If your image of a knitter is some grandma, softly repeating “knit one, purl two,” you haven’t been paying attention to the resurgence of what Vox calls “fiber arts,” Why the word “knitting” is deemed inadequate for the art of knitting is unclear. It could be because hipsters need a new word for everything, to distinguish it from what grandma did, or it lacked the prestige new wave knitters needed to validate their importance.
Still, knitting was a wonderful craft. Until it turned into a vicious cesspool of hateful outrage.
On January 7, Karen Templer, a knitting designer and owner of the online store Fringe Association, published an innocuous blog post on her website entitled “2019: My Year of Colour,” in which she enthused about her forthcoming trip to India.
Templer was very excited about her trip to India and wrote of it with huge enthusiasm.
I’ve wanted to go to India for as long as I can remember. I’ve a lifelong obsession with the literature and history of the continent. Photos of India fill me with longing like no other place. One of my closest friends [when I was 12] and her family had offered back then that if I ever wanted to go with them on one of their trips, I could. To a suburban midwestern teenager with a severe anxiety disorder, that was like being offered a seat on a flight to Mars. … Then about six weeks ago, the opportunity presented itself—a chance to go with a friend who’s been. … I said yes. And I felt like the top of my head was going to fly off, I was so indescribably excited. Within 48 hours, three of those friends of mine who are so much better travelers than me—but who are all equally humbled at the idea of actually going to India—also said yes. There has hardly been a single day since that I haven’t said in disbelief, either in my head or out loud, I’m going to India.
This is normally where one’s friends share her excitement and wish her well, which they did for a bit. Then the scold appeared.
One of the first people to attack Templer was a user named Alex J. Klein who wrote:
Karen, I’d ask you to re-read what you wrote and think about how your words feed into a colonial/imperialist mindset toward India and other non-Western countries. Multiple times you compare the idea of going to India to the idea of going to another planet—how do you think a person from India would feel to hear that?
I’m going to take a leap here, and say that Klein wasn’t Indian and wasn’t expressing his personally hurt feelings about his country or heritage. Rather, Klein was one of those white knights, allies, for whom finding some reason to attack a perfectly nice and normal expression of happiness and positivity for being said in a politically wrong way.
Templer responded by explaining her excitement, and noting that her Indian friends found nothing troubling in her enthusiasm. Naturally, this compelled Klein to double down, because anything else would have made him a complicit racist.
Instead of asking your Indian friends to perform more emotional labor for you and assuage your white women’s tears, maybe do some reflection on how your equation of India with an alien world reinforces an “other” mindset that is at the core of imperialism and colonialism.
Whereupon the mob descended to destroy Templer for . . . being excited to go to India. Templer’s supportive friends then flipped on her, suddenly aware of how she was literally Hitler and probably wore a MAGA hat to sleep at night.
As Vox “explains,” knitting is apparently a hotbed of racism.
But even though the stereotypical image has gotten younger over the years, the community is still perceived as very white. Part of that is a problem of access: Mahon points to the expense, especially if you’re buying high-quality or indie-made yarns (hand-dyed or luxurious yarn can be around $30 a skein, and depending on yardage, you’d need at least three to four skeins to make a sweater). “And it just keeps getting more and more expensive and elitist, until only other white women can keep up,” she said.
So “free” yarn is the next right, along with “free” education and “free” medical care? There’s more.
But another part is pure “marketable aesthetics,” says Yoo. “At some point, those super-blue filters came through, and then the minimalism came through, and then the not showing who you are, the cup of coffee, ball of yarn … spaces could become whitewashed without you really noticing.” The popular look was to focus on the knitting, not the person doing the knitting, which made it easier to forget what that person looked like. And sometimes, when followers were reminded, they showed their prejudice.
Whitewashed? As in white people took pictures of themselves and they turned out to be white?
Rose said she noticed the whitewashing of the community when she’d post a photo of herself, or part of herself, after long stretches of only showing yarn or other images. “I just noticed the space was easier to navigate when I didn’t show who I was, because then you wouldn’t assume that I was a black person,” she said. “When I didn’t show myself, people would assume that the picture was from a white person. That’s when I knew it was really whitewashed.”
Was Rose adored when her race was unknown, but shunned when her skin color could be seen? It doesn’t say so, and if it did, that would be terrible and shocking. It only say she “noticed the space was easier to navigate” when her race was unknown. creating some mysterious sense of the nefarious while saying nothing at all.
What did this complaint of “whitewashing” have to do with Karen Templer’s excitement over her trip to exotic India? Enough, apparently, for Klein to incite the mob to rip her to shreds until she admitted her wrongthink and begged for mercy.