Danny Angus

🧵 Rupert Lowe is an unapologetic racist. His post below replies to Andy Burnham, who wrote in the Guardian the evening before that he was “open” to calls for a formal state apology for the slave trade, while ruling out reparations. Lowe was free to oppose that, and others did. Tory leader Kemi Badenoch objected the same weekend, saying there was “no reason British taxpayers today should be held financially responsible for things that happened generations before any of us were born.” Her quoted objection rests on taxpayers and historical distance. Lowe’s is framed around race, and is very different. In just 41 words it casts the injured nation as white, recasts the acknowledgement of slavery as an attack on white people, and essentially tells Caribbean and African people, as groups, to fuck off. Below, I show how his rhetoric does that, and why the charge of racism rests on the words themselves. Three tools from Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) help here. The first is Teun van Dijk’s ideological square. Ideological talk, van Dijk argues, polarises in four moves: it emphasises OUR good qualities and THEIR bad ones, and plays down OUR bad qualities and THEIR good ones. The second is also van Dijk’s. In his work on the denial of racism, he identifies reversal as one of its strongest forms. The in-group is recast as the real victim of prejudice, so that talk of racism against the majority displaces talk of racism by it. The third comes from Martin Reisigl and Ruth Wodak’s discourse-historical approach. They separate referential strategies (which are how a text names and groups people), from predicational strategies (which are the qualities it attaches to them). Asking who is named, and what they are called, shows where a text draws its boundaries. In Lowe’s post, the boundary is race. The post opens with mock agreement. “I agree. The British establishment should apologise over slavery” echoes Burnham, and the next two words, “To us”, turn him round. The apology is still owed, but the injured party has changed. Who is “us”? Lowe does not say directly, but the next sentence answers for him. What the establishment has allowed is “anti-white”, so the British people owed an apology are defined by being white. This is the central referential move in the post, and its consequence is easy to miss. Britain has a large Black British population, many descended from people enslaved on British plantations in the Caribbean. Lowe never names them, but pairing “us” with “anti-white” builds an implicitly white national in-group. The frame places Black Britons outside the injured party, and gives their claims on this history no standing in Lowe’s version of the debate. “Anti-white” performs exactly the kind of reversal van Dijk identifies in the denial of racism. Nothing in Burnham’s article is framed in terms of white people. The debate concerns a state, its institutions and what they did. By calling it “anti-white”, Lowe turns a question about Britain’s conduct into an accusation of racism against white Britons. The enslaved vanish from the sentence, and white Britons take their place as the wronged party. Lowe is not answering anything said about white people. The injury he names is that the debate exists at all. The question on the table was what, if anything, Britain owes for its part in slavery. Lowe swaps it for another, which might be paraphrased as: why should white Britons put up with being reminded? The second question displaces the first, and the position of victim moves with it. The remaining predicates reinforce the reversal. “Pathetic” presents acknowledgement as weakness. Placed next to “anti-white”, “self-loathing” implies that white Britons who support an apology hate their own race. “Bullshit” dismisses the whole subject as beneath argument. In the terms of the ideological square, the in-group’s bad deeds are erased, and simply remembering them becomes the offence. Continued...