Well, Soil is Sort of Brown
Worthy of the Guardian, but found in the Telegraph:
It is the softly spoken radio show that provides good-natured help and advice to thousands of gardeners every week. So regular listeners to Gardeners’ Question Time may be horrified to discover it has been accused of peddling racial stereotypes. According to an academic, the sedate Radio 4 panel show is riddled with “racial meanings” disguised as horticultural advice.
Dr Ben Pitcher, a senior lecturer in sociology at the University of Westminster…
…claimed the programme’s regular discussions on soil purity and non-native species promoted nationalist and fascist beliefs. Speaking on another Radio 4 programme, Thinking Allowed, the academic said: “Gardeners’ Question Time is not the most controversial show on Radio 4, and yet it is layered with, saturated with, racial meanings.”
“The context here is the rise of nationalism. The rise of racist and fascist parties across Europe. Nationalism is about shoring up a fantasy of national integrity. My question is, what feeds nationalism? What makes nationalism powerful?” Dr Pitcher said the “crisis in white identity in multicultural Britain” meant people felt unable to express their views for fear of being called racist, so expressed their racial identity in other ways, such as talking about gardening.
Remember, folks. For academics in the Clown Quarter, it pays to be unobvious.
When not hearing racism in discussions of soil acidity – and seeing it in Scandinavian furniture, which is “all about race” – Dr Pitcher writes about “how the meanings of race are made and remade in acts of creative consumption.” And, obviously, “the relationship between race and neoliberal capitalism.” He is, in fact, “setting out a framework for thinking about race in the twenty-first century.” Our senior lecturer in sociology also ruminates deeply on “Top Gear and postfeminist media culture.”
Yes, a giant walks among us. Let’s all follow him.
Update:
Here’s the Gardeners’ Question Time website, in case any of you want to comb through the content for those hidden racial messages with which it’s apparently “saturated.” The episodes on the National Botanic Garden of Wales and the Chelsea Flower Show look particularly suspicious.
Update 2:
Given the Guardian’s intense gravitational pull on certain kinds of stupid, it was perhaps inevitable that Dr Pitcher would find a welcome there. Now it turns out that squirrels are yet another proxy for “our” unspoken racial sentiment. Our esteemed intellectual, who divines hidden racism by means of his third eye, is hurt by the avalanche of mockery aimed at his earlier pronouncements, claiming his words have been misconstrued, while also claiming that same derision proves him right, and while repeating the very claims that resulted in laughter. He does, however, concede that “the uprooting of… Japanese knotweed is… not necessarily motivated by racist intent.”
Dr Pitcher’s problem – one he shares, as we’ve seen, with many of his peers in academia’s Clown Quarter – is that he takes a very slim and unremarkable idea and then extrapolates wildly, based on nothing much, in order to make it sound credible as the basis for a book, and by extension his career. And so, is it possible that at some point someone has consciously or otherwise used gardening, or squirrels, as a personal symbol of racial sentiment, or racial antipathy – or some other, entirely different and unrelated thing? Well, I suppose so. But this rather slim and negligible idea isn’t the stuff of books and scholarly pole-climbing. And so, instead, he insinuates that such mental manoeuvres are widespread, commonplace – that’s it’s some kind of phenomenon – without ever establishing that any of this is the case, or even plausible.
And when the Radio 4 programme in which these strange things were said reached a wider, less credulous audience and Dr Pitcher faced an appropriate level of ridicule – from which his academic environment has apparently shielded him for years – he then blamed this public reaction on the idiocy and mischief of “little Englanders,” while affirming precisely the sentiments he now claims he didn’t air. Those of us who don’t regard squirrels and IKEA as being racially totemic or “saturated” with nationalistic sublimation may note just how often our statusful academic uses the words “we” and “our” when talking about things that, despite casual presumption and great efforts to project, may not in fact be happening outside of his own head. At least not with a frequency sufficient to justify Dr Pitcher’s claims, or indeed his career.
