00:05:05.980But look, for anyone who's listening to this
00:05:07.980who's thinking you know what I've always thought of myself as someone who's on the left I've always
00:05:13.440thought of myself as someone who's liberal I've always wanted to look out for the underdogs in
00:05:18.340life I've always you know these are my views but equally all this woke stuff doesn't make sense
00:05:25.260to me what is a credible left-wing position that is not woke that you support why are you a lefty
00:05:33.700Just articulate that for people, for the positive case for being on the left.
00:05:37.280OK, so liberalism, this is two aspects and they're not exactly the same thing.
00:05:43.480So liberalism is the desire for equal opportunity, for individuality, for universality, for freedom of speech and belief.
00:05:53.020So there can be liberals on the right, left and centre.
00:05:56.020A liberal lefty like me is somebody who believes in these vital freedoms, in this individuality and not judging people by their race, gender or sexuality and ensuring that society doesn't do so either, but has genuinely leftist policies.
00:06:14.620I would like to tax rich people quite a lot more in order to better fund the NHS and have fewer children relying on food banks and generally have a better welfare system and affordable housing for poorer people, many of whom are not white.
00:06:33.960So this should be somewhere where we can sort of share interest
00:06:38.220with both the Marxists and the critical social justice activists,
00:06:43.500but they tend to be purists, the latter.
00:06:47.140The Marxists will talk to you, but not the critical social justice people.
00:06:52.920And why is that? Why do they not engage in debates?
00:06:55.460Because surely the way you persuade somebody, to your point of view,
00:07:00.380Yeah, that's the liberal marketplace of ideas. But what we've seen coming from the social justice left is the idea of dominant discourses, which, of course, comes from postmodernism in the first place.
00:07:14.680well it's got a longer history than that but let's go with Michel Foucault as a good grounding
00:07:22.140point here this idea that certain discourses in society certain ways of talking about things
00:07:28.280become powerful because they get legitimated by powerful structures in society and then we all
00:07:35.840speak into them without even realizing we're doing it and these power structures can be called
00:07:40.480things like white supremacy, patriarchy, cis normativity, you know, the belief that people
00:07:46.940are generally the same gender as their genitals indicate their sexes. So that's when you believe
00:07:54.280in dominant discourses and marginalised discourses, you can't believe that a marketplace of ideas will
00:08:00.440work. All that will happen is that the dominant discourses get an airing, and people just accept
00:08:07.300that as the truth and the marginalized people are still not heard so this is why we hear that
00:08:11.480they are silenced they are erased um because there's this idea that if anybody um is speaking
00:08:19.640into a dominant discourse doesn't matter if it's the president of the united states or someone with
00:08:24.280three followers on twitter they're likely to be leapt upon and told precisely how they are being
00:08:31.420problematic but isn't Helen isn't one of the things that is so persuasive about this it's
00:08:38.820like the best lies the best lies always have a kernel of truth isn't that particularly relevant
00:08:45.440when we look at critical race theory because racism does exist people are oppressed you know
00:08:50.580women that do have it harder when it comes to things like you know like worrying about their
00:08:56.840own physical safety etc etc okay well i disagree with the last one you're much more likely to
00:09:02.960become a victim of violence than i am but he keeps saying he nearly got mugged three weeks ago and
00:09:09.180he's saying that same thing i'm a real man i can defend myself yeah what actually happened was the
00:09:15.600guy tried to grab his wallet out of his hand twisted his wrist and he was complaining for
00:09:19.520three weeks six weeks but i kept my wallet but yeah i mean the kernel of truth is is racism
00:09:26.600exists. Homophobia exists. Nasty sort of bigotry against trans people exist, which needs to be
00:09:35.720separated from a belief about sex being a biological category, which people should be
00:09:40.940able to hold. So yes, nobody, I think, is denying that these prejudices still exist. The problem
00:09:48.900is what we disagree about is how we go around fixing them so between the 60s and the 80s that
00:09:57.460was when we saw a real leap forwards in civil rights racial equality lgbt equality gender
00:10:06.780equality but a whole load of legislation was passed that and a big sort of cultural revolution
00:10:11.940and it was a liberal one so this all happened before the critical social justice ideas really
00:10:19.440started taking off which which happened at around 1989 when these ideas really started branching so
00:10:27.120this is the liberal thing this is when you say I am a human being just like you and I don't have
00:10:34.960the same rights the same opportunities that you do this isn't fair we we need universal human
00:10:41.820rights and society says um yes actually you do women should be paid as much as men and we
00:10:48.660shouldn't prosecute gay men for having consensual sex with each other you know this this is the
00:10:54.720liberal approach and there's it's worked it works really well and it can continue working
00:11:01.720But for the social justice activists, this isn't enough. After the legislation had changed, what remained was changing attitudes. So racism hasn't gone away. Sexism hasn't gone away. There are still people with horrible ideas out there.
