Frankie Gaffney: Non-Simultaneously Straight, While and Male

First : The "Straight White Male" /rants

Further on: Feminist Hierarchy /replies

Identity politics is utterly ineffective at anything
other than dividing people

It is facile to equate ‘straight, white men’ with privilege

Fri, May 19, 2017, 01:10 by Frankie Gaffney

I grew up in Dublin’s inner city, an environment where poverty, violence, and addiction were normal. Given the odds I had to overcome to get where I am today, I thought I’d meet a lot of allies among those who preach equality. But instead, I was often met with open hostility, despite the fact I campaign on a variety of related issues. Why? Because I happen to be straight, white, and male.

“Straight white male” is an identity I didn’t choose. I mean it wasn’t a decision I had any say in, what sexuality, race, or gender I am. I was born this way. But also, “straight white male” was never something I chose to “identify” as. At various times if you’d asked me about my identity, I might have said “Irish”, “a Dub”, or “working class”, but never straight, white, or male – let alone the arbitrary combination of all three. But people who talk a lot about “choice” and “freedom” chose for me, and decided that’s what my identity should be reduced to.

Although he might also be straight, white and male, it would be perverse to describe Ballymun native and founder of Home Sweet Home Dean Scurry as “privileged”. A few weeks ago Scurry established a new podcast series, Pow Wow with Dean. In the first episode (featuring John Connors and Philly McMahon), Scurry discusses Home Sweet Home’s occupation of Apollo House last December. Within minutes of him releasing this debut, a woman leapt in on Twitter to admonish him for using the word Pow Wow. She confidently asserted it was “not appropriate” because the word “belongs” to “First Nations culture”.

I replied that words are not like land, or food, or water. Using them doesn’t deprive anyone else of their use. Words don’t have owners, only users. And the usage here was far from disrespectful, insulting, or “inappropriate”. She went on, as usually happens in these instances, to explain to me why I was wrong.

Patronising preachers

A recurrent theme of this ideology is patronising people. It’s a nice word, “patronise” – kind of similar to “mansplain”, except gender-neutral. And time was, people who were into equality wanted to avoid gendered stereotyping, not invent new forms of it. The further irony is the most patronising people I’ve ever encountered are the people who explain to me why it’s fine to use words and phrases such as “mansplain”, “manspreading”, “toxic masculinity”, “fragile masculinity”, and to use “straight white male” as a pejorative, while simultaneously decrying gender stereotyping and the use of negative genderd terms. The proponents of identity politics discuss these concepts as if they were talking about the second law of thermodynamics, the periodic table of elements, or the disciplinary handbook of the GAA. In actual fact, they are using an imprecise and flimsily justified shorthand jargon. One they can’t so much as agree on among themselves.

If the CIA or MI5 wanted to encourage a style of “activism” that could consume an infinite amount of energy, yet was utterly ineffective at anything other than dividing people, it would be the prominence of this very type of politics. We need politics that unites us in our shared humanity, for the 99.9 per cent to come together and fight the 0.1 per cent who are stealing the wealth of the Earth, pitting the poor against the poor and entrapping us in ignorance. We do not need politics that explicitly sets out to divide us and perfectly mirrors what it claims to oppose.

Proponents of this ideology demand:

• Intellectual dishonesty
• Faith over reason
• Disdain for evidence
• That challenges be condemned as blasphemy
• Their own liturgy
• Strict orthodoxy
• Public displays of adherence
• And most shamefully, the regular public flagellation of heretics.

New order

These people don’t want to separate church and state, they want to institute a new religion, just with themselves at the helm. And just like with Eve and the apple, they demand that individuals should be held responsible for the sins of their gender. I’m considered part of “the most powerful group in the world”, not because of my actions or experiences, but by simple virtue of how I was born. But of course, don’t even dare mention the fact that men are statistically more at risk of homelessness, addiction and suicide.

Later on that same day my mate Eric from Tallaght shared a video on Facebook of a woman assaulting a white fellow because he had dreadlocks. This woman has many defenders, who will explain at great length the evils of “cultural appropriation”. “F***in’ eejit” was Eric’s view of her, and I’m inclined to agree. I wonder if the people who spend their “activism” on these issues ever went hungry, ever worried where they were going to live or had their electricity cut off. I experienced all these things while still a child, long before anyone told me I was just a “straight white male”.

