It’s not just racism and Islamophobia. Misogyny is running rife through the race riots.

Amid the fascist race riots which have endangered lives across England, politicians and the media have been awful. There are indeed many reasons why people get sucked into the wormhole of far-right imaginationland, and the country needs to understand those reasons fully if it’s going to stop this from happening again in the future.

But explanation is not justification. And what political and media elites seem to have been doing is justifying the unjustifiable. We don’t just have a racism problem in public discourse and on the streets. We have political mansplaining too. This is just as much a misogyny problem as anything else.

Race riots: white male violence is the reality

the Canary reached out to 2024 election candidate Maddison Wheeldon to talk about this issue, and she had some strong words about what’s been going on. She said:

When it comes to white male violence against women and girls, the rhetoric is most often focused on what women and girls need to do to prevent harm befalling them, or needing to ‘know their worth’ to avoid being abused and manipulated.

When it comes to a falsehood of violence against young girls being perpetrated by a Muslim and the peddling of misinformation to connect this very real threat to the politically convenient target of immigrants and our Muslim communities, there are riots on the streets.

This violence has nothing to do with the very real threat to women and girls. It has everything to do with white supremacy, domination, misogyny and male violence. We have seen Muslim women have their heads kicked just walking down the street, have their hijabs snatched from their heads whilst carrying other women to safety, being shouted at to ‘get out of our country’, amongst many other terrifying, hostile incidents.

This is their country, as much as ours. They are British, just as much as we are.

We need to stop the mischaracterisation of this violence

Wheeldon insisted that we mustn’t allow political and media elites, and the far right they’ve been helping to empower, to continue misdirecting us on this issue. She asserted:

The longer we allow these bad actors to mischaracterise violence like this – whether it be as a ‘legitimate protest’ against uncontrolled immigration, or to protect the women and girls in our society – the worse this issue, and violence generally in our society, will become.

As a woman, I wish there were a characteristic we could look to in order to identify threat or risk to our personal safety, but as every woman knows, this is not the case.

Misogyny and the pathological urge to dominate exists in all societies, but it is running rife here on our streets and in our discourse, with our political and media elites parroting misogynistic, divisive and racist rhetoric.

Whether on our streets, or in the violence we are seeing in Gaza and the West Bank, violence against women and girls is so often used in order to justify further male violence. We, men and women, need to come together and call out male violence, white supremacy and this underlying urge to dominate.

We have to come together, work to build a more equal, fairer society, hold those in power accountable, and demand a redistribution of wealth, with a tax system that reflects fairer values, in order to realise the kind of society we can all thrive within.

We’ve heard this before. We need to see through it, and fight back.

The fascist race riots are a wake-up call for us all. It is wrong to assume that the fascist threat is a thing of the past. And we urgently need to unite as anti-fascists across the country to defeat it like we have in the past. As Wheeldon said:

As a white woman who is very aware of the threat of male violence and abuse, my heart breaks for women and girls in the Muslim community, who will now be dealing with both that same fear as a female, coupled with the very real violence, aggression and threat to life that we are seeing aimed at our Muslim communities, and those who have come here simply seeking a chance at a survivable life.

100 years ago, the rhetoric was ‘what to do about the Jewish problem’.

We cannot allow this to become ‘what to do about the Muslim problem’.

We must see through it. We have to be part of the solution. Men need to call out misogyny and racism amongst their friends, and women need to refuse our personal safety being used as a false flag to further the hate we now see on our streets, so we can have the conversations that could actually improve our societies, and protect us all.

Featured image via EachOther