Readers with nothing better to do may recall my recent post on the Ninety-Fourth Lady of Fleet Street, Lowri Turner. Snobby, triplet-denying, serial kiss-divorce-and-tell merchant Lowri (far left) was most put out when the baby she conceived with Nicol Batra, (near left), turned out to be infected with dad’s Indian genes and so turned out – would you believe it – brown.
Previously, incredibly, unaware of Batra’s ethnicity, Turner chose the lucrative pages of The Guardian and the Daily Mail to spew out her feelings on the child’s resulting disfigurement. Ordure was duly heaped on Turner’s feather-filled head, and much sympathy expressed for her daughter.
Until this week, that is, when feminist blogger “Maia” linked to a number of pieces on the story, including mine, and lent Turner her support. Evidently, when viewed through the lens of patriarchy, Lowri Turner’s right to bleat “confront her own racism”, for money, must trump consideration for her baby daughter – for whom, sadly, racism is likely to loom rather larger than for her mother. As “Maia” says:
We women are told too often that we must not or ought not to speak our truth. Too often, and too freely.
It is not a new thing for us to be told that writing about our experiences of motherhood – especially if questioning the myth that motherhood is one big fluffy ball of unseasoned love, joy and pleasure – is bad because it will damage our children in later years. It is not a new thing for us to be told that we are bad mothers if we have thoughts or feelings inconsistent with the myth, and to be shamed for admitting those thoughts and feelings publicly.
And that is why, when any woman is shamed or vilified or called names for speaking her truth – even when that truth is painful and difficult and controversial and challenging – it is a silencing that must not stand.
“Maia” chose to post away on this over at her site rather than engage with commenters here or at nmj‘s, as is her prerogative. You can read my polite, yellow-dungarees response there if you like. But I’m struck by several points:
- Turner has had her freedom of speech. Noone tried to “silence” her, although you’d hope that some close friend might have counselled Turner before she hit “send”;
- Public discourse is subject to all kinds of censorship, much of it self-imposed. For example I note that “Maia”, like many bloggers, writes pseudonymously. As I pointed out to her, I make it a point never to write about people with whom I have a face-to-face relationship, obviously including my children.
- It is ridiculous to characterise such trimming as “silencing”, and to do so in order to privilege Turner’s adult, white, well-paid and widely-read voice over that of her pre-verbal, brown daughter is…words fail me.
Or am I just a rapist?
In her book We Need To Talk About Kevin, the author Lionel Shriver examines the bond between mother and child. Is Eva at fault for not immediately connecting with Kevin? Is Kevin inherently evil? Is Eva wrong to resent this screeching, puking, child who has taken her independence and destroyed her career? How do we treat mothers who simply cannot love their child in the way society expects them to?
I think Maia is correct that we are often unwilling to talk about such issues. From personal experience I was brought up by a woman was not able to elicit the maternal instinct until much later; at her bookclub my girlfriend discussed this with her friends (all are mothers) and found that they simply could not deal with the book. It was beyond the pale, too much to countenance, utterly horrific. I once had a brief exchange with the Guardian journalist Jon Wilde in the comments box of some article. He hated the poet Philip Larkin, apparently because of his poem This Be The Verse, with its famous refrain “They fuck you up, your Mum and Dad…” As a father, this was unforgivable. He could not see beyond his own relationship with his son and possibly imagine how anyone else could feel the same way.
I think the point that Maia misses is that Turner received such opprobrium, not simply because she could not connect with her daughter, but because she tacitly assumed that merely prefixing her racism with an apoligia somehow gave her a passport to bigotsville. And she’s hardly been silenced has she? As a columnist for two national newspapers, one of which sells in the region of four million copies daily and with a regular gig on television, she’s granted a larger audience than most.
Hello there. It’s me.
I think I’ve answered these points already.
(1) I’ll copy from my own comment: “by “silencing” I don’t mean that Turner’s critics physically stopped her from being published. I mean that the virulent reaction against her articles is behaviour aimed at or having the effect of stopping or discouraging her or others like her from expressing her thoughts on this subject (or at all) in the future. If you think a person shamed and vilified for speaking on a particular topic might think twice before doing it again, then you know what I mean. If you think a person who sees another shamed and vilified for speaking on a particular topic might think twice before discussing that topic herself, then you know what I mean.”
(2) and (3) Nobody is characterising self-censorship as “silencing” behaviour. Least of all me. I quote myself again: “I don’t think there is any reasonable analogy between self-censorship (as when you choose not to write publicly about your friends and family) and silencing behaviour towards others (as when you shame and vilify a person for choosing to write publicly about theirs). The one is a personal decision for yourself. The other amounts to policing what others may ethically choose for themselves. Self-censorship is not the same as telling another person they should STFU. Self-censorship is not by any means the same as silencing another person.”
(3) Copying again: “this is not about giving a white woman priority over a brown baby. It is about allowing a white woman the space to talk about her brown baby. In the interests, I might add, of exploring latent racism. Who suffers?”