00:11:17.520the liberals will say we need to continue arguing with these people. We need to continue discrediting
00:11:24.000these ideas and we can see how much we have. If you're, you know, I'm 46, I see a dramatic
00:11:31.880difference in the public acceptability of using a racist slur now than I did in my 20s. I think
00:11:39.500we have got, we've seen significant improvement in my lifetime. So this is the liberal approach.
00:11:46.020we just frown generally upon people evaluating other people by their immutable characteristics
00:11:52.900it's both stupid and unethical so but that isn't how the critical social justice works
00:11:59.980that wants to control how you speak it wants to insist that you must be racist and you must be
00:12:06.920sexist you must have all of these assumptions you do you're not an individual with the agency and
00:12:12.460the ability to evaluate ideas and reject and accept them. That's a naive, simplistic, liberal
00:12:17.880belief. And how do you, I mean, the question I suppose that comes out of all of what you're
00:12:24.240saying is, if the marketplace of ideas doesn't work for conversations with people who have this
00:12:31.140critical uh just social justice mindset um how do you how do we have a society and and how do we
00:12:42.260manage that if conversation isn't the answer because it seems to me that that from their
00:12:48.100perspective they are the bringers of truth and everyone else must accept that truth so how do we
00:12:54.080deal with that as a society i i think we need to put critical social justice in the right category
00:13:00.540At the moment, it's in the wrong category of just being a general ethical approach to anti-discrimination, which we should sort of make into our laws, into employment policies.
00:13:15.940But it doesn't belong in this category of training like, you know, data protection and health and safety.
00:14:32.580And I'm hearing from thousands of them.
00:14:35.120And I hear, and so does almost everybody in this sphere.
00:14:39.820And that is why we have set up what began as a Discord server
00:14:43.940to triage the worst cases about seven months ago,
00:14:47.300is now forming an organisation, Counterweight.
00:14:50.620And I think we are filling the gap that is needed because while we see a lot of cases when a celebrity gets cancelled or if an academic is fired or has their paper retracted, we don't see a lot of how this is affecting the average person in their daily life.
00:15:11.500Now, I hear from these people and I heard from the supermarket assistant who accidentally called a trans woman, sir.
00:15:24.420And then when the customer became quite irate and said, do I look like a man to you?
00:15:31.380She instinctively said yes, not meaning to be rude, but then got all flustered.
00:15:36.480and then there was disciplinary action and then she didn't know what to do
00:15:40.020and she didn't even know anything about the trans movement.
00:15:44.080So, you know, there is a lot of reasons why people who don't have power,
00:15:51.540don't have a platform, don't have an academic background
00:15:55.760which enables them to feel confident in making arguments in writing and defending them.
00:16:02.160And it's a lot harder for them to push back at this.
00:16:05.000So we have set up Counterweight, which works as a caseworker system.
00:16:10.320Someone will come to us, they will say, my workplace is setting up this policy, I need to respond to it, what should I do?
00:16:19.060Then we can connect them with other people in their sphere, we can connect them with legal advice if necessary,
00:16:26.800we can connect them with me if we want to go through theoretical assumptions and what they want to challenge with that.
00:16:34.180we can sort of produce provide them with a personalized package and we've had a lot of
00:16:39.800success people a lot of our members have got themselves onto diversity equity and inclusion
00:16:45.360boards where they've argued for a broader range of ideas on how to oppose discrimination and we're
00:16:54.120producing accessible educational resources so there's a lot of short articles but there's also
00:17:02.160a YouTube channel, Counterweight Media, which looks at the problems with unconscious bias
00:17:08.720training, with lived experience at work, and a lot of the other, you know, the things
00:17:15.720that people really see that just hit them in the face right now, that we, I think the
00:17:20.940way to push back at this has got to be knowledgeable and it's got to be principled. And these ideas
00:17:25.980aren't that difficult to understand. So our aim is to help people to understand them and
00:17:31.900And then to push back at them in a way that they feel safe to do so, armed with knowledge and with principle, you know, not you don't have to throw yourself on the grenade.
