Zadie Smith’s Awful ‘New Yorker’ Essay is More Revealing Than She Might Realize
By stacy lee kong
Image: Ben Bailey Smith for Penguin Random House
A note on language: As I’ve mentioned in every newsletter I’ve written about Gaza since Oct. 7, it’s super important that we take care with our language when discussing Israel and Palestine, because the way we talk about this situation has real consequences for real people. So to be clear, when I critique the Israeli government and military, I am not critiquing all Israelis, much less all Jewish people. I also think it’s important to push back on attempts to characterize critique of Israel and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) as antisemitic. Furthermore, it is disingenuous and actually dangerous to conflate Zionism with Judaism, as this list of prominent Jewish writers has argued. Lastly, when I use the words colonization, genocide, apartheid, occupation and ethnic cleansing to describe Israel’s actions, that’s based on the analysis of organizations like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, the International Federation for Human Rights, the United Nations, the Center for Constitutional Rights, Jewish Voice for Peace as well as academics who study genocide and South Africa’s application to the International Court of Justice to bring genocide charges against Israel. It is also based on the language Israeli officials and public figures have used themselves, 500+ instances of which have already been collected by Law for Palestine.
A question: is it possible, as racialized people, to gain acceptance into rarefied and elite (read: white) spaces without eroding our sense of responsibility to our own communities, and sense of solidarity with similarly marginalized communities?
I ask because… Zadie Smith.
The British novelist published an essay in The New Yorker this week that was just… not very good, in either form or function. Ostensibly about the language pro-Palestine student protesters are using, the piece was actually a confusing and disingenuous feat of bothsidesism that self-seriously argued words are equivalent to weapons of mass destruction. Literally, that’s the dek: “In the campus protests over the war in Gaza, language and rhetoric are—as they have always been when it comes to Israel and Palestine—weapons of mass destruction.” Even if meant as a metaphor, this comparison fails spectacularly. And, even knowing that writers often don’t come up with their own heds and deks, it is a fair encapsulation of her over-arching argument, which btw, seems quite contradictory to her interests as an author and what she’s said about herself and the youth in the not-so-distant past. (I say “it seems” deliberately, because I had a hard time parsing what she was actually trying to say, other than ‘please don’t make me take a moral stance that might jeopardize my earning potential.’ Though to be fair, that part was implied.)
No, Zadie. Saying “Free Palestine” is not a shibboleth
Titled “Shibboleth,” Smith’s overarching point with this essay appears to be that, while demanding a ceasefire is morally good, doing so by using the terms genocide and apartheid or—worst of all—calling Israel’s supporters Zionists constitutes a danger for pro-Israel people (who Smith characterizes exclusively as Jewish students, as if many of the student protesters aren’t Jewish themselves) and a moral injury for the protesters, whose ethics and morals she believes are not being consistently applied. “For it may well be—within the ethical zone of interest that is a campus, which was not so long ago defined as a safe space, delineated by the boundary of a generation’s ethical ideas—it may well be that a Jewish student walking past the tents, who finds herself referred to as a Zionist, and then is warned to keep her distance, is, in that moment, the weakest participant in the zone. If the concept of safety is foundational to these students’ ethical philosophy (as I take it to be), and, if the protests are committed to reinserting ethical principles into a cynical and corrupt politics, it is not right to divest from these same ethics at the very moment they come into conflict with other imperatives,” she writes.
So… this is a hypothetical situation that Smith has invented in order to make an argument, right? Which is why it may be worth pausing here to consider the meaning of the word shibboleth. According to linguist Suzanne Kemmer, an associate professor of linguistics and cognitive science at Rice University, “a shibboleth is a kind of linguistic password: A way of speaking (a pronunciation, or the use of a particular expression) that is used by one set of people to identify another person as a member, or a non-member, of a particular group. The group making the identification has some kind of social power to set the standards for who belongs to their group: who is ‘in’ and who is ‘out.’ The purpose of a shibboleth is exclusionary as much as inclusionary: A person whose way of speaking violates a shibboleth is identified as an outsider and thereby excluded by the group. It is also one example of a general phenomenon of observing a superficial characteristic of members of a group, such as a way of speaking, and judging that characteristic as ‘good’ or ‘bad,’ depending on how much the observers like the people who have that characteristic.”
Smith believes a person’s stance on Israel/Palestine is a shibboleth imposed by protesters and other pro-Palestine folks, which she clearly feels is unfair. This doesn’t really make sense because it positions the protesting students as a socially powerful group that can determine who’s ‘in’ and who’s ‘out,’ when in reality, these students possess much less power than the presidents and administrators of their universities, much less the politicians who are complicit in Israel’s genocide and apartheid. And, they are in much more danger than anyone siding with those dominant powers, student or not.