Such is the arse-end of academia.
Via Pablito in the comments here.
That’s this chap.
And he doesn’t look like a caricature at all.
Christ.
For anyone who can’t be bothered to watch Dr. Pitcher’s video, allow me to summarise. A cartoon hipster with spectacular combover and a face you’d never get tired of punching thinks that white people who watch Scandinavian murder mysteries are racist, but that repeats of Neighbours offer “new ways of being black”.
Identity politics is actually more racist than racism. Racists only see racial differences in people. Identitards see racial difference in stuffed toys and flowers.
Thinking Allowed
But clearly not required.
I couldn’t help but notice that Dr Pitcher, according to the “Recent publications” tab on his University of Westminster webpage, is the author of “The cultural politics of being a knob”.
Quite.
Could Such publications be a sign of Dr Pitcher’s astounding self-awareness?
But clearly not required.
Thinking Allowed is a programme I find insufferable. It typically affects an air of intellectual sophistication and great moral depth while begging endless questions and cultivating credulity. It’s where the most extraordinary pseudo-intellectual horseshit is treated with a deference it simply hasn’t earned. It’s basically the sound of the nation’s collective middle-class leftist admiring himself.
The Outrage Absurdity Index is like a ratchet. Those Outrages of ten years ago seem so stale now to our lefties. Happily, so many new issues have been noisily ratcheted up over the last decade in order to declare fresh Outrage on increasingly incidental (and unrelated) themes. While I admit it is growing harder to see to what new levels Outrage can be squeezed out of a very dry lemon, you have to hand it to the loons who do this sort of thing: they can find something new every week to blame or label or beat us with.
Personally I am getting more outraged over the use of white chalk on blackboards. I mean, people only see the white and not the black! And don’t get me started on the colour of fluffy clouds on a summer’s day…
“Gardeners’ Question Time… is layered with, saturated with, racial meanings.”
Glad to hear the University of Westminster’s sociology department is doing important work.
Glad to hear the University of Westminster’s sociology department is doing important work.
In the context of a modern sociology department, where people like Dr Pitcher are not only employed but flourish, I’m not sure what “important work” might be.
“The cultural politics of being a knob”
A draft of this “article” can be read here. It seems to be his attempt to justify enjoying Top Gear while condemning it at the same time.
Glad to hear the University of Westminster’s sociology department is doing important work.
If Dr Pitcher is one of their best they should level it and build a car park instead. A better use of the space.
Glad to hear the University of Westminster’s sociology department is doing important work.
This government really needs to starting making some serious cuts in public spending. The University if Westminster’s Sociology Dept is, I would suggest, an excellent place to start.
A draft of this “article” can be read here. It seems to be his attempt to justify enjoying Top Gear while condemning it at the same time.
And if anyone’s interest has been piqued by that delightful draft, the whole book – Barthes’ “Mythologies” Today: Readings of Contemporary Culture – which seems to be chock-a-block with knobbery, costs a mere $140/£83, according to Routledge’s website.
If it’s any consolation, I doubt that there will be a second edition.
Surely that’s a wig…
Here’s the Thinking Allowed tongue bath, sorry, interview. It’s the usual convoluted bloviating, desperate status signalling, and tenuous, rather strained leaps of association. The Ben Pitcher section starts around 15:40 and the bit regarding Gardeners’ Question Time begins around 25:00 in.
I should warn you the programme is as tendentious and tiresome as usual and while listening you may feel like you’re bleeding out. Shockingly, the programme’s career race hustlers – because it needed two of them, obviously – want us to “talk about race,” because “it isn’t really talked about.” We also learn that there’s a “crisis of white identity,” which apparently afflicts all we palefaces – bedevilled as we are by “fantasies” – and that, “historically, white culture is a racist culture,” unlike all those others, presumably.