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00:24:38.220okay look jk rowling obviously very wealthy you'd imagine influential well-connected etc
00:24:45.480but we've had you know people like nick buckley on our show for example who yeah who who to his
00:24:51.240credit but also to his downfall during the whole blm thing in may uh of last year he he went on
00:24:59.020their website and read their policies and then went well maybe this isn't such a good idea given
00:25:04.920what they're advocating and he was removed from his own charity yeah this is just a guy who was
00:25:10.560helping underprivileged kids in inner cities he wasn't selling millions of books and you know
00:25:15.380swanning around in frogs right so what about someone like him what would be the argument
00:25:21.160surely he got cancelled didn't he yeah i i whether or not we call it cancelled or whatever we call it
00:25:28.880he got unjustly um penalized there was an attempt to destroy his reputation to destroy his livelihood
00:25:35.820because he expressed an idea that some people didn't like now that that's a serious problem
00:26:29.320it then becomes justifiable to respond to it by silencing people
00:26:34.440by completely destroying their reputation
00:26:37.400from removing them from society or even from being violent to them and why is it you know I just
00:26:45.380every time you articulate it so beautifully and I and you know I find myself really understanding
00:26:51.140it even though it's to me palpable nonsense but why these people never seem to talk about class
00:26:57.160they talk about white people as being a monolith without accepting that we have real problems in
00:27:02.760this country and america with white people who are in poverty but immediately the fact that you're
00:27:08.500white means you're privileged even if you can't afford to put food on your table yeah i really
00:27:12.900don't understand that that's um this is where a kind of modern bailey move happens so if you were
00:27:19.940to say this to a critical race theorist or an intersectional feminist they would say class does
00:27:26.180matter we're not saying that white people are privileged in every area we're only saying that
00:27:31.880they don't suffer discrimination on the grounds of their race. But in reality, what actually happens
00:27:38.600if you try to bring up any kind of class issue is that it's then brought back to race. You wouldn't
00:27:45.940hear somebody say to, say, a black activist, yes, we understand that you have, that you're, you know,
00:27:55.420you're not advantaged in every way, but one of your problems is not that you are poor.
00:28:01.880There isn't a reversal of that. We've seen two main issues come and take top priority, and that is race and trans identity at the moment.
00:28:14.260So there's often a lip service to class issues, but if you were to raise the issue of, say, the number of poor homeless white men on the streets, then it would be brought up that that is a neglect of poor homeless black men and that they have an additional burden as well as being homeless and poor.
00:28:40.900So they'll find a way to bring things back.
00:28:45.520There isn't the universalism, the humanism that liberals would like to see in there.
00:29:28.920Do you not find that, like, we've already bought into their way of thinking
00:29:33.740by even having to mention all this stuff?
00:29:36.000Yeah, that's because, I mean, the idea of postmodernism is that it is post this liberal epoch. So it is now understood that this idea that you and I could discuss things on the level of ideas without power dynamics playing into things without, you know, me not being an immigrant, you not being a woman.
