then UKTV declared it would ­remove an episode of Fawlty Towers. After a public outcry against this silly decision, UKTV decided to back-pedal and allow the episode to be shown.

The so-far bloodless cultural revolution is not just directed at censoring scenes that could be interpreted as racist, it is also hostile to productions that portray the police in a positive light. That is why Paramount Network announced the popular program Cops is no longer on its network. It also indicated that it did not have “any current or future plans for it to return”. It seems the main ­problem with Cops is that ­instead of depicting the police as a ­collection of brutal thugs, they were portrayed as people doing a difficult job.

There must be a small army of censors working out which song or film is likely to offend the sensibility of protesters. Changing words and getting rid of films is one way of communicating to the world that you too are metaphorically taking the knee. In this indecent haste to whitewash society, some will find just about anything offensive and little can be taken for granted.

The new Inquisition

Censorship by powerful cultural organisations is just one symptom of what is fast becoming an institutionalisation of intolerance. Although the different groups associated with BLM represent themselves as a movement for diversity, they appear to be zealously hostile to the expression of a diversity of viewpoints. As far as many supporters of BLM are concerned, there is only one version of events. The statements of prominent individuals and personalities are carefully vetted, and those who express a sentiment that is not in line with the BLM world view face becoming ostracised, fired from their jobs or shut down.

It only took a complaint made by Sasha Exeter, a black influencer, against Jessica Mulroney, who hosts a show on Canadian TV, for Mulroney to be sacked. Her crime was to tell Exeter she did not want her platform to be used to support BLM. After a series of angry exchanges, Exeter stated that as a result “she was paralysed by fear”. The TV network bosses responded by showing Mulroney the door. Not even the fact she is a close friend of ­Meghan Markle saved her.

In recent weeks, journalists who were not on message have come under fire from colleagues who are keen to demonstrate they have re-educated themselves and have become active allies against white privilege. The New York Times led the way, forcing its opinion page editor, James Bennet, to resign over allowing an opinion piece written by a pro-Trump ­senator to be published. Many of Bennet’s colleagues have adopted the view that the paper’s opinion pages should be confined only to writers who share their view.

The crusade to cleanse media outlets of heretics has enveloped other outlets. In many instances, groups of reporters and editors have demanded colleagues be fired or reprimanded for their complicity in “problematic” editorial or social media decisions.

The forced resignation of Stan Wischnowski, the executive editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer, illustrates the febrile atmosphere of a witch-hunt that prevails in sections of the media. He was forced out after approving the headline “Buildings matter, too”. In recent weeks, media outlets Variety, the Intercept and Vox faced mini revolts.

Sadly, the targets of this inquisition often resemble the victims of the Chinese Cultural Revolution in that they roll over and apologise for their sin. So when Variety editor-in-chief Claudia Eller was placed on leave after a Twitter exchange about minority hiring, she issued a ­humiliating apology: “I have tried to diversify our newsroom over the past seven years, but I HAVE NOT DONE ENOUGH.”

The institutionalisation of groupthink within sections of the media and its promotion within wider culture have become most stridently vocal in its cultivation of white deference. The cultivation of deference — which is captured by the demand to acknowledge your privilege — is underpinned by the presumption that whiteness is a form of original sin.

According to the authors of this notion, all white people are racist. This point is forcefully argued in Robin DiAngelo’s influential bestseller White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard For White People To Talk About Racism. As far as DiAngelo is concerned, the real problem is not white people who are hardcore racists, the real threat is posed by those “colourblind” whites who are convinced they are not racists. That is why forcing colourblind whites to confess to their racism has become transformed into a ­ritual of self-abasement.

The demand for white deference coexists with the assumption that the only constructive contribution white people can make to the debate is to acknowledge their guilt and re-educate themselves.

In the discussions surrounding the global protests there has been very little discussion on the significance and impact of an increasingly culturally sanctioned narrative of white guilt. Yet the influence of this narrative is entirely insidious. It represents a fatalistic acceptance of racism as an eternal condition of existence. If indeed people are born racists, there is little that can be done to eradicate it. Worse still is its impact on young people.

Children and young people are easy targets for the guilt-tripping moral entrepreneurs. Even at the best of times, when faced with pressure to fall in line to the latest fashionable narrative, young ­people can often succumb and conform.

Today, matters are made worse by the fact the cultural institutions and celebrities that ­influence their lives incite the young to feel guilty. The really important battles at present are not between protesters and the police but the war for the hearts and minds of our children.

Frank Furedi’s Why Borders Matter: Why Humanity Must Relearn the Art of Drawing Lines is published by Routledge.