Knitting circles are replete with racism, according to a 2,000-word essay published Monday. And it wasn’t even in the Onion.
The Vox commentary article, titled “The knitting community is reckoning with racism,” claims “knitters of color” are often discriminated against by fellow knitters. Such instances of hatred are seen all over the internet, according to Vox, but is especially cancerous on sites such as Instagram, Etsy, and even on the knitters’ personal blogs.
What mountain of evidence does the author use to show the prevalence of racism in knitting circles, you might ask? Absolutely none. This essay follows up on a recent invasion of the online knitting space by social justice types, or maybe just trolls, who began bullying people for having basically just normal conversations about life. The phenomenon received some attention last month in Quillette, where the issue of racism among knitters was referred to as a “witch-hunt.”
In January, Karen Templer, a popular knitting blogger, told her followers about an upcoming trip to India, kicking off the whole debate. The post, which discussed Templer’s excitement about her childhood dream finally being fulfilled, praised India’s culture and food and also noted Templer’s “lifelong obsession with the literature and history of the continent.”
Her innocuous comments about India were immediately attacked. One commenter, Alex, noted her “words feed into a colonial/imperialist mindset toward India and other non-Western countries.” Vox author Jaya Saxena also jumped on board, saying the tone Templer used, as a white person, “felt like they thought India only existed to be all those things for them.”
After several days of this and other ridiculous abuse, Templer apologized for the post, writing that her earlier post was “insensitive” and that “words matter.”
But according to Vox, Templer’s racism is just one example of what plagues the knitting community. In order to back up her claim that knitting groups face profound racism online, Saxena argues that because “hundreds of people of color have shared stories of being ignored in knitting stores,” racism is widespread among knitters. Mind you, Saxena does not provide any specific stories, despite her essay’s great length. It also bears mentioning that even if stories are out there, it doesn’t mean they are true — that the knitters actually were ignored specifically because of their race. But it’s not too much to ask that such stories at least be found and shared if this is such a widespread problem.
This lack of evidence characterizes all of Saxena’s claims about knitting racism. While she argues there are “countless stories” of white knitters saying “they didn’t think black or Asian people knit,” she doesn’t even provide a single instance of such misguided chat, let alone a case of anyone being so ill-used by it as to merit a 2,000-word essay about knitting as a hive of racism.
That the editors at Vox chose to publish this is a head-scratcher. But this has long been an issue with Vox in general. Many of the pieces it publishes seem to suffer from the underlying belief that as long as a writer holds acceptable politically correct beliefs and asseverates with sufficient gravity that white people are inherently racist, whether in the field of baseball, the creation of color film, or the act of calling the police, their essays don’t need to meet the same journalistic standards as everybody else’s.
This sort of sorry excuse for journalism is having a devastating effect on how people view the field in general. According to a recent poll from Columbia Journalism Review, the general public has almost the same confidence in the press as they have in Congress, which it goes without saying is pretty low. Essays like Saxena’s containing such a disproportionate ratio of words to facts surely do nothing to help.