00:30:06.000gives us certain kinds of privileges that that need to be addressed they just want to focus on
00:30:13.280these kinds of privileges and that is where I think yeah we do need to avoid following people
00:30:21.980down this rabbit hole as far as we can but we need to understand the rabbit hole so quite often
00:30:27.760it's as simple as saying I don't share the premises that your statement just that your
00:30:34.000statement relies on. If someone says to you, how do you as a man have the right to address the
00:30:41.060issues of gender-based violence or something? You can say, I don't share your premise that I have
00:30:47.980to have a certain identity to address a certain issue. Well, I could just say I'm Russian, in
00:30:52.880which case it all goes out of the window. But Helen, you know what? Let's just say that for
00:30:59.040the sake of argument, we accept this fact that, you know, women, trans people are more oppressed
00:31:04.500than men. People from certain ethnic backgrounds have more of a right to speak about racial issues
00:31:09.720than white people. Let's accept all that. What happens then when you get someone who's like
00:31:17.220Trevor Phillips, the former chairman of the Equalities Commission, who comes out against
00:31:21.520this woke stuff, or other prominent black people, or women, or trans people who don't buy into it,
00:31:27.200and they get attacked now how do you square that circle how do you explain that if we buy into this
00:31:34.060thing that oppressed people are the ones that should be allowed to speak you then get an
00:31:38.160oppressed person who doesn't buy into this crap they then get how does that work how does that
00:31:42.980make any sense that's that that's where the dominant discourses come in again so when they
00:31:48.220had uh the marxist ideas it was quite clear that there was a group of people that were oppressing
00:31:54.720another group of people. When you get Foucauldian ideas, you've got powerful discourses. So it
00:32:01.760doesn't really matter what your identity is, although it's about identity politics, although
00:32:08.040they'll say only black people get to speak on this, they mean black people who agree with social
00:32:15.140justice discourse. So if you are a black person who doesn't, if you are, say, a black conservative,
00:32:23.100then you have bought into a white supremacist discourse and um you are at at best brainwashed
00:32:31.980at worst you are a traitor to your own people by trying to secure advantage to yourself by
00:32:39.420pandering to the white supremacist society so we get a lot of people um particularly
00:32:46.400south asian women from hindu and sikh backgrounds um make up uh our membership who really and that
00:32:54.820they tend to be professional uh women successful women and they tend to get a bit annoyed about
00:33:00.860having to speak about being women of color rather than speaking about being architects or archaeologists
00:33:07.260or you know whatever it is they're actually doing so there's one of our first projects we're hoping
00:33:15.940we're calling out our black intellectual diversity project and we're getting a load
00:33:20.900of black intellectuals to write a chapter on their favorite black intellectual who deals
00:33:26.100with issues of race and racism and why they think their approach is particularly valuable
00:33:31.040so we want everyone from Ibram X. Kendi to Thomas Sowell and we want them we're going
00:33:37.420to have Marxist libertarians pan-Africanists separatists liberals humanists everybody in
00:33:44.800this one book and we're going to put those views out there so this book I'm hoping it'll be a
00:33:51.580manifestation of the marketplace of ideas and my imagined audience is a young person who wants to
00:33:58.000make up her own mind how she thinks about politics and how she thinks about racism and she can read
00:34:04.900these ideas from people you know as varied as Shelby Steele who takes a very sort of individual
00:34:10.900responsibility approach to people like Ibram X. Kendi who any inequality, any disparity can only
00:34:18.280be caused by racism and it's actually anti-racist to discriminate if that's the case. And get all
00:34:26.800these ideas together. The problem we're finding is we can't at the moment get critical race theorists
00:34:31.740or intersectional feminists to write anything in a book alongside libertarians, conservatives or
00:34:36.760marxists so it's um um we may end up with a uh a chapter of that book called the chapter that
00:34:46.120should have been in which i will set forward a lot of the arguments of some of the most prominent
00:34:52.600um critical race try and then they will accuse you of misrepresenting it it's the same we have
00:34:58.960the same problem on the show whenever we invite people like that on they won't come on this is
00:35:03.540the thing i i can't prove any anything i i know i was invited to join a panel on intersectional
00:35:10.400feminism and then all the intersectional feminists dropped out coincidentally and i was invited to
00:35:16.800join a panel on whether we need to decolonize the university and the people on the yes side
00:35:23.940dropped out mostly i i don't know i can't you know they they um don't necessarily say i won't
00:35:30.960be on the platform with a critic of my ideas. But sometimes they do. I got publicly disinvited
00:35:38.300from the decolonised STEM symposium, even though I'd been up front with my own name,
