Why Everyone Is Outraged - Ashley 'Dotty' Charles - #204

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Oh yes, hello, my friends. Welcome back. If one thing has defined the discussion and discourse in 2020, it has been outrage. From zero to 100, real quick, with every single conversation, no subtlety or nuance in what's being said, no goodwill or faith in the other person's side in having any truth or justification at all. It's just cancel them, delete them from the world, call them a bigot, as fast as you can, and that gets you the most virtue points from other people on the internet that you've never met. Ashley Dotty Charles is a BBC Radio 1Xtra presenter and her most recent book, Outraged, discusses why everyone is shouting and no one is talking. Given the way that 2020 has gone and the things that you will have seen on the internet, I think this is a topic which we're revisiting an awful lot, and rightly so, right? The only two ways that we can communicate are either by speaking to each other or fighting. That's it. That's all you've got. You can use words or you can use fists. And I would much sooner try and get us to go back to using the art of words a little bit more effectively. But for now, it's time to work out why everyone's getting outraged with Ashley Dotty Charles.
Could you have realized before writing a book on Outrage just how timely mid 2020 would be for it to be published?

**Ashley Charles** (1:44)
You know what's crazy?
For the past nine months, I've been like, we've got to drop the book down, we've got to drop the book now. Oh, I wish it was coming out now. Oh, we need to come. Outrage is a constant carousel. Anytime I would have released this book, people would have said, what are the odds? You've dropped it in a, this is the world we live in. So, I think people are hyper aware now, but I think because I've written the book, every couple of weeks, there's been something that has felt really timely. And I've been like, oh, they're canceling David Williams. We need to release the book. Oh, no, no, no, it's JK. Rowling. The book needs to come out. It's just constant. And I think that's why the book was needed, because anytime would have been timely.

**Chris Williamson** (2:30)
The stock price of outrage is constantly on the up, isn't it? It's like Tesla or something at the moment. Why did you write a book about outrage a while ago? Let's forget this year. Why did you write a book on outrage already?

**Ashley Charles** (2:43)
Yeah, so I started this book two years ago. Well, two and a half years ago. It took me two years to write it. And I'm somebody who has been one of those voices online. I've had arguments with strangers. I've tried to convince people that I've never met, that their thinking is wrong and that their belief system is flawed. I've written an open letter to Piers Morgan. I've been that person that I now can't stand, right? I've had pointless arguments. I've been outraged about trivial things. And I kind of reached breaking point, I'd say. And I sort of had an epiphany. And I think when people read this book, they'll each have their epiphany moment. For me, it was January 2018 And there was outrage about H&M Hoodie, which had been placed on a black boy. And it said, coolest monkey in the jungle. Now, of course, you can look at that through a critical lens and say, what, that this is completely tone deaf? It's racist. For me though, it warranted a conversation about who the hell works at H&M. And why did nobody flag that this could offend people? I don't think the intention was to offend people. I think it was more symptomatic of their employment structure and how flawed it must be. If there's nobody from the stage of idea conception to it making it onto the H&M website, if nobody in that conveyor belt of decision making says, oh, maybe we don't put the monkey hoodie on the black kid.
If there's nobody in that system that notices that, there's a problem in the system. But that doesn't warrant knee jerk outrage because this is clearly, it's not intentional racism by H&M, a multimillion revenue company is not gonna one day wake up and say, should be a bit racist today. We throw it all away.

**Chris Williamson** (4:49)
It's a mix of negligence or just idiocy, right? Rather than maliciousness.

**Ashley Charles** (4:54)
Exactly, and that was my light bulb moment as I kind of watched the world up in arms, outraged, H&M are racist, boycott H&M, they've done this deliberately. In that moment, I was like, outrage has gone too far because it's stifling conversation and we're not gonna get anywhere by having this knee-jerk reaction. Being quick to anger doesn't work in every situation and I felt as though we'd over inflated the outrage bubble and it had burst for me in that moment. And so I wrote an article about it for The Guardian and from that article, the book was born.