Not racist but.

“I’m not racist, but…” The dining room table of a bed & breakfast in rural Leicestershire, mid-June 2016. A retired gentleman from Birmingham has just uttered the time-honoured phrase, invariably the prelude to a stream of muddled (in this instance, anti-Asian) invective which could only be categorised as anything but not racist….. “and that’s why I’m voting Leave on Thursday.”

Being of sound Welsh-Irish working-to-middle class upbringing, I responded as I had been raised to do – by ignoring the utterly nonsensical illogic of the monologue (not to mention the crass offensiveness of describing in detail how he was for no valid reason about to disrupt the lives of the mixed-EU couple across the table), making non-committal sounds of polite non-disagreement and attempting to change the subject as quickly as possible.

I thought nothing more of it until I awoke on the morning of June 24th to the head-banging mass stupidity of the referendum result. My first useful conclusion was to vow never again to meet the words “I’m not racist but” with silence.

I mean don’t get me wrong – I’m perfectly happy to listen to a racist diatribe, and then, with any luck and a fair tail-wind, to engage with it and attempt to unravel the false assumptions on which it’s based, whether successfully or not. But you don’t get to say “I’m not racist but…” and then express a series of racist opinions. That is literally what makes you a racist. You can say “I am racist and….” plus racist opinions, or “I’m not racist and….” plus non-racist opinions, but “I’m not racist but….” simply makes no sense.

When the writer A A Gill died late last year, opinion (especially at home in Wales, for perfectly valid reasons which Gill himself makes clear in his memoir Pour Me – A Life) was divided between whether he was a brilliant writer or a complete prick, as if the two are in some way mutually exclusive.

Gill on a lot of subjects I could always take or leave, but I could never quite tear my eyes away from his restaurant column. “One of the great misconceptions about dinner is that nice people make good food…. But it’s almost exactly the opposite. Great food is cooked by twisted, miserable, depressive, cruel, abused and abusive, needy, compromised and shamed people.” Perhaps that’s also true of writers, and from experience seems more plausible than not.

Gill’s memoir is self-indulgent, rambling, disagreeable, unattractive and at times incomprehensible. I thoroughly recommend it. He’s not someone you can ever imagine preceding a series of offensive, prejudiced outpourings with “I’m not a racist but” – he repeatedly leaves that for us to decide, from the content of what follows.

Three sections stand out for me. His feelings on religion I knew before, and they’ve always struck a chord. His thoughts on dyslexia were new to me – his own, how dyslexia is approached, and his broader thoughts on the British education system overall. There were many times during my career as a teacher where I felt I was being asked to turn daffodil bulbs into tulips, or vice versa, which is really not a valid objective no matter how good the gardener or how potentially fertile the bulb.

And then his thoughts on critics and criticism.

“The rule of criticising anything is – first you must love it, innately, the thing itself, the idea of it, the application of it. If you don’t wholeheartedly adore the medium, then why would you ever care if someone did it badly or well?”

“…. there is no such thing (as constructive criticism). Critics do deconstructive criticism.”

There’s food for thought there, for critics and artists alike. The two instances where I balk at critics’ writing is when I feel that whatever love they had for their chosen subject has diluted or disappeared completely, and when they attempt to offer solutions to shortcomings they (rightly or otherwise) identify. Singers constantly wish critics would do this, but the point is they don’t know how and it’s not their job.

Ultimately the aspect of Gill’s writing which keeps drawing me back to it is his humanity – as a restaurant reviewer, I never felt he was unbiased, objective, fair or constructive. What I did feel was that I had a clear vision of what it had been for him to experience that portion of his existence spent on that meal. I knew how it felt to be him at that moment. A shared experience with a fellow human.

After all, deep down, we’re all complete pricks.