Palestinian-American author and academic Steve Salaita surgically (and concisely) detailed the essay’s many failures earlier this week, and I highly recommend reading it, but in the meantime, here’s a small excerpt: “Her reflections on student activism in The New Yorker (where else?) represent a milestone in the venerable genre of Self-Important-Liberal-Novelist-Giving-Unwanted-Advice-To-Wayward-Youth-And-Uncouth-Radicals. Most entries in the genre are merely obtuse and sanctimonious; Smith manages to also be sloppy and misinformed. Give her credit. She’s mastered the trick for which the haut monde sent her off into the world. While positioning herself as a Deep Thinker detached from primitive loyalties, Smith painstakingly tethers expressions of ambiguity to the status quo, the most primal loyalty of all.”
Ouch. But also… facts.
This essay doesn’t tell us much about the use or misuse of language. It does, however, tell us an awful lot about Zadie Smith
Salaita says Smith’s essay “tells us plenty about how genocide can be rationalized.” I’d argue it also tells us a lot about her—and that matters because, despite her claims of neutrality and centrism, and discomfort with ‘identity politics,’ it’s actually impossible to separate her stance (such as it is) in this essay from who she is and where she comes from.
Smith burst onto the British literary scene in 2000 with her debut novel, White Teeth, which she’d started writing while studying at Cambridge. Published when she was just 24, White Teeth follows two families, the Iqbals and the Joneses, living in Willesden Green, a diverse neighbourhood in North London where Smith herself grew up. It has been described (by her alma mater, actually) as “profoundly multicultural and representative of the Britain, and more specifically, the London shaped by generations of immigrants.” Writer, editor and researcher Lisa Gee made a similar observation in 2013’s London Fictions, a collection of essays about how London is represented in literature, arguing Smith “captured the spirit of the age… London was prosperous: a place where people from a variety of backgrounds could mix it up and make it. Londoners might not have been queuing for the Millennium Experience, but we weren’t yet disillusioned with Tony Blair’s government, its rhetoric of social inclusion and the black hole between its principles and its practice. White Teeth is audacious, ambitious, and optimistic: absolutely the right book for its time.”
Like Irie, one of her characters, Smith is the child of a young Black Jamaican mother and a much-older white British father who grew up in a neighbourhood where cultural mixing was normal—a place that exemplified social anthropologist Susanne Wessendorf’s concept of “commonplace diversity,” where “ethnic, religious and linguistic diversity [is] experienced as a normal part of social life by local residents, and not as something particularly special.” The fact that she was using her own experiences to tell a story about Britain that Britain wanted to hear at that particular time helps explain the book’s massive popularity, as does the fact that it’s genuinely fun to read.
But it wasn’t just the book that captured the attention of the British literati; it was also its author. Smith was a young, biracial woman who traversed class barriers through her own smarts and wit (and a robust social safety net, obviously), landing a £250,000 advance based solely on the first few pages of her manuscript. This was an irresistible combination of factors for British, and eventually global, media—and helped create a perception of Smith that she quickly chafed against, as she said in a 2023 New Yorker column about her most recent book, The Fraud. In explaining her decision to both write a historical novel and return to London after 17 years abroad, she said that she’d initially left the U.K. with her husband, the Northern Irish poet Nick Laird, in part because she “was definitely weary of London’s claustrophobic literary world, or at least the role [she] had been assigned within it: multicultural (aging) wunderkind.” An August 2023 interview in the Guardian supports that assessment, noting that ‘multicultural wunderkind’ was “a label she hasn’t been able to shake off since White Teeth. Published in the first days of the new millennium, that novel made her the voice of a generation at 24—the book world’s contribution to Cool Britannia. Now 47, the wunderkind has become the grande dame of British fiction.”
The thing is, she became that grande dame while slowly but surely distancing herself from White Teeth, in both her writing and, it seems, her personal politic. Per Gee, “during the BBC Radio 4 ‘Book Club’ devoted to White Teeth, Zadie Smith described Willesden Green as an ‘extremely successful’ example of how people of different ethnicities and beliefs can live, work and study together… [But] having transposed her own experience into the novel, Smith later described this melting pot vision as naïve. She was, she felt, right to show that people don’t give up their own gods easily, wrong in assuming that living cheek by jowl with each other would inevitably overcome fundamentalism and parochialism.” Which is why, in each subsequent novel, she moved away from what critic Andrea Long Chu called the “audacious unreality” of her debut in favour of a type of morally serious realism that she hoped would inspire readers to sympathize with “people who are various, muddled, uncertain, and not quite like us (and this is good),” as she put it in a 2003 lecture on E.M. Forster. Chu’s searing review of The Fraud, published in Vulture last September, explains what that actually looks like in practice: “The truth is that Smith herself struggles to think in groups of two or more; her habit of sympathizing with the least sympathetic party in any given situation frequently drives her to the political center… No surprise that [her] most ardent wish these days is for fiction to be a space of freedom from the long teeth of identity.”