00:35:44.340and I'd put forward my own argument that I was going to make, which is that saying that STEM
00:35:49.560is white, Western and male is actually sexist and racist. But I said it in the language,
00:35:57.000so um you know post-colonial language so they probably didn't understand it but after googling
00:36:02.940me i was um informed that i was a danger to the other attendees and that um their safety had to be
00:36:12.200um considered paramount because it you know it's just so hazardous if you go in there and
00:36:18.860suggest that people who aren't white do science as well um helen look we're talking about
00:36:26.880you know the the intellectual aspect of it but let me ask you a pretty brutal question which is
00:36:32.300isn't this just a way to exploit white guilt? I think we have to assume goodwill I think there's
00:36:41.280always going to be opportunists in any kind of movement I think Shelby Steele is the person who
00:36:49.860addressed white guilt and um as sort of how that can be exploited at most length but whenever we're
00:36:57.320dealing with any individual unless there's really strong evidence that they are um seeking power
00:37:03.720um for themselves in an opportunistic way i think we have to assume that they genuinely believe
00:37:09.020what they say they believe and we have to try and address um those ideas and and try to find
00:37:15.940some common ground and move them from them a bit if we can. You know you talk about finding common
00:37:22.820ground but isn't that practically impossible if people don't want to engage in a debate or a
00:37:26.740conversation? There are many people with whom it is literally impossible because they just won't
00:37:33.500talk to you at all so if you know someone like Robin DiAngelo just always refuses to debate with
00:37:42.760any black intellectual or anyone who disagrees with her so yes then you can't do anything yeah
00:37:51.460and you can't if somebody really is sucked deeply into an ideology it may be almost impossible to
00:38:00.860get them out you know we've seen people join cults before and the difficulty that they have
00:38:08.760they have to realize the problem for themselves usually but i think there's a very small number
00:38:15.100of people who really are committed um ideologues in this way so i i took the tribes test it's for
00:38:22.860america so i shouldn't have done really but um and that shows that um only 12 percent of people
00:38:29.600um are progressive activists who um could have these ideas and it included me among that 12
00:38:37.660really so i think there really is a small number of people who um hold these ideas really strongly
00:38:47.540and then there's a large number of people who are condoning and enabling them because they
00:38:55.080don't understand um that this isn't a liberal and friendly thing or because they're afraid of being
00:39:01.240considered racist or sexist or you know who wants to seem to stand against social justice
00:39:08.400but quite often I'll get a an email from someone saying I think I'm the only person in my institution
00:39:15.180who has has any concerns about this and I'll be able to say no actually you're not would you like
00:39:21.520me to introduce you and and that's another major thing that that we're doing we're introducing
00:39:27.560people to each other and emboldening them they're finding people in their own profession and even in
00:39:33.200their own organization um who they didn't realize had the same worries that they did and we can kind
00:39:39.580of reach a kind of tipping point. Helen the one thing that I always find really sad about this
00:39:47.120obviously people losing their jobs having their careers blighted is sad the thing that I find
00:39:51.760really tragic is when this tears apart families we get emails from people saying my daughter no
00:39:57.600longer speaks to me my son and daughter have fallen apart as a result of this is that particularly
00:40:02.760common or does that tend to be in the minority i don't i when i've if you read um reniedo lodge
00:40:10.220um for example i've just finished natives by akala and we're looking at people who are mixed
00:40:17.840race but who identify as black because of how um people are do tend to be racialized um and yeah
00:40:27.100there's uh there's an alienation that can occur if you get too deeply into these ideas i've um one
00:40:35.260case study that we're about to sort of anonymously talk about as well is about a parent of an eight
00:40:43.460year old boy who has been taught about white supremacy and anti-blackness and has become very
00:40:50.020upset and he isn't sure how to think now about his parents you know his mother is white his father
00:40:55.200is black what um is he supposed to think about this is is he half bad and this is the really kind
00:41:03.300of upsetting thing and i know how easy it is to get sucked into this when i was researching for
00:41:10.520one of our papers i read about six of these books in two days and then i decided to try and unwind
00:41:17.000by watching csi or something and there was a scene in which a mixed race student graduated and she
00:41:23.300came out and she hugged her parents and i thought oh look how lovely she she loves her mother even
00:41:28.840though she's white i think what what has happened to my brain and i it it's really horrible
00:41:37.700uh helen and uh i think it's so exciting that with counterweight you're giving people a way
00:41:44.920to not get cancelled and to to to to be able to express themselves and to think about the stuff
