Every two months, I plunge into a digital detox, whereby I delete every social media app from my phone, creating a barrier between my three thousand Instagram “friends” and myself. After the fifth day of withdrawal, I began to cycle along the river, arrange coffee dates, and start living in the world.
My decision to distance myself from social media is often prompted by my incessant struggle to manage a writing deadline or the rare occasion I want to take a day off (which my psychotherapist often recommends). FOMO aside, I relish in this twenty-first-century virtual abstinence, mainly because I am temporarily immune to the social enigma of the internet—updates from my nemesis, semantic debates about “woke,” or the emergence of a male politician’s illicit love child.
But there is something better that I avoid when I divest from this landscape; I no longer find the unbridled racket of discourse on my timeline and the “culture wars” that have become all too familiar on my feed.
“These disputes are sometimes discussed as distractions from more ‘serious issues,’” philosopher Arianne Shahvisi writes in her new book, Arguing for a Better World, “and have undoubtedly been stirred by those who hope to siphon off the energy available for dissent, but I hope to show that they undergird the more obvious threats to our collective thriving.”
Unlike me, Shahvisi does not shy away from the most banal or provocative remarks that emerge on social media—such as “Has ‘Political Correctness’ Gone too Far?—and instead, she sets out to understand where these questions arise and the political efficacy of these claims.
In Arguing for a Better World, Shahvisi has a mission: to unsettle people’s assumptions about some of the most charged subjects—not through dogmatism—but through the Socratic method. The book opens with her intellectual honesty, acknowledging how “marginalised people are often burdened with explaining their marginalization and thereby expending energy that could be used for rest or resistance.” (Something I am intimately familiar with.)
But she doesn’t stop there; instead, she explains that teaching and learning—even the periods of misunderstanding—is not only a prerequisite for resistance, but it can also be a way for us to “care for one another and our communities.”
Shahvisi—whose research encompasses medical ethics and feminist philosophy—nibbles through thorny subjects that plague the internet through compact lessons with inquisitive title chapters such as What’s Wrong with Dog Whistles and Who Should We Believe? Anyone with a Twitter account might have seen these questions surface from the Internet’s sewers, and perhaps that might have been accompanied by a digital boxing match. But that isn’t Shahvisi’s goal.
When Shahvisis decides to answer the question of the first chapter, “Can You Be Racist to a White Person?” (the assumption that the person in question is not white), she begins with Trevor Sinclair, a Black British soccer player. The controversy started when he was arrested for driving while intoxicated and used that moment to call one of the police officers a “white cunt.” The incident caused controversy, not about the salient sexism, but about whether Sinclair—or any Black person—could be racist towards a white person. Shahvisi maintains that to answer the question; one should examine “reverse racism.”
Rather than focus on Sinclair, she uses recent legal cases where people have claimed alleged reverse racism, such as Abigail Fisher, who sued the University of Texas Austin for denying her admission to their institution, which she believed was due to their affirmative action policy. In reality, Fischer was a weak candidate, and her marks, not affirmative action, affected her admission or what Shahvisi refers to as “Becky with the Bad Grades.” Rather than use the language of affirmative action, Shahvisi does something different by exploring the economics of racism and sexism to see how it facilitates exploitation. As an anti-capitalist, Shahvisi is interested in how operatives such as “privilege” might be tied to wages, access to property, or personal safety.
The legacy of racism and slavery, as demonstrated in Arguing for a Better World, profoundly shapes social hierarchies today, Shahvisi finds: “But just as the labour of slaves produced the wealth of European and North American nations, so too did slavery produce the moral conditions of the present day, and determine the character and persistence of anti-Black racism.”
She later notes that this isn’t just in people’s heads; it creates economic regimes; it means that some physicians (falsely) believe Black people’s skin is thicker or more likely to tolerate pain. Anti-Blackness, as described in this chapter, is not just physical but perennial. Given this, when a Black person refers to a white person who calls the police on her, does that make her a racist? According to Shahvisi, probably not because the term doesn’t come “with any capacity to cause real harm; ‘reverse-oppression’ is not oppression.” But white people are not the only target. How do we handle half of the Earth’s population?
It is true; if you look deep enough into the claims about men, you will not be devoid of demining statistics. For example, in the UK, fifty per cent of women killed in the country are murdered by their partners or former partners, most of whom are men. (For men, three per cent of those murdered are killed by a partner.) The data on male-generated violence might lead one to think “men are trash”, given that they cause so much harm to society and themselves (such as suicide).
But rather than sit with the claim and let it simmer, Shahvisi insists that behaviors associated with masculinity—aggression and narcissism—are the concern. At the same time, these are the same characteristics that allow men to succeed.