This includes class, I think. On X this week, academic Rachele Dini wrote about what it was like to go to Cambridge for her undergrad, and especially how the ethos of the school “forced [her] to renounce crucial aspects of [herself] including [her] moral compass and care for others.” This was due to a combination of U.K. culture, which involved “tak[ing] things less seriously if you yourself wanted to be taken seriously” and the school’s, and particularly the English department’s, culture, which prioritized the study of literary texts divorced from context, political or otherwise. It seems unlikely that this type of atmosphere would not also affect Smith, who attended Cambridge just a few years before Dini did. And these attitudes, which often serve to uphold patriarchal and white supremacist ideas, are for sure present in the British publishing industry, too. (And the American one. And also generally in media, on both sides of the pond.)
Keeping that context in mind, I guess it’s not a surprise that she could both write a DEI dream of multicultural coexistence, and also see a personal, political and economic value in rejecting that dream. And what’s more, it makes a sad sort of sense that a writer who has never been able to fully shed the constraints imposed on her because of her identity, despite her attempts to disavow the impact of that identity and her professional inclination to become ever more centrist and neutral, would reject a politic that not only centres but prioritizes identity as important.
“Black faces in high places are not going to save us”
It’s that last bit that I find most interesting. In a weird way, it makes me think of Ruha Benjamin’s phenomenal speech at Spelman College in early April, when she received an honorary degree from the school at its Founder’s Day Convocation. Benjamin, who is a sociologist and a professor in the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University, condemned Atlanta’s Cop City, Israel’s genocide (and America’s complicity) and university administrators’ carceral response to student protesters, saying, “Black faces in high places are not going to save us... That is, our Blackness and our womanness are not in themselves trustworthy, if we allow ourselves to be conscripted into positions of power that maintain the oppressive status quo.”
I think Smith would agree that her Blackness and her womanness are not inherently ‘good.’ What she doesn’t seem to recognize is that her race and gender do still matter—and that they always will within a capitalist, white supremacist machine. Her insistence on neutrality and political centrism sometimes feels like self-preservation, but she doesn’t seem to see that this strategy is doomed to fail. (The Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party, etc. etc.)
Because when those of us who belong to marginalized groups enter these privileged spaces, they can’t help but try to change us. They have to tell us that the things we experience, that we see, that we know to be true just… aren’t. They must attempt to absorb us into their worldview and politic for their own survival. Obviously, we need to resist—or at the very least, Zadie, we can do our best not to help them along.
Not Bad For Some Immigrants, Episode 5: Work, Work, Work, Work, Work
This week’s episode of Friday Talks features one of my favourites: Allison Hill, founder of Hill Studio, a salon and wellness space for Black women in Toronto. A long-time entrepreneur and the child of immigrants, she had plenty to say about the myths and realities of immigrant entrepreneurship, why she decided to start her own business (she saw there weren’t enough spaces where Black women are truly prioritized, cared for and supported, so she created one) and what keeps her going, even when it's hard. Watch now!
And Did You Hear About…
Hot Docs’ Asian Heritage Month screening of Crazy Rich Asians, which will feature a special pre-movie convo between me and RepresentASIAN Project founder Madelyn Chung about why the movie was so impactful, and how far we’ve come in Asian representation since its release. It’s happening next Friday, May 17 at 9pm and I would love to see you there. Get your tickets here! (And use the code ASIANS10 for a discount!)
All the smart takes on Drake and Kendrick Lamar’s beef. (Also: I just want to say for the record that if they’d dropped their most recent tracks before I wrote last week’s newsletter, my thesis might have remained the same, but the hypocrisy section would have been so much sharper 🙄)
Sister Mary Blaze, who may or may not be a real nun, but who I am obsessed with.
This wild tale of a Boston woman who tried to pass herself off as a 13-year-old foster kid.
Defector’s Alex Sujong Laughlin on the Met Gala, the state of the world and compartmentalizing the spectacle.
The social media-assisted rise of veneer techs—and why you definitely shouldn’t go to one.
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