The Londoner: Zadie Smith tells young radicals to stop lecturing

Writer Zadie Smith has said she’s sick of being “lectured” by young, “often white”, radicals who criticise “liberalism” but will end up getting married “if the polyamory doesn’t work out” and sending their kids to private school.

Speaking of coming from a normal background, Smith said: “I really object to being lectured by people who had no place in the commons, who went to private schools ... telling people who lived and benefited from the commons that it’s insufficient that that pact was nothing, it was just hopeless liberalism.”

She continued: “It’s in no way perfect... but to dismiss it and from a position of rhetorical radical thought without any idea of what it is to live in government housing, to go to the state schools, to participate in state health care, this drives me up the wall”.

Smith, who was born to a Jamaican mother and an English father, grew up in Kilburn and went to comprehensive school, before going to Cambridge. She now lives in New York.

She went on: "I want to know not what they say at twenty, when you’ve got to our age I’ve seen this cycle a few times, not only that they’re willing to defund the police, dismantle blatantly racist structures now, i want to know when they’re 35 and they’re married, if they get married, if the polyamory doesn’t work out, that they’re not going to move to the suburbs and start this again.

"I want to know where they’re going to send their kids to school. It’s much easier to wave a banner now it’s those choices - are you going to participate in the commons? Are you going to send your kids to school with our children? Because that’s the fundamental question. Are you going to live in our neighbourhoods as equal participants not as gentrifiers? Commons - that’s where justice happens."

Real action, she told the Adam Buxton podcast, was “so much harder” than just changing “the picture on your Instagram.”

The proof will be in the pudding.

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SW1A

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