00:41:51.620honestly with integrity and i think that would be a really important part of the process of pushing
00:41:56.800back uh we hope that with what we do on this show giving voices to different people we're giving
00:42:02.080people at least an opportunity as you say to know that they're not the only ones that is such
00:42:07.180a huge chunk of the feedback that we get as well. Do you think that although all those things are
00:42:15.080very good, there's going to have to be some legislative changes in the future because
00:42:21.300of how deeply embedded these ideas are now within the legal framework? I mean, a lot of people are
00:42:28.060now taking a critical look at the Equalities Act of 2010 in the UK. Do you think there is
00:42:33.860some legislative work to do on this as well. I do. I mean, I am not, I'm not qualified to speak
00:42:40.500on law very well, but we have been talking to lawyers about it. And what seems like the thing
00:42:49.260to do is to take the part of the Equality Act, which speaks of philosophical beliefs as a
00:42:55.840protected characteristic and define that much more clearly as viewpoint diversity. So we have
00:43:03.860a situation where a Christian employer could not force a Muslim employee to be trained to believe
00:43:11.600that Jesus is the son of God. We also need to have the right for people to opt out of being
00:43:19.260trained um to detoxify their masculinity or um you know they're overcome their whiteness and
00:43:26.440their white fragility people have to be able to say i don't believe what you believe and i don't
00:43:31.500have to and helen why is it that certain industries seem more prone to this than others i mean it looks
00:43:38.900to the at this point that most of them are toppling like dominoes but the first ones to
00:43:43.840full work the arts and those types of industries i i think obviously this is coming from the the
00:43:50.940humanities there's a departure from um sort of in empiricism and rationalism and liberalism
00:43:59.620in the humanities anyway because it's a largely um about thought experiments about um about human
00:44:07.940emotion and experience so there's it's going to be we're going to find more of this kind of theory
00:44:14.820arising in um cultural studies than we are in physics so that's not really um surprising but
00:44:23.760i don't but we we see the effects that it has um on the sciences and um sort of uh indirectly
00:44:31.640and even some scientists um i've just written a response to to one of them who thinks our fat
00:44:39.660studies paper should be reinstated we agree it should so um uh where he argues that um you know
00:44:47.300that fat studies um really isn't such a terrible thing and people should be allowed to to argue
00:44:53.520for it and i think yes they should but it still is actually um not it is very it is radically
00:44:59.960anti-scientific and so i'm going i'm going to point out that it's both silly and dangerous
00:45:05.860it's an interesting point i mean if you think about it we've had so much talk about the need
00:45:10.800for censoring people who are skeptical about lockdown or the efficacy of vaccines or whatever
00:45:16.100else but for the most part until this point at least you've been able to tell people to to be
00:45:21.860overweight which is terrible for them with with no censorship whatsoever it's it's it's an area
00:45:27.820that needs to be sort of looked at, isn't it?
00:45:30.540Yeah, I mean, this is where we need, again, some nuance,
00:45:33.620which just doesn't come with the sort of really simplistic
00:45:38.520black-and-white social justice approach.
00:45:41.160There's always a kernel of truth in there.
00:45:43.640There is evidence that heavily overweight people
00:45:47.760are less likely to be offered jobs which their weight is irrelevant too.
00:45:53.840so and there's evidence that um they're less likely to visit their doctor with any other
00:45:59.500kind of problem because they know the doctor will just tell them to lose weight so you know
00:46:03.900there are problems there there's a need for advocacy but it can't be anti-scientific that
00:46:09.540needs to accept that um obesity is a genuine um problem that it is a health um condition that
00:46:19.760needs treating and that it isn't a reason to be unkind to or discriminate against obese people
00:46:27.680it shouldn't it's not really that complicated but um social justice makes it so
00:46:34.300and helen what is the end game because it has to be an end game to what these people want what do
00:46:41.420they actually want i think and is it attainable is the second part to that question i would add
00:46:46.400I unlike with something like Marxism where there's a clear end goal of the proletariat owning the means of production that isn't what we're seeing with social justice people are feeling as though they have awoken to a reality that they didn't realize was there.
00:47:07.000And they're still feeling at the beginning stages where we're picking apart these dominant discourses that make us believe that men are stronger than women or that people who have a penis are a man or that racism underlies everything.
00:47:26.000We have to, there's, it still feels very much like it's at a beginning stage. So the project is finding it. So one of the tenets of anti-racism formed by a group which includes Robin DiAngelo states the question is not did racism take place, but how did racism manifest in this situation?
