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?

But 1492 wasn't just plucked out of the air was it?

If you think the grandchildren of French/German/Polish immigrants are English but the grandchildren of African/West Indian/Indian immigrants arent I think that is racist.

What does it make you if you think they are all English with a non English heritage?

The arbitrary part is deciding that immigration to the Americas before 1492 doesn't count as immigration.

This is playground level pettiness.
Sonia Sodha is a Queen.

I just want to make something clear. If there is ever any repatriation of people who emmigrated to America the Germans are getting Trump.

Viv's initial tweet read

Why is it that those of us who are born of English heritage, going back generations, are denied our ethnicity and called racist by people whose families moved here in the last generation or two? Why are English people the only group denied our own cultural identity? My emphasis.

She was already muddying the waters between cultural identity and ethnicity.

Whatever TheignT wants to be.

I think FIFA rules are as good as any if you want to argue who is English, but beyond that the only thing that has any administrative effect is your nationality and where you live.

I'm interested to know how she thinks she is denied her ethnicity.

I think they are equally likely to be British by nationality, their sense of national identity is entirely up to them, and no one is ancestrally from a single place, so all you can say is the grandchild of the French person is likely to have more of a similarity in the birthplaces of their ancestors to an average Brit than the grandchild of someone the person from India.

Why not the Scots? Doesn't the maternal line matter? 😉

We are keeping quiet about that.

Irish

So nothing to do with skin colour then. How about if the GPs are white from the West Indies?

Especially since she started of by trying to set her own rules on someone else's identity. And then when people pointed out the inconsistencies/criticised this falls back to claiming her own identity is being denied. DARVO

Like John Cleese retiring to the Cayman Islands? I would like it if a Python was my grandparent.
Other than that I'm not sure what question you're asking.

No idea what someone retiring has to do with anything

Or the French GC are the children of Thierry Henry.

I explained it at length a few posts before the one you’re responding to, but apparently you’re so keen for a fight you’ve ignored that one.

Again: I wrote a lengthy post which absolutely no-one engaged with, but you’re the second person who’s jumped on this one to accuse me of not setting out a position. Which was the point of this post. I set out a positing, no-one responded, so I asked why and NOW you’re offended.

Just a famous white person who emigrated to the West Indies who popped into my head. But as I said I didn't really understand the question.

Kathleen Stock's take.
https://www.thetimes.com/article/884f51b5-57d0-4711-a1f4-a9c212c01cc0?shareToken=82dd0e9df551441dba74a7c872e4dcba

'The obfuscation was not all on one side, however. It would have been simple for Braverman’s critics to concede she is not ethnically English but insist this has little to do with modern nationality. Instead, quite incredibly, some commentators sought to deny the existence of a distinctive English ethnicity altogether. One common move was to equate ethnicity with race, then declare triumphantly that English is not a race. But according to standard definition, ethnicity is not the same as race. There is usually a common genetic thread, but ethnicity is also about shared language, history and cultural symbols — continuity with the past, not total homogeneity.'

'The assumption that if you can’t draw a clean line between two things, neither thing exists, is known as the fallacy of the continuum. It doesn’t work for biological species, where there is a lot of unavoidable vagueness round the edges, and it doesn’t work for ethnicity either'

Interesting to see Kemi Badenoch commenting on this (Braverman's original comments rather than SS

I don’t want to live in a country run by people who...debate whether my mixed-race children are English.

I don’t want to explain to my son when I’m watching our brilliant England team play football that some people don’t think our black players are English.

I remember back in the day when Ian Wright and John Barnes were playing, nobody was questioning whether they were English. We certainly didn’t have sitting MPs questioning whether they were English.

I think she may be technically wrong on no one questioning the Englishness of Wright and Barnes, but it tended to be confined to the NF and similar, and her point about MPs still stands.

To be fair Enoch Powell did say black people could be citizens of Britain but never Englishmen but he was in a minority for that view then and for years after (even if people did like quoting his other stuff). I don't know if he ever commented on footballers.

It's not just the rising tide of racism being bad generally, it's also worrying how quickly quite well established commonly accepted definitions of Englishness are being overwritten and how the people overwriting it are then almost changing the past/arguing it has always been thus. Even hardcore tub thumping patriots liks Kipling didn't ascribe "Englishness" to a rigid ethnic/racial framework. Neither did Shakespeare, Blake, Defoe, Tolkien or Churchill or any of the major cultural touchstones of England. It was always a minority view in this country, I don't really care about how the Japanese etc did/do define themselves. So I have huge sympathy for people like Kemi Badenoch, but also resentment that actual Englishness and what that has always meant is effectively being erased. Often by people who aren't English themselves and have a somewhat patronising attitude to the country (I am thinking of Konstantin Kissin and right wing American types).