Finally, in response to:
I think the point that Maia misses is that Turner received such opprobrium, not simply because she could not connect with her daughter, but because she tacitly assumed that merely prefixing her racism with an apoligia somehow gave her a passport to bigotsville.
I think it is a bit of an assumption to say that Turner could not connect with her daughter. I got the impression that they were very well bonded actually. You can be bonded with a person and still have some feelings of strangeness about them, just as you can love a person and have other negative feelings for them (e.g. resentment) at the same time.
I don’t think either that it is fair to claim that Turner assumed she had a passport to bigotsville. Clearly she was in confessional and what came out wasn’t pretty – what came out showed her up as a racist, probably more even than she realises (although no more racist than most white people are, actually – just more honest). It is clear that these truths are difficult and painful for her. She was seeking, perhaps inexpertly but certainly with honesty, to explore racism as she is experiencing it. Personally, I think her aim is laudable. Agreed, her execution is slightly off. Some criticism is warranted (e.g. the stuff about pakoras made me cringe). But there is nothing wrong *in principle* with what she was trying to do. That’s all I’m saying.
When I first read Lowri Turner’s Guardian article, I was mainly struck by how bizarre her position was and felt hugely sad that she could have such negative feelings towards her baby. I thought she must be post-natally depressed, and reeling from the separation from her Indian husband, to vocalise such emotions. But when I re-read the article, I became angrier and angrier. And when I saw she had written the same article, cynically edited for a Daily Mail audience, , I felt very uneasy. I didn’t know who Lowri was and subsequently discovered she edits out her disabled triplet when it suits her, and that ‘she has gay friends but wouldn’t want them running the country’. I am amazed that, given these kind of views, she would even have sex with an Indian man, someone so obviously flawed.
I understand that not all mothers have instant, unconditional love for their babies. The mother in Lionel Shriver’s novel, from what I recall, does not bond remotely with baby Kevin (this did not shock me a jot), and, over the years, her growing dislike of her child is based on his quite unlovely behaviour. She has good reason to dislike him. What is shocking for me is that Lowri has a set of negative feelings already in place for her three-month-old baby, based solely on the colour of her skin. Yes, Lowri is shocked too. I know.
I have really wondered if she’s bullshitting us and thinks it makes her interesting to have a complex about her mixed race baby. Or maybe she’s getting back at her ex.
Whatever Lowri’s motives for these pieces, I obviously don’t agree with Maia (who linked to my own previous post on the subject): Turner’s ‘can’t believe I’m racist about my own baby’ views cannot be made more palatable in a ‘let us not be silenced’ context. What if a white father admitted to such views about his brown baby? Would he be ‘justified’ too? I think not, I think he would be vilified beyond belief.
Hello Maia, You snuck in there, your comment was not there when I was composing mine, I will read and perhaps come back, but my energy is used up right now.
I have really wondered if she’s bullshitting us and thinks it makes her interesting to have a complex about her mixed race baby. Or maybe she’s getting back at her ex.
I’ve often thought there was something of the Polly Filla about Lowri Turner and if you’ve ever found yourself blinking at a television in the morning you might well have caught one of the many times she’s appeared The Wright Stuff, yet again prefixing her prejudices masquerading as informed opinion with the old chestnut “Speaking as a mother…”
The mother in Lionel Shriver’s novel, from what I recall, does not bond remotely with baby Kevin (this did not shock me a jot), and, over the years, her growing dislike of her child is based on his quite unlovely behaviour.
I’ll have to defer to you on this one, as my copy is currently loaned out to a friend, but I suspect this isn’t quite correct. I seem to remember Eva recalling that Kevin dispised her from almost the first moment he looked at her and the beauty of Shriver’s book is that we only ever hear Eva’s side of the narrative. Is she making excuses? Is she a reliable witness? Isn’t it patently ridiculous to believe a baby hates you? We never really know.
hello errorgorilla, i have never seen lowri on television, the guardian article was my first encounter with her, i had to google her to find out who she was.
actually sounds like your recall of lionel’s novel is more accurate than mine! so long since i read it: i suppose what i meant was i never felt truly shocked by her behaviour towards her child, she does such a good job of presenting her own case, although i recall there was an arm-breaking incident(?) which was a bit dodgy. and of course it’s fiction. whereas, lowri very much unsettled me, & i felt she was more concerned about lowri than baby lowri. and from my point of view, as a 1960s brown baby of a white mother, i feel she is sensationalising sth which is simply not sensational.
hello again maia, yes, in the daily mail version, was truly cringeworthy, as was .
hello again maia, the last part of my comment was cut off . . . yes, in the daily mail version, was truly cringeworthy, as was .
Ach, sorry about this, John, I was trying to cut & paste extracts from the Daily Mail article, but they keep disappearing, I was referring to the ludicrous ‘pakora, sitar playing & sari-wearing’ bit & ‘Tracy TowerBlocks’, the ubiquitous white mother of dark-skinned child.
“This morning as I was getting ready for work, I thought of my half-Japanese daughter, whom I haven’t seen for a week.”