00:47:49.500so that's what people are looking for we're looking for how racism manifests and once you
00:47:57.040find a way to say that it has then you've you've got it right and you've you've managed to unpick
00:48:03.900and show an aspect of the white supremacist system and so the end game is to continue doing
00:48:10.440this dismantling speech revealing structures of power that exist within attitudes biases
00:48:18.580unconscious bias microaggressions etc and make it all visible then once everything is out
00:48:26.600then there's a hope that we can rethink everything in ways that aren't racist sexist and
00:48:32.760and homophobic but of course we're starting from the presumption that any encounter is
00:48:38.900going to be racist or sexist so it's um confirmation bias at best
00:48:45.680but helen doesn't this make you a very angry person so for instance if i spent every single
00:48:51.660minute of every day walking around looking for ways in which people have been sexist racist
00:48:56.360whatever it is aren't i just going to be a very fundamentally angry person because i'm looking
00:49:01.140for the negative in everyone yeah i mean this is um if you look at um if you google microaggressions
00:49:09.420on something like twitter a word that will often come up is exhausted people say that they feel
00:49:15.800exhausted by microaggressions because they have trained themselves into this way of thinking
00:49:22.760and i mean an example i i tend to give of of it is is if we were to imagine a black and a white
00:49:31.140customer entering a shop at the same time and a white server whose job is to go and offer them
00:49:38.060help um which one should she approach first if she approached the white customer first
00:49:44.360obviously they then read this situation as uh white supremacy the white person came first but
00:49:51.100if she approached the black person first then this situation could be read as um anti-blackness and
00:49:57.700not trusting a black person to um peruse the the shelves unsupervised so we're always going to see
00:50:04.660racism in everything if we're trained to look for it so it's ultimately self-destructive and I don't
00:50:13.340think it can last especially as it sort of fractures into smaller and smaller groups
00:50:18.000and you have at the moment I'm closely following a lot of arguments between
00:50:24.560African Americans and recent African immigrants to America and there's this sort of debate about
00:50:35.360privilege going on there and then there's the privilege of being light-skinned or dark-skinned
00:50:41.340black person and there's a privilege even within fat studies apparently there's people who are
00:50:50.660heavily overweight but uh still have a kind of hourglass figure have a privilege they need to
00:50:57.280acknowledge over people who don't have that and excellent that sounds brilliant helen i think
00:51:04.820there's a very british solution to the white black customer in the shop problem which is for
00:51:09.780the server to ignore them both and give them no customer service whatsoever just grunt at them if
00:51:15.960they if they approach yes that that that would work and helen because what this ideology leads
00:51:24.360to is it leads to think people saying things that are actually very very racist i saw this tweet
00:51:31.400which went viral from this uh social justice activist saying that straight black men are the
00:51:36.820new straight white males isn't it going to come to a point where it eats itself like you said
00:51:42.340I have argued that it will combust, but I'm less convinced now because we seem to be forming more of a hierarchy.
00:51:56.120So at the top of the hierarchy are black trans women, obviously, but we're losing people, we're shedding people on the way.
00:52:05.360And, you know, gay men have sort of too often declined to be social justice activists to any longer be considered marginalised.
00:52:16.980And women have been having the Karen trope and the white women tears thing since the votes for Donald Trump.
00:52:28.480So we're no longer really considered marginalised either.
00:52:31.580I think it will narrow down, it will become an extremist movement, it's going to be difficult to counteract, but it's going to have to self-destruct at some point because it just doesn't make any sense, it doesn't have an end goal that is achievable.
00:52:57.460as we wrap up the interview we're coming close to the end now i i'm curious uh because you
00:53:04.240mentioned advising people to vote for joe biden at the top of the interview given everything that
00:53:09.460we've talked about why are you advocating that people should vote for the party that is pushing
00:53:16.040through some of these ideas because there are so many other ideas as well i focus very much
00:53:22.400on critical social justice issues because that's what i've studied i was a liberal feminist and i
00:53:28.740was of the humanities so i'm addressing this problem because i want to fix the left i want
00:53:34.120to make it electable again i don't address problems on the right um because i i don't
00:53:40.900think there's a right way to do conservatism i recognize the need for conservatives i you know
00:53:46.920And I respect ethical Conservatives and their input that we need as people there saying, can we conserve some of the good stuff, please?
00:53:58.720So, you know, yeah, I can respect Conservatives, but I'm focused on the left because I share the economic positions and the social positions of the left.
00:54:09.860No, no, no. But that part I get. But what I'm getting at is, you know, we have this capital, the storming of the capital, which Francis and I both obviously condemned straight away. And frankly, there were a lot of Trump supporters who got upset about that. But we don't care. That needed to be condemned, just like BLM violence needed to be condemned. Right. But the moment it happened, Joe Biden comes out and makes it all about race. Right. So you've just advised people to vote for somebody. I know it sounds like I'm having a go.