Unlike those who need an ever-expanding lexicon to express their beliefs, what I believe can be summed up in one word: equality. We should all be subject to the same laws, all have the same opportunities, all have the same rights, all have the same responsibilities and all be able to use the same language. Now that’s something worth fighting for.

Postscript? My mate Eric happens to be black and wear his hair in dreads. John Connors actually spent time with the Lakota tribe, who love this use of the term “pow wow”. Like me, both John and Eric have overcome an awful lot in their lives. And they don’t don the mantle of oppression just to belittle or exclude others.

Frankie Gaffney is a wruter. His debut novel Dublin Seven was published in 2015.

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#CopOnComrades:
Statement from feminists based in Ireland.

MAY 25, 2017 / SOUNDMIGRATION

We are a group of activist women from a wide variety of backgrounds, races, ethnicities, and sexual orientations. Last week, a good number of the left-wing men we work and organise with seriously disappointed us. These men – our friends, our fellow trade unionists, activists, writers, organisers, and artists – shared and commented on a reductive and damaging article written by Frankie Gaffney, which was published in the Irish Times.

We live in a world where our advantages are tangled up with the things that disadvantage us – some of us are working class, some queer, some of us are poor, some of us come from minority ethnic groups or have disabilities or don’t enjoy the security of citizenship. As well, some of us have had a multitude of opportunities in our lives while some of us have had to fight our way through. It is an obligation on all of us to honestly look at our different positions within the structures of oppression and privilege under patriarchal racial capitalism. It is only by acknowledging all these differences that we have any chance of imagining and building a better world that includes us all.

Working-class ‘straight white men’ in Ireland don’t have it easy these days. They never did. They are ignored by a political class that couldn’t care less about them. They should have a say in the decisions that affect their lives, but they often don’t.

However, that doesn’t make them immune to critique. We all have to examine ourselves as oppressor as well as oppressed – because we are all both. The response to the article felt like a silencing to us and we are writing this because we are way past putting up with that. You will see from the names on this letter that we are women who have been in the thick of things. Whether in political parties and organisations, education, trade unions, or grassroots and community-based movements, we are tired of being accused of ‘bourgeois feminism’ and of betraying the struggle when we raise our voices. No campaign in this country could survive without women, without us – our work and energy and knowledge and organising have been instrumental in all the progressive movements in this country. When we say we need to be recognised and respected within our movements, we need you to listen.

The article expressed the view that identity politics is good for nothing except dividing movements, using language and narratives that have been made popular by MRA (Men’s Rights Activist) groups and the alt-right. According to such narratives, straight white men are the new most oppressed group. This ignores the struggles of women and others at the sharp end of misogyny, racism, anti-trans and anti-queer violence. It aims to silence those who will no longer tolerate the violence, abuse and marginalisation we have suffered for so long. These alt-right arguments have been used by people on the left to support the view that women, and feminists in particular, are to blame for the rise of the far right – for instance, for Trump’s election – and for neoliberal capitalism, which is seen as having damaged working class men in particular.

In this version of events, straight white men are made to feel uncomfortable about being ‘born this way’ by social media-fuelled ‘political correctness’. They are too afraid to say what they think or express opinions for fear of online retribution. Men who claim to be silenced in this way might try a week or even a day as a vocal woman or person of colour online and see how they deal with the rape threats and threats of racist violence that follow.

We are not concerned here about one opinion piece by one person. Rather we have all been aware of the increasing trend towards this particular new type of silencing of women from our supposed fellow activists on the left. The arguments mounted here and elsewhere are apparently to criticise some of the worst aspects of ‘call-out culture’, as well as the lean-in type of so-called feminism that disregards class and race. Yet they seem to be used now by some of our left-wing activist comrades as an excuse not to deal with the complexities of gender, race, ethnicity and sexual orientation in our political organising. These excuses, when accepted, prevent us from seeing clearly the state of our movements – who is taking part in them, who is heard and represented, who is doing the work. These are massive issues that have to do with how we are creating mass movements, which need to be addressed and faced to ensure that people of different classes, races, ethnicities, sexual orientation and gender have not just a voice but leading roles in our struggle. Without this solidarity in working together, we are simply imitating the oppressive structures we want to fight – the structures that say “not now, your life comes second.” It is not the straight white men who are being silenced when this argument is made.

