Anyone else seeing LWD Director Viv Pointon’s posts about Sonia Sodha?

[IWantToMakeTea]

Did anyone catch the comments LWD director Viv Pointon made about Sonia Sodha? She’s getting massive backlash online for explicitly targeting Sonia’s heritage and ethnicity.

Just to be 100% clear, I am and remain completely gender-critical— but I did end up leaving the LWD and WRN groups a while ago simply because of how some people, like Viv, were behaving behind the scenes.

The group chats just felt incredibly messy, bitchy, and unmoderated. Instead of being a supportive or organised space, they were frequently filled with general nastiness towards each other, a bizarre amount of hate directed at former Labour MP Rosie Duffield, and some shocking antisemitic comments. Viv herself was often a central part of that unpleasant atmosphere. A lot of the time, it was just constant chatty bullshit rather than anything actually relevant to GC campaign work. There were some bitchy LWD messages that got leaked to a newspaper a few months back. These are grown women behaving like playground bullies. I was going to go to the conference and attend the fringe group, but I decided not to go, though I might watch the videos on YouTube later.

Being in those groups was really eye-opening because it showed me the GC movement isn't 'love all around'. Maybe I was just a bit naive! Even though the core beliefs are massively important, seeing a director behave like that online to Sonia Sodha just reminds me that some people in the movement can end up doing more harm than good with their behaviour.

What does everyone else think?

As the second generation immigrant you can’t win. I was born the UK and I have lived share all my life, but if truth is to be told I’ve always been other in the UK ironically the only time I’m made to feel British is when I’m in another country on holiday where the first thing they say is your British aren’t you, even in my parents home country, they would look at me and say you’re not from round here are you? So I have no home technically speaking because I’m not accepted in the country that I was born in but I don’t belong in the country that my parents came from. It’s it’s extremely telling how when you asked your ethnicity how you’re classified you can be only be Asian British or Black British and then you have to say where you come from whereas if you are white you aren’t actually asked specify a geographical area of Europe that your parents or grandparents originated from. Because the messages white immigrants from countries like Australia, S.Africa America don’t count. And it’s okay for white people in South Africa, even if they went to school in England and worked in England, to say that they are South African but I can’t say I’m English though I was born and bred here.

I think you can say you are English if you prefer that to British. There is no law that says you can't!

Of course we can say that but it doesn't mean other people accept it.

Go back 200 years or 300 years or 1000 years and people were not defining English as an ethnicity. That doesn't mean English people could never be racist etc. It's just that "ethnicity" was not something that was ever a big part of Englishness as an identity. They were more likely to associate it with having specific rights "an Englishman's home is his castle" or adhering to certain principles/freedoms "are you not Englishmen" (shouted to a jury to convince them not to convict" or duties "for England Harry and St George".
It's popping up now partly because people feel disassociated from their natural identity- because of an erosion of rights or because some rights/values have become more universal and from their communities. And because it's being pushed by people from outside. Usually from the same country where people think they are Irish/Scottish of they have red hair.

It's hard to describe if you are English living in England because it's like a fish describing water. But it's definitely a thing in the same way Welshness is a thing.

So this is quite an interesting question, actually. There is a difference between ethnicity, religion and culture: European or Asian are ethnicities, English or Indian are cultures, and Christian or Hindu are religions. This country adds a further layer of complexity because the nationality is “British” to cover the cultural nations of Scotland, Wales, England and Northern Ireland, but any family tree will contain so much mixing between the nations that most modern citizens will be English by being born and raised in England rather than because not ONE ancestor came from a different UK nation.

And realistically, most English people are actually a mix of all sorts of different European backgrounds. My husband is British and wouldn’t identify as anything other than English, but his grandmother was Italian. My family is mixed UK as far back as I’ve been able to look, but I wasn’t even born British - I’m an immigrant and identify as Aussie!

So why wouldn’t Sonia be British Asian and identify as English? It makes as much sense as my husband not mentioning his family’s delicious focaccia recipe every time he supports the English football team.

Some people don't accept the earth is a globe but we don't have to give those views much weight.

