Daily Times

Forest School in northeast London somewhat lacked the gritty drama that played out on the BBC’s popular tea-time television show, Grange Hill, which first aired back in 1978. This fictitious London comp was a bit rough; with tales of drugs and bullying. Oh and more than the odd smattering of racial abuse. Well, this is the Beeb we’re talking about.

Most of us were hooked. It soon became an act of collective rebellion, the dashing back from school to tune in. Most of our mums didn’t approve. They feared it would ‘give us ideas’. About answering back teachers, playing truant and all other kinds of insubordination that Enid Blyton never wrote about. . Yet in truth the programme represented nothing more than the opportunity to live out our schooldays most vicariously. For nothing terribly exciting ever happened at Forest.

Well, apart from the time when Tory MP Norman Tebbit flew in for a quick visit. By helicopter, yes really. He was swiftly whisked away, never to be seen again. Ditto the gigantic fruit basket that made an appearance in the dining hall just in time to be photographed for school-magazine-posterity before being sent back down to the kitchen. All to hoodwink the politician into thinking that this was part of our daily bread.

Another memory that sticks out is the opening of the computer block, as it was elaborately named. Not that any of us had at the time much idea about this new-fangled contraption. The BBC Micro had just hit the market; a desk top that supported cassette disks but no software. And that may have been what we were using at the time. But this was not of much interest to us. Too enthralled were we by the two-storey building itself. It over looked the cricket pitch that we were never allowed on, given that cricket was for boys. And as if deliberately adding insult to injury — the second floor was home to the cricket pavilion. Again, this was a strictly male domain. A few of us used to sit around and plot a break-in. Though not out of Grange Hill-inspired delinquency. But of out of legitimate outrage at just, well, the sheer cheek of it. In our mind’s eye, we would create havoc once inside, what with our tea and biccices and all those crumbs. I can’t remember now if we ever did so or if we fantasised about it so much that I now imagine it to be true.

The new computer block overlooked the cricket pitch that we were never allowed on, given that cricket was for boys. On the second floor was the cricket pavilion. Again, this was a strictly male domain. A few of us used to sit around and plot a break-in. Out of legitimate outrage at just, well, the sheer cheek of it

We must have been in our early teens back then. Women’s lib, as it was known then, was not on the syllabus. Yet we didn’t need to be told that this was blatant gender discrimination; we didn’t need to read feminist theory to understand that this was a grave injustice. Just as my mother recognised implicitly that labour expended in the home ought to be remunerated; especially as this kind of work offered no fixed hours and acknowledged no such concept as ‘overtime’. The first time I heard her broach this with my dad — it was several years after the founding of the International Wages for Housework Campaign, a feminist global socialist movement born in Italy some two years after Britain introduced equal pay legislation; which was made in Dagenham. My mother had never studied feminist theory, too busy had she been supporting herself from the age of 17 after having moved alone from one end of the country to the other. Yet when she heard about this politics of ‘rebellion’ — it resonated with her. It was something that she had always felt, but until then she didn’t perhaps have the vocabulary to articulate it.

Which begs the question as to whether movements or ideas come into being only when someone names them.

Naturally the answer to this is no. Yet it doesn’t always seem so. Meaning that feminism, like everything else, is becoming increasingly co-opted by the global capitalist system. For profit. The English speaking western world is rather clever in how it exports white feminism and all its accompanying jargon. The key buzzword du jour being ‘intersectionality’; which may be described as a counter-measure to white feminism that not only dominates but also dumbs-down the feminist discourse by insisting on divorcing gender from class — which is itself a gross injustice given this model is preached mostly in pluralistic societies.

Yet western multiculturalism should not be confused with real cultural diversity.  For at heart remains the predominantly white culture that allows everyone else to have a little piece of the Bake Off pie; and then it is up to the latter to prove that they can balance this alongside their cultural heritage, which must always have the scales tipped not quite in its favour. This is the paradigm largely followed by western academia, too. I still remember how excited I was to see the large and diverse student body at SOAS. There were at around 40 different nationalities on our course, or so it seemed, with the Brits being in a minority. Yet the reading lists, the central themes, all these were overwhelmingly written by westerners. Thus it was up to the non-Brits to interject with stories of their own experiences or with tales of how things work ‘back home’. Which, of course, is causal tokenism by another name.

Yet this, sadly, is how western academia works; particularly as it battles to secure funding. And when it turns it attention to feminist theory — things become even more unpalatable. British universities like SOAS, for example, can have as many Third Worlders as it likes on student and faculty bodies — but the point remains that such institutions remain fundamentally charged with preserving the regional worldview. And this is what elites from the Global South unwittingly sign up for when they turn to western academia to study feminism. They feed into a system that seemingly offers rewards such as recasting them as experts in this filed as they return to the ‘native land’. Not only does this contribute to the education apartheid in this part of the world by ensuring that job opportunities largely circulate among the few — it also serves the west’s interests of reducing the poor women of this and other regions to little more than footnotes in their own history. Never mind these are the women who are leading indigenous struggles at the grassroots level; for these efforts become co-opted by those with feminist training for their own profit, whether they realise it or not. And so this cycle of appropriation continues. And as we battle it out over whose feminism is the best — we fail to effectively challenge the West as it continues on its path of structural injustice.

This is how whiteness reasserts itself. A pity, then, that this wasn’t on the syllabus at Forest back in the day.

The writer is the Deputy Managing Editor, Daily Times. She can be reached at mirandahusain@me.com and tweets @humeiwei

Published in Daily Times, November 10^th 2017.