It’s basically the sound of the nation’s collective middle-class leftist admiring himself.
Snort. Consider your tip jar hit.
Snort. Consider your tip jar hit.
Cheers, Bo. Gratuities always welcome. But it is a dreadful programme, almost a parody of what it pretends to be. It’s so dense with begged questions and Guardianista assumptions it’s difficult to keep count of them. And so instead of widening the listener’s horizons, it actually feels claustrophobic and parochial. A tiny group of people with eerily similar views congratulating each other, and thereby themselves.
‘…postfeminist media culture.’
I must have been napping during the transition from feminist to postfeminist media culture.
Or is it just that ‘post’ has become a fashionable prefix like ‘social’ and ‘cis’. In other words, a beacon to alert us to the writer’s elevated sophistication and moral bonafides.
Ive been thinking lately that these absurd, far- out lefties with the craziest theories are part of a plot to make your more mainstream lefties, who would be extreme by most historically modern standards, seem normal. The farthest out ones enable the somewhat moderate ones someone to point and laugh at and thus reassure themselves that they are normal. But that’s just crazy talk.
I’m going to produce a sociological paper arguing that gardening is inherently socialist. The convoluted allegories are abundant.
– It’s an unnatural elimination of competition and growth designed to attain the gardener’s idea of perfection.
– The weeds (counterrevolutionaries) are constantly pulled up and destroyed, the grass (proletariat) is kept at an an artificially, but equally low level.
– Even the desirable plants are largely reliant on the gardener for sustenance (DPRK-style public food distribution), and are frequently deadheaded and pruned to remove undesirable growth or elements that are no longer useful (purges).
– The compost heap is a gulag
– The potting shed is party headquarters
– The bird table is a bread queue
Now, could someone tell me where I collect my wheelbarrow full of public money?
It’s basically the sound of the nation’s collective middle-class leftist admiring himself.
Misread that as “It’s basically the sound of the nation’s conservative middle-class leftist admiring himself”.
Which is also true. For there is none so conservative stricto sensu as the modern British leftist.
I’m going to produce a sociological paper arguing that gardening is inherently socialist.
You’re not supposed to make it look easy.
‘…postfeminist media culture.’
I must have been napping during the transition from feminist to postfeminist media culture.
Or is it just that ‘post’ has become a fashionable prefix like ‘social’ and ‘cis’. In other words, a beacon to alert us to the writer’s elevated sophistication and moral bonafides.
I usually interpret it as a sly conceit. Post*isms, like Feminism, is a sly way of admitting that it is actually the status quo without making it explicit.
…claimed the programme’s regular discussions on soil purity and non-native species promoted nationalist and fascist beliefs.
To be fair, we always knew that the rabid environmentalists harping about this stuff were, indeed, fascist. The “non-native” species are merely disadvantaged immigrants seeking a better life.
Oh, by the way, here’s the Gardeners’ Question Time site, in case any of you want to comb through the content for hidden racial messages. The episodes on the National Botanic Garden of Wales and the Chelsea Flower Show look particularly suspicious.
What’s interesting, I think, isn’t just Dr Pitcher’s dogmatic unrealism. Or even his hilarious conforming to just about every caricature of leftwing sociology lecturers. It’s the fact that this idiocy has apparently flourished with little, if any, challenge. It made its way past academic peers, academic publishers and onto a flagship ‘intellectual’ programme of the nation’s state broadcaster, where it was met, not with laughter and derision, but with nodding and chin-rubbing.
Talking of things Grauniad…
https://twitter.com/Independent/status/496993524102217729/photo/1
Those Outrages of ten years ago seem so stale now to our lefties.
For all the people who keep insisting that the Sixties were an absolutely wonderful time of love and freedom, even the slightest review of the period shows the countering reality. Just start by looking at Nero and all the damage he did, and then everything goes downhill from there . . . .