We are working-class women, women of colour, migrant women, trans women, Traveller women, disabled women, queer women, women who are sex workers, women with children, and women who are none of these, active in our communities and committed to an anti-capitalist struggle. We are well aware that a right-wing, neoliberal distortion of feminism and what is called ‘identity politics’ exists. We know this because it erases our experiences and struggles and we resist this erasure through our work as activists every single day. It is distressing and enraging that we also have to fight against the bad faith of fellow activists on the left – mostly men, sometimes women – who, for their own reasons, blur the distinction between this kind of middle-class neoliberal faux-feminism, and a truly radical feminist politics that has class struggle at its very core. This hurts us because it erases and undermines our realities, our suffering, our analyses, and our organising, and gives more strength to the powers that are ranged against us. For many of us, it is heart-breaking to look at some of the men around us and realise that they are nodding in agreement with this erasure of their working class women friends and comrades.

Most of us have grown up learning to appease men. How to give them our space, how to deal with the fact that they dominate any political discussions, that they are paid more, heard more and believed more. However, most of us expect that the men we work with in all the social justice movements we are part of should have at least considered how they are complicit in this domination when they refuse to recognise that it exists. Patriarchy forces men into roles that damage them as well as us. Most of us have men that we love, admire and respect in our lives and for that reason, not only because it damages and diminishes the life experiences of women, we should all be fighting patriarchy together.

Niamh McDonald
Zoe McCormack
Jen O’Leary
Aline Courtois
Emily Waszak
Theresa O’Keefe
Sinéad Redmond
Aislinn Wallace
Hazel Katherine Larkin
Linnea Dunne
Natalia Fernandez
Helen Guinane
Maggs Casey
Stephanie Lord
Anne Mulhall
Eileen Flynn
Ellie Kisyombe
Elaine Feeney
Wendy Lyon
Sarah Clancy
Brigid Quilligan
Emily Duffy
Clara Purcell
Aoibheann McCann
Aoife Frances
Shauna Kelly
Eilís Ní Fhlannagáin
Dearbhla Ryan​
Michelle Connolly
Siobhán O’Donoghue
Aoife FitzGibbon O’Riordan
Stephanie Crowe Taft
Denise Kiernan
Aisling Egan
Donnah Vuma
Kate O’Connell
Natalia Fernández
Fionnghuala Nic Roibeaird
Mary McAuliffe
Marie Mulholland
Margo Harkin
Avril Corroon
Juliana Sassi
Ailbhe Smyth
Kate McGrew
Ciara Miller
Aoife Dermody
Emer Smith
Francisca Ribeiro
Jerrieann Sullivan
Marie McDonnell
Kathleen Gaul
Liz Martin
Laura Lee
Roisin Blade
Kerry Guinan
Gráinne O’Toole
Edel McGinley
Máiréad Enright
Erin Fornoff
Sarah Fitzgibbon
Cliona Kelly
Ciara Fitzpatrick
Bronwen Lang
Shonagh Strachan
Dervla O’Neill
Hilary Darcy
Jane Xavier
Emma Campbell
Clara Rose Thornton IV
Linda Connolly
Nomaxabiso Maye
Rosa Thompson
Liz Nelson
Eavan Brennan
Doireann Ní Ghríofa
Elaine D’alton
Anne Rynne
Elaine Crory
Jodie Condon
Clare Kelly
Catriona O’Brien
Meireka Radford
Lisa Keogh Finnegan
Fiona Dunkin
Lelia Doolan
Jacinta Fay
Mary O’Donoghue
Mariel Whelan
Aine Treanor
Flavia Simas
Meabh Savage
Noirin Lynch
Claire Brophy
Liz Price
Linda Kavanagh
Linda Devlin
Aileen O’Carroll
Anita Koppenhofer
Vicky Donnelly
Marianne Farrelly
Aisling Walsh
Ronit Lentin
Sarah Ferrigan
Neltah Chadamoyo
Aine Ni Fhaolain
 Rosi Leonard (107 signatories)

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