Yes, some people don’t know what a woman is, even. It takes all sorts.

Some people think reality is whatever they decide it is, and can't comprehend, that stupidity would be applicable to all. So anyone saying no to their yes, is just as right as they are, if that were how reality worked.

Are any of you actually engaging with the fact that English makes no sense as an ethnicity? It’s a culture. Come on now.

Even as a culture it's difficult to compare 60 million people living in England to just over 3 million people living in Wales. England just includes so many more people than the other nations.

Obviously 'nation' means something because we play each other at rugby and care who wins, but somebody living in Chester is likely to have more in common with somebody living in Wrexham than somebody living in Cornwall.

Cornwall having their own independence movement of course...
Wales now has a very distinct culture. The last time it was an independent nation though it spread out over a much wider area including Chester. So it is complicated...

Also I'd say there is a lot of variation within Wales between the North and South (especially Cardiff) for example. And a huge class division which isn't talked about that much. I'm not sure if someone living in Wrexham or the valleys automatically has more in common with someone living in Cowbridge than someone in Stoke for instance...

That doesn't mean that Welsh identity isn't very strong and very real.

I think you can make an argument for or against. But having a different view on this seems a flimsy basis for calling someone racist.

This is my position too.

Why would they engage before you've explained your case? Which is what?

I think it's an interesting question. I don't think it's 'racist' to ask questions or discuss what ethnicity is or means.

You mean on the diversity forms?

Those are always optional, I think. And you choose as you wish, or don't wish,to be identified, usually. I often tick 'prefer not to say' because the questions irritate me, and as you say, it often doesn't really make much sense. Do I answer according to my birthplace, or my mother's? Fathers? Race? Or what?

If you're in Scotland we have a whole other layer of identification, of whether we choose 'British/scottish/other'.

From what I can gather there were various Kingdoms in Britain, and then people from Scandinavia and France (who were also really from Scandinavia) brought most of it together, but ran out of steam around the edges. That was a thousand years ago, and even now, some people regard those with Norman ancestry as incomers.

The complexity of defining an English ethnicity that doesn't appear to be connected just to skin colour is highlighted by the first half of this tweet, sent to Sonia after her article was published, in relation to her being ethnically English

"This has to be bait, so you are telling me, with a straight face that there is no difference between you and say… Alan Turing or Agatha Christie? "

If you didn't already know, it doesn't take more than a few minutes research to discover that Turing's family were, within a generation or so, Scottish and Anglo-Irish and Christie's maternal great-grandfather was German. There will be high profile figures who will presumably be 'ethnically English' over far more generations (although obviously not the king), which makes me wonder what it was about these two that made the tweeter presume their 'ethnic Englishness'.

Could you please define ethnicity? Does it exist? Is anyone entitled to claim to belong to an ethnic group in your view. If you reduce it to nationality what becomes of the Yazidis, Armenians and other minorities in larger totalitarian states.

My pennyworth. It's a pointless discussion. I posted in support of Sonia. In all my ten years of terfing on twitter I've never had so many terrible, toxic, racist replies. The majority of them very obviously bots but not all. I don't think everyone discussing it is racist, it's often people talking about different things, but it certainly encourages racists. Makes me think of the Nazis checking your family tree to see you were 'pure.' The bot farms were having a field day with it.

What gets me about all this stuff is the inconsistency and the fact that the inconsistencies are agenda- driven.

For example: I don't know what the precise legal definitions are, but in popular parlance it seems that anyone whose ancestors got themselves to anywhere on the Americas before about 1492 AD counts as "indigenous". Fair enough. But apply the same sort of rule to people living in Europe or Eurasia and there would be howls of outrage in some quarters (though glee in others). Even if your ancestors arrived in Europe before 1492 BC you still get told that you're not indigenous, especially if some of them are known to have crossed about 20 miles of water in 500 AD.

I'm not personally wedded to any particular definition of indigenosity (if that's the word), or any particular view of ethnicity, but they should be thought through and then applied across the board, not gerrymandered to prop up vested interests of one kind or another.

Yes. Imagine if it were possible to discuss the issues without people trying to score points and find 'gotchas'.