No imaginary transgression is too small for the mob of virtue-signalling SJWs on Instagram

Kathrine Jebsen Moore
Quillette

"Knitting is just so white. Let's hope it gets better." I overheard this puzzling remark in my local yarn store in Edinburgh, Scotland, last week. The store is in the affluent area of Marchmont, just outside the city centre. Its Edwardian and Victorian tenement flats, adjacent to huge green spaces, are popular with students and families alike. Two customers were chatting to the store owner: "It's about time we had the conversation," one of them offered. Her companion nodded in solemn agreement.

Knitting, which helps lower the blood pressure and keep the mind busy, has enjoyed an upsurge in popularity in recent years. The Internet has allowed for the proliferation of new platforms from which to buy yarn and patterns, and has helped connect artisans and hobbyists worldwide. Usually, it's a calming and creative pastime focussed on aesthetics rather than politics. However, a short browse through the knitting posts on Instagram steered me in the direction of the source of the exchange I had overhead and the "conversation" it had produced.

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. To most observers, Templer's post will read like a guileless account of her hopes and aspirations for her upcoming travels:

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.

And what on earth could be wrong with any of that? Rather a lot, it turns out. After a series of encouraging posts from well-wishers, the comment thread took an aggressively inquisitorial turn. Templer's previous posts had typically garnered between three and 30 comments, but "My Year of Color" has 197 at the time of writing.

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? 

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