Or is it just that ‘post’ has become a fashionable prefix like ‘social’ and ‘cis’. In other words, a beacon to alert us to the writer’s elevated sophistication and moral bonafides.
It’s all part of the race and politics discussion. They’re all trying to be first past the post.
“Well, Soil is Sort of Brown”
Does that make your garden a Chocolate City?
They have to keep racism alive.
They can’t cope with a world where there is no moral objections to the goings on of the average middle classian.
But what I think the video is talking about is the fact that racial identity is a norm. It will happen and is unavoidable. And because white majority isn’t allowed to identify with their race, based on his previous conjecture he’s looking to see if white majority is out-letting through subtle hues in choices in design and furniture and preferences.
I’m sorry people, we classify things. It’s in our nature. That’s how we form memories, predict behavior. If we couldn’t classify, then we wouldn’t be able to predict how to not offend. It’s a circular self sustaining problem. So I think people may be misinterpreting what he’s saying here. He sees white majority identifying with Nordic culture because it seems that’s the only culture they are allowed to identify with. It’s the only culture left that is identified as profoundly white, but not politically censored in history and today.
But for me, racism is a dying thing. There are always going to be preferences for people that look and act like you do. That will never change. Because it is a known factor. The earlier you introduce racial diversity, the less a person is conflicted by it. It’s no different from cultural diversity. Experiences or lack of experiences early in life lead to conceptions one carries with to their deathbed.
But, we are so thin-skinned these days.
Racism used to be deadly. Minorities dealt with brick throwing, stoning, burning crosses, forced to work in deadly conditions, and lynching. But now, we are looking at the hidden emotions and seeing if there’s any preferential treatment.
Let me quicken that search. There is, and there is nothing inherently wrong with it. As long as a standard level of treatment is established, and everyone falls within that standard, that’s the best that society can provide. You can’t prevent a cop from giving his mom an easy pass on a pull-over.
To show how frustratingly meaningless it is these days…
A common racial stereotype is associating a favorite food with a particular race. If I were to be super sensitive and avoid mentioning this food item around people of a certain racial group, am I being racist? If I mention it, am I being racist? The very fact that someone can find both scenarios racist just make the classification of offense meaningless.
The Travails of the Muddled Class
This is coming from the same “language is inherently racist/sexist/homophobic” theme that tells us the term “nonwhite” is racist (because, obviously, it implies that “white” is the default state, and that the important thing to note is the fact of a deviation and not it’s specific substance.)
white people who watch Scandinavian murder mysteries are racist
I did find something disquieting about watching Kurt Wallander lose his marbles to Alzheimer’s, but my initial thought was that they were wrecking the franchise by giving him an incurable disease that he can’t rise above to do police work.
Now I know that it was my own racism that was troubling me.
Enlightenment is our friend.
Here’s my racism for 2014, thus far.
And for 2013.
My soil is actually gray when it dries. I had a gray cat who was difficult to see when she just sat there on the ground.
He sees white majority identifying with Nordic culture because it seems that’s the only culture they are allowed to identify with. It’s the only culture left that is identified as profoundly white, but not politically censored in history and today.
Do people really identify with it ? Is there any evidence or is it just an assertion which is used to confirm the hypothesis ? A lot of people liked the Three Tenors, does that mean the opera is a subtle expression of white identity ? The interest in things Nordic, to the extent that it actually exists, is probably no more than the current craze, something else will be along soon. As far as not being politically censored goes that is only because the left has got it into its collective silly head that Scandinavia represents the ideal social democracy that we should all be copying, so by the same logic the left are covert white identity seekers.
Here’s my racism for 2014, thus far.
All your own? I’m impressed.
Beautiful garden Dicentra, I take my battered gardening trilby off to you. My garden soil is a mixture of 50% stones and 49% molluscs, the remainder seems to be some sort of growing medium as the weeds like it, there’s rumoured to be a bit of thin loam in there somewhere but I think it’s just a myth.
