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“Does anyone else look like me in Alcoholics Anonymous?” says the headline on AA’s latest promotional leaflet, above a picture of four smiling cartoon faces, two of them Muslim.

This leaflet has so many possibilities for comedy, not to mention complaints from the Muslim Council of wherever. But if this was a caption competition I would suggest a reply speech bubble from one of the faces saying:

“No, because we follow sharia law and do not do something that is haram. White people should do the same and stop drinking like filthy infidel fish. Stop comparing us to you. We do not drink until we fall over in the street because we have high moral standards. Praise be Allah.”

Two of the faces in the picture are later described as Muslim. Another is wearing a turban, so in my fantasy caption I would also have a speech bubble coming out of his mouth saying: “Hang on a minute, I’m Sikh!” And then another bubble from one of the others would say: “Well, you keep your mouth shut, then, because you’re also the infidel.”

The serious point is, I’ve tried to point out to the AA top brass before that no matter how hard they try, they’re not going to recruit more Muslims to AA except by persuading more Muslims to get drunk in the first place, which I really don’t think will go down well with the caliphate. But they seem determined.

Inside this latest “racial equality” leaflet AA GB have put out is the AA “responsibility statement”—“I am responsible when anyone anywhere reaches out for help”—and this is displayed with twelve different-colored cartoon hands around it. Some are dark brown, one is charcoal gray, a few are tanned, some are a weird maroon color. I have no idea which ethnicities gray or maroon represents.

Leaving that aside, only three of the twelve hands are white. As someone who goes to meetings, I had no idea only a quarter of AA members were white.

On other pages, there is a patronizing guide to being black, ethnic, and drunk. It reads like “My First Equality Leaflet.” You would think a 5-year-old had written it.

HOW DO YOU FEEL? And the answer is given as: “Nobody else looks like me in AA. I’m alone nobody understands me. How can you help me if you don’t understand me and my culture…” (which is not drinking).

The words in parentheses are mine. But you get the idea.

Another headline presumably spoken by a black person states that “AA is only for white people.”

I’ve never heard a person of color saying any such thing in all the years I’ve sat in meetings. But the most patronizing and awful thing about this leaflet is to come.

On the next pages it gives examples of ethnic minorities who go to AA. All are depicted as cartoons, so it is very stereotypical and offensive before you even get to the words.

The first smiling cartoon ethnic man is called Raj, and he says: “I came into AA believing that I would not be accepted partly due to the environment I grew up in. Growing up in a predominantly white area, we suffered with racism. I am from a Muslim Pakistani background.”

Again, all I can say to try to help the people who produced this leaflet is that you really ought not to imply that Muslims are secret drinkers. Some of them no doubt are, in numbers severely limited by the extremely harsh penalties their authorities impose.

But it’s not for Westerners or Western organizations to point this out. It’s no less insulting than writing a leaflet for Muslims on how to cut down their pork intake. You are veering into very dangerous territory, but anyway:

The next cartoon ethnic minority AA member is called Raja. And without further ado, I’d like to skip to the next, for he is called…Navraj.

That’s right. Incredibly, AA has produced a leaflet on racial equality in which it betrays itself as being completely unable to think of any Asian names other than Raj, Raja, and Navraj.

You couldn’t make this stuff up.

At this stage, Raj, Raja, and Navraj can say what they like to encourage more Pakistani Muslims and Sikh Indians into AA, but the damning racism of all this is there for any ethnic minority to see.

AA top brass is so blinkered, and so used to dealing with white people mostly, up there at head office, that they cannot think of any other Asian names for men aside from names based on Raj, which in itself, dare I say, is racist because if you were going to pick a foreign name pertaining to the East, that is probably the one with the most imperialistic overtones.

I think AA should get out of the equality leaflet business right now. Withdraw this insulting leaflet and never put one out again.

There are also some black cartoon women, and these are called Yasmin (who says she is Muslim), Shana (who says she is a POC, which I presume means Person of Color), Rita (Sikh), and Karen, who says: “In 2019, I set up the Sober Sistas WhatsApp group for Black women in AA. In May 2020, we started the UK’s first AA meeting for Black women. This opened the door to a vast world of Black and people of colour online meetings, which revolutionised my recovery. I learned to reconnect to my ancestral spirituality and discovered a wide array of ways to deepen my relationship with my Higher Power.”

Yeah. Because you’re more likely to stay sober if you go to black-only meetings and find your ancestral spiritual base. I was brought up by an Italian mother, so I must try to find some other Roman Catholic nutcases and connect with them on the Catholic Guilt in AA network. Also, should I go to white-only meetings, or tanned-olive-only meetings? It hadn’t occurred to me before, and I really don’t want to, but this leaflet does seem very clear that segregation sobriety is the way ahead.