When I spoke to Shahvisi over Zoom in June, we chatted about social media, Cornwall, and writing. (Full disclosure: we follow each other on Twitter.) The queries she laid out in her book would have a different character limit than Twitter. Influenced by scholars such as Angela Davis and Andrea Dworkin, she believes the internet has “revolutionary potential.” With careful precision in her thought, Shahvisi noted how the internet is “where lots of us learn, but learning is passive rather than active.” As we continued conversing, we reflected on how those online conversations can be acerbic, biting, and lengthy.
But they don’t have to be. Shahvisi wants to transform society as a professor by developing more productive conversations. She told me: “Unless you’re going to flesh the meaning and the ways racism is structural, you’re putting us in a position where everyone just walks away feeling a bit confused, and nothing changes.”
Whether or not people want a social revolution or want to return to eighteenth-century duels, the “Do All Lives Matter” chapter sharpened the edges of online debate. Here, Shahvisi investigates the intent of a person’s claim when they state, “All Lives Matter.”
It’s a profound intellectual exercise to question whether the person making the claim is racist. Well, it depends. A color-blind person would argue that Black lives matter, but their neglect of society’s failure towards Black people might make them unaware of how Black lives are devalued.
The “whataboutery” person would be unwilling to engage with the topic altogether and would say, but what about the incarceration of panda bears in zoos? For the record, I support the liberation of all caged animals. The white supremacist might not think Black lives should matter. In some cases, they might believe society treats Black people better than white people, ultimately making white people victims of discrimination.
Shahvisi’s sharpest critique in her book wasn’t necessarily about the white supremacist; it was about the liberal. The color-blind person engages in what Shahvisi refers to as “laissez-faire racism,” which is predicated on the assumption that “if some people do better, that’s down to their own gumption, and if some people fail, that’s on them for being lazy and stupid.”
The predictable (but also baseless claims) are common in online debates where people lack historical evidence or present-day statistics. The power of Arguing for a Better World is that it lays out how the wealth that some people accumulate isn’t just due to hard work; it comes at some people’s suffering—the low wages of workers in the Global South or the militarized exclusion of African and Middle Eastern migrants from Europe.
The people who disproportionately experience premature death, the lack of free movement, and exposure to infectious diseases—on a global scale—are disproportionately Black. “The vast majority of those who live in extreme poverty,” Shahvisi notes, “are Black people from sub-Saharan African countries.”
But the observation itself is not enough; what is the explanatory power? If you’re a racist, you might think there is something defective about Black people; if you’re a color-blind person, you don’t see the problem. Of course, speaking about poverty is not to say that all Black people are poor but that racism’s power—with the help of capitalism—makes it difficult for Black people who work hard to reap the fruits of their labor. For those who consider themselves anti-racist, Shahvisi offers an apt reflection: “We have to ask how the material world would have to change for Black lives to matter, and those who take that question seriously will find themselves looking back through history, across borders and right to the heart of the economy.”
This is profuse, but part of the issue is a claim made later in the book, “We are all morally injured.” Even if we accept this premise and want to change society, will arguing in itself bring out a better world? While grim, Shahvisi does not end with despair nor present us with a dizzying manifesto for achieving the society we want.
When we last spoke, Shahvisi told me she wants people to think, imagine new formations and form collectives. Her book is meant to be a haven from the virtual noise we can’t ignore. Echoing the likes of Marxist Antonio Gramsci and philosopher Theodor Adorno, she knows something is wrong with this world, but we have agency. “Our objective must be to rattle the joists of the system, destabilize the whole edifice and let the light in through the ruptures. It’s a massive undertaking, but then again, there are masses of us.”
A Read(ing)
As some may know, I do not have a green thumb. Last week, I wrote a book review for The Nation. In the essay “The Pleasure and Peril of Gardening While Black,” I discuss Camille T. Dungy’s book, Soil, a memoir about gardening, land sovereignty, and writing. Dungy excels at storytelling and providing some care in why we should be stewards of the Earth.
Speaking of books, I have two book launches this month for After Sex, an anthology I co-edited with Alice Spawls, a text that offers personal and political perspectives from the mid-20th century to the present, setting feminist classics alongside contemporary accounts. These essays, short stories, and poems trace the debates and tell the stories; together, they ask us to consider what reproductive justice might look like and how it could reshape sex. The first book launch is at the London Review Bookshop on 16 November, and the second is at diffrakt space in Berlin on 26 November. If you haven’t ordered it already, you can purchase it here.
Some Recommendations
Ravel Leilani reveals some secrets about sex writing. Her literary secret is about being honest about one’s ignorance.
Kevin Lozano talks a bit about book publishing. This might be illuminating to novelists and other fiction writers.
Doctors in the US want to unionize. This is good news for labor, and hopefully this is a pathway to Medicare for All.
Ivorian architects are designing buildings with a second skin in West Africa.
Anti-Palestinian crackdown spreads in Europe.
Sam Huber interviews Rizvana Bradly in The Yale Review. They discuss blackness, art, and negativity.
Here is an excerpt from Munir Hachemi’s eco-thriller, Living Things.
Finally, a poem.
May your heart have space for love and care,