Bad writing aside, wouldn’t such an utterance seem a bit “off” if you heard (or read)it? In fact, I haven’t seen my daughter for a week (she’s visiting family in the country, no problems!), and I have thought about her often, simply as “my daughter” (or, more accurately, as “Kaede”–her name). End of story.
Psycho-babble aside, if we can voice disagreement with, and question the character of, the cross-burners, the swastika-wearers, among others, then Turner is fair game. She has the right to speak, I have the right to respond.
This is only my opinion, but people who say stupid things are, generally speaking, stupid.
Hi there;
There are not enough words to describe my appalled astonishment when I read the Lowri Turner Daily Mail article (and the slyly ‘re-jigged for audience’ Guardian one when it appeared on-line).
Shocked. Queasy. Worried. Fearful. Protective. Amazed. Astonished. Disgusted. Well, those are a few.
So I was intrigued to see that she has a ‘defender’ of sorts and popped over to read how Lowri’s ill-thought out, un-embarrasedly racist attitudes towards her infant daughter were defensible. Well, phew – they aren’t.
But I do take issue with the whole ‘silencing’ concept raised by Maia. Turner wrote her piece which went around the globe (the most ‘oh my god/brow-clutching’ header is from the Vancouver Forum and reads ‘Mother’s Second Thoughts about Half-Breed Child’) and has even made it on to far-right websites one of which (to my great surprise) also think that Lowri is an ass. But then with peculiar attitudes such as (‘I didn’t know he was Indian’!! My brown baby spoils the Scandinavian-ness of my family’ My friends say she has my features but they are lying’!!) that she is an ass is a conclusion that even hard-line bigots can come to. What a world we live in.
Sorry, I digress – in my opinion Lowri’s opinions are so weird, stupid and ‘wrong’ that the more we discuss them (and her) the better it is. All of our comments create a forum to share opinions and educate each other; there is no silence on the Internet. Anyone can weigh in and no one can be ‘silenced’. For example, this is the first time I felt that I could comment, and I’ve now done so on both yours and Maia’s site.
As they say in America – ‘It’s all good’! All except Lowri’s racism – but if we keep chatting maybe there is a small chance that she too may manage to get a much-needed, f***ing clue!!!!!
And yeah Lowri – I’m mixed race BTW. That’s right; mixed race. Not that arsey ‘biracial’ or your preferred ‘dual heritage’ – I have loads of heritages (as do most of us). And I am grateful for them all. I suggest that you do not leave the celebration of your daughters ethnicity to the grandparents (as you stated) but get involved. Both ‘halves’ of your daughter are beautiful and perfect (even the part from you) and your daughter must grow up proud of them. Do not damage or warp her, you mindlessly stupid woman.
Me again.
And bloody hell I don’t think I want a reputation as a defender/apologist of racism or of racists! So thank you, Spymum, for realising that’s not what I am.
The ignorance and racism in what Turner has said has quite rightly been picked apart and criticised, including where she didn’t even seem to get that she was being racist. Unfortunately, what has also happened is that the tone, the one-sidedness, the misrepresentations (I’m not just talking about this blog) have created an unbalanced picture of what she actually said. She said some ignorant things based on her own only half-recognised racism. But she also made clear her love for her child, and the discomfort she felt at realising that her daughter’s race and colouring mattered to her in a way that she recognised to be inappropriate and unacceptable. And it isn’t necessarily her fault if other people (like that idiot writing the “half-breed” headline) feel that her articles validate racism, instead of (as I read them) challenging us to confront our racism.
Why should I care so much if a racist is shamed for being racist?
I guess I care because I want, in the spirit of fairness, to see that the promising, antiracist strands in what she says are also noticed. I guess I also care because in white people it is hypocritical: if we’re self aware then pretty much all white people have to admit to racism on some level, even if we pretend we’re not – it is how we were brought up. And I guess I care because I’m a mother, and I’m sick of seeing mothers shamed for their failure to be perfect.
(As for the “silencing” issue, I talked about silencing on my own blog, where regular readers are likely to know what I meant. If you didn’t, it doesn’t mean I’m talking crap. I feel a sort of responsibility to explain myself yet further, given that everyone here – even errorgorilla who came close to getting what I meant – seems to take issue with it. But it’s too much for now. Maybe I will do it on my own blog, some other day. )
i like u
I read the article then found this page. I found a lot of what Lowri said to be true, even if people don’t want to hear it. This is as someone who knows what its like to be mixed race.
Not EVERYONE’s experience of being mixed is postive. It depends a lot on where you live, and how you are mixed. Don’t tell me a mixed child who looks more white doesn’t get less grief then one that looks distinctly Asian.
Lowri does not say that she does not love her child. But the process of having children is narcissitic – most parents want to see some of themselves in their child. So if you are having children with someone who looks distinctly different from yourself, you then have to deal with the fact they may not resemble you at all.
Same with grandparents – I think a lot of grandaparents in their hearts feel alienated from their grandkids when they look totally different from them. Chances are they haven’t been taught to speak their native language either. It won’t mean they won’t love them – its just different and takes time to get used to.
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