There is a fourth black guy, called Tony, who says: “Colour didn’t enter my conscience when I called AA for the first time….” I think he means consciousness.

But yes, imagine that. And now you’re a cartoon Tony being forced into a leaflet on color. How does that feel?

Of his first meeting, he says: “I looked around at the people and they didn’t look like the drunks I grew up with, they certainly didn’t look like me, there was one brother there, we didn’t make any sort of contact at the time, you know the brother nod.”

No, I don’t know. What is the brother nod in this context? Let’s rob this load of white pussies later in the car park? What on earth is AA insinuating about black men?

He concludes by saying (and I think the word “neither” is missing from the start of this sentence): “Colour nor race [sic] came into it for me. AA works if you work it.”

Interestingly, there are no cartoon Jewish people in this leaflet. Nor are there any Chinese or Jamaicans. For some reason, the ethnic types most likely to get sozzled are not depicted. But that is no doubt because they are already in AA. What AA wants to do with this leaflet, I think, is to recruit more of the cultures it does not have, which is to say Muslims. It is deluded.

AA is in the grip of a woke mania, trying to get hardline cultural teetotalers to become recovering alcoholics so it can tick a box.

I thought about asking them for comment, but as they never give me any comment, and as this leaflet is so conclusively idiotic, I couldn’t be bothered. If anyone in the AA general service office is reading this article, then by all means send me some comment. You have my email. I’ve written to you often enough about your various manias. Tell us what your excuse is this time and I’ll write about it next week.

Were these cartoons based on real people? Do you really think all black men call each other “brother”? Do you really think black women don’t know how to spell the plural of “sister,” or chose to cap up Black to make a point, and join black women’s networks wherever they are?

On and on go the horrible clichéd assumptions until you just cannot work out how the printers didn’t refuse to print this garbage on the basis that someone at the printers had to be black or Asian and must have looked at what they were sent by AA to make into leaflets and thought, “Dear God, are these people from 1953?”

As a boring old white alcoholic, I would also like to say that in the 23 years I’ve been in AA, I’ve sat in meetings with lots of black people. People of Afro-Caribbean descent and African Americans can be really good at drinking, so racial equality of destructively alcoholic behavior does already exist, for what that’s worth to people, for heaven’s sake.

What I resent most about the current AA drive to recruit Muslims, specifically, is that they are taking the cultural “ownership” of alcoholism away from the people who arguably patented it.

With all due respect to all the black people who’ve drunk themselves to death over the centuries, alcoholism is a white man’s disease when you consider it at its most insane level.

It’s a northern hemisphere thing, this desire to while away the cold, dark evenings of the soul with drink. The Brits, the Scandis, the Dutch, the Polish, the Russians, and so on, all perfected and exported the misery of drinking oneself to death for no particular reason other than an existential feeling of inner hopelessness, perhaps brought on by the darkness of the weather, which somehow entered the northern genes.

Yes, men of all creeds and colors have crushed grapes and gotten sozzled for fun since time began, and in every tribe in every corner of the planet, man has had one too many for a laugh.

But the art of miserable drinking, of very deliberately ruining one’s life by drinking to excess when you’ve no very good reason to, that’s largely a white man’s skill, or at least something half-white, half-tanned morons like me can’t help doing.

As my Italian mother said to me when I checked into rehab in 2001: “You get this from your father!” (who was of miserable north of England extraction).

Moreover, the medical defining of the art of self-destruction through the medium of whiskey, and the concept of being rescued from this once hopeless state of mind, was pioneered by two white fellas in the Midwest. Until then, people of all colors just drank themselves silly without really putting a label on it.

Akron, Ohio, was where alcoholism the brand was born. One night, stockbroker Bill Wilson was sitting in the Mayflower Hotel and realized what would happen if he started drinking after a day of business deals going wrong. He looked to the bar and he looked to the public phone booth in the lobby, and by some miracle he chose to make a phone call, and by another miracle he was connected to Dr. Robert Smith, who also couldn’t stop drinking once he started. For many years, it remained a fellowship for low-bottom drunks, including many black Americans.

I’m not sure what Bill and Bob would think of AA actively trying to recruit Muslims to meetings. But I do know that in the writings of their later years, they did worry about some of the new people coming in, who were “barely alcoholic.”

Chiefly, they worried that if you broadened AA’s base enough, you would eventually get to a situation where non-alcoholics were coming in for the company and the chat, possibly the networking, and in this scenario, they predicted that these people would want to change meetings to make them in their own image.

If Muslims do start coming to AA, who can say what AA will become? I would hazard a guess that it won’t be a place where members can bang on about transgender issues—and I’ll be more than satisfied with that.