00:54:38.280you i'm just trying to think this out in my i'm not having a go you at all but you have advised
00:54:42.680people to vote for a guy who's literally as his first action in in this heated moment makes
00:54:49.680everything about race we know yeah when if the democrats get in then we know that the fight
00:54:55.700against critical social justice is going to need to become more intense so that that's not um i
00:55:02.240don't have any kind of belief that if we vote left-wing governments in, then all the social
00:55:09.240justice problems will disappear. They won't. They will get emboldened. However, we do now have an
00:55:16.900opportunity, or Americans do, to reject this idea that we all need to gather together and oppose
00:55:25.860the right. So that's what's often said to me, why are you criticising the left when you're on the
00:55:31.520left we should be solidarity against the right well now in the the democratic party has won
00:55:38.600this is the time for the liberal lefties for the socialists um who uh value reason and evidence
00:55:46.080and are not social justice activists to to push back at this to try and actually get their own
00:55:51.900house in order they don't have the excuse of fighting trumpism anymore they need to sort their
00:55:58.940shit out but there's one question that i actually really wanted to ask because we talk about
00:56:05.200privilege yet we don't talk about a privilege that i believe really exists and no one seems
00:56:10.580to want to address which is beauty privilege i'm very privileged but we joke about it it is a real
00:56:17.000thing but we no one talks about it you're more likely to be you're more likely to be more popular
00:56:21.460have more jobs offered to you if you're hot why don't we talk actually hot high is a massive
00:56:26.640privilege we're all revealing all our sore spots at this point but but yeah I mean you know what
00:56:32.840I actually think if you made beauty privilege that big people would actually claim to be
00:56:37.400privileged they'd be like yeah I'm really privileged I'm so handsome yeah no one's
00:56:41.480gonna say I'm ugly I'm oppressed yeah exactly I mean this is um when it comes to something that
00:56:48.580that's innate um there's often you know there's been a lot of feminist um objection to uh beauty
00:56:56.020privilege because it is essentially sexualising women and taking away any focus on them as
00:57:04.640people. There's pressure to be beautiful. So there's that kind of thing. But we don't
00:57:10.440see a focus on the kind of issues that really are a lottery. So intelligence, beauty, whether
00:57:20.180you come from a supportive and loving family these are really um individual and genetic
00:57:26.140things that that we can't do much about socially so it's not of huge interest um to um to people
00:57:37.040on the left generally and i and i understand that to a certain extent i think yes we're not
00:57:42.580all going to be supermodels or sports stars or um you know quantum physicists or whatever we're
00:57:49.760going to have quite a few of us being quite average and we need for those people to also have
00:57:56.040work that isn't um soul destroying and that they can afford to live on yeah they can host a youtube
00:58:02.840show helen i wanted to just first of all to say from both francis and i that uh we're really glad
00:58:11.220the counterweight is now a thing uh we will be supporting it with everything that we've got we
00:58:16.520encourage all our viewers to go and check it out and to become members of that and the free speech
00:58:21.140union because these are two organizations that will be critical in in dealing with some of the
00:58:26.440problems that we've created for ourselves so thank you for coming on the show and thank you for
00:58:31.260starting it and before we let you go as you know we have one more question for you which is always
00:58:37.220what is the one thing that we're not talking about as a society that we really should be
00:58:42.400OK, so here's the thing. And as I've pointed out, I am quite single minded. There's often this argument about whether or not the implicit association test works and whether unconscious bias training works. And this is what it revolves around. And, you know, there's a lot of evidence that it doesn't.
00:59:00.280But what gets missed with this conversation is that your employer doesn't actually have the right to know what's going on in your head in the first place.
00:59:09.500You can have whatever biases you want.
00:59:12.880What they have the right to demand is that you behave well to your colleagues.
00:59:17.840So there needs to be more focus on the individual's freedom of conscience and their freedom to keep their conscience private.
00:59:27.240Absolutely. And there's another question I want to ask before we go, Helen.
00:59:30.280are we white and fragile you are the two of you are i am slightly brown and very resilient
00:59:37.560uh i'm afraid brown fragility is also a thing and um for fuck's sake
00:59:42.880well excellent on that very happy note helen tell everybody obviously people should get
00:59:51.320cynical theories if they haven't already where can they uh find out more about counterweight
00:59:56.220Okay, so there's counterweightsupport.com is the website, which hopefully by the time this airs will be up. And there's Counterweight Media on YouTube, where we have a lot of short informational videos. And you can seek a caseworker if you need one or just resources by going to either of those.
01:00:17.500fantastic thank you so much for coming back