My new book, Consuming Race (Routledge, 2014), explores how the meanings of race are made and remade in acts of creative consumption […] finding race in some unusual and unexpected places, it gives us some fresh and innovative ways of thinking about the centrality of race to our lives.
Surely the man should start by investigating his own hair?
It’s the most racist hair I think I’ve ever seen. He is literally just a few short days growth followed by some strategic shaving from becoming an Adolf Hitler impersonator.
Now there was someone who was genuinely in the thrall of a visceral need to see everything in terms of race.
Comments are disabled for this video.
Why ever so one wonders?
It’s truly nauseating to hear him – with his brimming book shelf including copies of Adorno, Derrida and other usual suspects – smugly declare that:
“It shows how, in fact, are lives are saturated with racial meaning; often in ways that we don’t always fully recognize, or understand”
In other words, “we” simply are all racists, but have failed to recognize it. And through some pseudo-Freudian maneuvering, the good Doctor, as an expert in such things naturally, wants to show how our racism simply seeps out of every pore despite our own natural inclinations.
He has slipped in one of those little preemptive strikes that any denial that you are not racist and that he’s talking out of his a*** will be used as proof of this hypothesis.
Here’s my racism for 2014, thus far.
Your Klan membership is in the mail.
How do we account for the enduring popularity of the BBC TV motoring show Top Gear?
Oh, well I don’t know – probably something to do with consistently high viewing figures?
Really, you have to wonder at someone who claims to be knowledgeable about pop culture yet who seems completely unable to grasp the concept of ratings.
Thinking Allowed is a programme I find insufferable.
That programme makes my skin crawl.
The presenter has hair almost as weird as Dr Ben Pitcher’s.
And so instead of widening the listener’s horizons, it actually feels claustrophobic and parochial.
That.
@Thornavis.
i support the Norwegians during the skiing season.
must be my Nordic blood..
i have blond hair, a scandi surname, and live in the viking-descended north of england 🙂
certainly nothing to do with them being perfect lefties!
The interest in things Nordic, to the extent that it actually exists, is probably no more than the current craze, something else will be along soon.
I didn’t even know there was a Nordic craze, never mind one that appeals to a “crisis in white identity”. Must be reading the wrong style magazines.
i have blond hair, a scandi surname, and live in the viking-descended north of england 🙂
Then sir as a South Saxon loyal to the Kingdom of Wessex you are my sworn foe ! We must meet at dawn with our identity swords drawn.
Here’s my racism for 2014, thus far.
And for 2013.
Hmmm. Well done. At least for sightseeing, you might find bits of Telegraph Hill to be of interest . . .
“Speaking on the same programme, Lola Young, a crossbench peer and former professor of cultural studies, backed Dr Pitcher’s analysis. She added: “I remember back in the late 80s-early 90s when rhododendrons were seen as this huge problem, and people were talking about going out rhododendron-bashing. That was at a time when ‘Paki-bashing’ was something that was all too prevalent on our streets.”
Let me get this straight. Thousands of gardeners didn’t like Pakistanis so they channeled their racism into uprooting rhododendrons?
“I remember back in the late 80s-early 90s when rhododendrons were seen as this huge problem,
That’s because they are, when they get into woods they smother all the ground flora. I suppose she’ll be telling us that there’s nothing bad about Japanese Knotweed next and that attempting to control it is a modern version of the yellow peril fear.
Here in the Midwest we are dealing with the Asiatic Carp, a invasive Chinese fish that crowds out native species, disrupts river ecosystems and is threatening to invade the Great Lakes. But John Hoffmann, a Minnesota state senator (and a Democrat) sees racism in the name “Asiatic Carp” and recommends a new name be found, something more inclusive and free of anti-Asiatic bias. Senator Hoffmann is open for suggestions.
@Elrond
I suggest, “Minnesota State Senator John Hoffman Is A Fucking Idiot Carp.”