The Blog

2020-

2020-12-19 g
CANCELING REASON III
"In recent years everything from microwaveable rice to white people sporting cornrows has sparked days of absurd discussion. It’s like someone, somewhere, is just picking topics out of a hat."

Gardening, sewing and the politicisation of absolutely everything

The creep of the culture war into all areas of life is – to borrow a favourite woke phrase – exhausting.

Is gardening racist? That’s the question British culture war Twitter was pondering at the weekend, after BBC Countryfile presenter and ethnobotanist James Wong said that ‘UK gardening culture has racism baked into its DNA’.

Citing his own experiences in horticulture, Wong said requests for ‘wildflowers’ that are ‘more in keeping’ with a given area are ‘predicated on often unconscious ideas of what and who does and does not “belong” in the UK’.

‘This is the kind of exhausting shit you have to go through everyday if you work in UK horticulture’, he went on. ‘Unless of course you internalise these unquestioned (often unconscious) ideas that are predicated in large part on a bedrock of xenophobia and racism.’

That word, ‘exhausting’, comes up a lot in woke discourse. But it’s also a good description of how the vast majority of us feel when debates like this spiral out of nowhere every couple of days.

Interestingly, this isn’t the first time Countryfile has been dragged into the culture war. Back in June, a Countryfile segment explored whether the British countryside was a ‘white environment’, to much bemusement.

At this point, it seems no area of life is safe from our incessant ‘is BLANK racist?’ discourse.

... This politicisation of absolutely everything is bad for politics and for culture.

So much of what passes for anti-racist politics these days is just inane arguments over language, cultural interpretation and offence. The idea that ‘decolonising’ horticulture will materially improve the lives of ethnic-minority people is, to put it politely, barmy – but that is apparently what many influential people believe these days.

Meanwhile, as these rows afflict more and more areas of cultural, non-political life, the public is denied any reprieve from the kind of identitarian hectoring that has long played an outsized role in our politics. (read more)

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