By Jerry Barnett
Wednesday, February 09, 2022
One of the
early signs of trouble for the British anti-racism movement was a tweet sent by
Lee Jasper in April 2013, in which he declared that black people
are incapable of being racist, and offered to publicly debate anybody who
disagreed. I offered to debate him, as did a number of others. I even suggested
a venue: the University College London Union (UCLU), where I’d recently taken
part in a debate on censorship. My offer was not taken up, and as far as I know
the debate never took place.
Jasper, a
British-born man of mixed African, Caribbean, and Irish origins, was one of the
louder characters in the London anti-racism movement of the 1980s, which sought
to oppose the racist far-Right. But he was always intensely ambitious, and
skilled at using race issues as a means of self-promotion. In this respect, he
was well ahead of the curve, importing Al Sharpton's brand of American
race-hustling into the UK long before it became more generally fashionable.
By the 1990s,
although the far-Right threat had clearly receded, the British Left (in the
face of a working class stubbornly uninterested in class struggle) was
switching its attention to the politics of identity. This was especially true
in London and Jasper started to pop up on late-night TV chat shows. In my own
social circles, which were mostly made up of people of West Indian origin,
“black activists” were generally not taken too seriously. But in left-wing
political circles, people like Jasper became flavour of the month. Here was a
provocative spokesman of an oppressed underclass, and surely the
Left—increasingly dominated by white and affluent people—needed people like him
in order to stay relevant.
On the subject
of racism, the British Left had long been guilty of threat inflation. While
racism was certainly widespread in the wake of waves of mass
immigration—especially towards the Jamaicans and Trinidadians who arrived in
the 1950s and ’60s, and Asians fleeing east African nationalism in the
1970s—Britain had never remotely resembled the United States in this regard.
Britain had never been segregated, and had never been home to slaves in
significant numbers. There was never a British civil rights movement, because
there were no racial laws to overturn. Furthermore, the collapse of the British
far-Right was largely the result of cultural movements, rather than politics.
The two powerful forces that united black and white people in Britain’s urban
centres were music and football. The Left is fond of recalling individual
racist horrors—the murders of Kelso Cochrane in 1959 and of Stephen Lawrence in
1993 in particular. But these events were notable primarily for their rarity,
as well as the enormous waves of revulsion and shame that swept through British
society in their wake.
The awakening
identitarian Left in the 1990s needed racism to feed its narratives, and if it
had previously been guilty of exaggeration, now it turned the dial to 11. The
importation of racist black nationalism from America in the wake of Stephen
Lawrence’s murder helped to undermine the unity of the anti-racism movement as
a force for solidarity and cohesion. In order to build its new narrative, the
Left began to ignore the British success story of racial integration. In a
handful of decades, Britain had been more successful in creating a mixed-race
culture than the United States had in four centuries, but this story did not
fit the American racial ideology, which demanded that black people be regarded
exclusively as victims.
As the
political tide turned dramatically towards Labour—nationally in 1997, and in
London with the election of the left-winger Ken Livingstone as Mayor in
2000—Lee Jasper’s years of positioning himself as a race and human rights
activist began to pay off. In 2004, he was appointed as Livingstone’s Director
for Policing and Equalities. An appearance at the mayor’s anti-racist Respect
festival helped underline just how far left-wing authorities had drifted from
London’s racially diverse communities. Jasper was there on Livingstone’s behalf
to welcome festival-goers in a faux British-Jamaican accent (“W’happen mi
bredren and sistren?”). The audience, composed largely of teenage Somalis who
had turned up to see the Somali-Canadian artist K’naan, looked on in
bemusement.
Jasper had an
instinctive knack for the grievance business. If the London-centric Labour
authorities were searching for angry black men, then he was happy to be the
angriest and blackest of them all. But since its earliest days fighting fascism
in the 1930s, the British anti-racism movement had always understood racism to
be hatred towards any person based on their race, colour, nationality, or
ethnicity. In order to prosper within that hierarchy, people like Jasper had to
toe that line for a while. If Pakistanis, Jews, Poles, or Chinese people were
the chief targets of racial hostility, then it was his job to stand up for them
too. Which is why his tweet declaring black people to be exceptions to the
rules signalled a departure, and an early warning that the anti-racist politics
of the British Left was about to take a sharp change of direction.
We now know
that Jasper’s tweet was sent just as a portal to Hell opened—America’s
racialised identity politics was about to hit critical mass and go global and a
tsunami of racism followed.
Like many
Londoners who grew up in the 1970s and ’80s, I was used to existing in a
white-minority environment, and I had long been aware that black people were no
less racist than any other demographic. But racism against whites, Asians, and
Jews had always been spoken softly, out of the earshot of most British people.
It was not a serious problem, but something that existed in the background. The
British anti-racism movement had certainly never pretended that one form of
racism was worse than another: racism in any form was, ipso facto,
corrosive to communities and opposed on that basis. It just seemed self-evident
that hatred from one group would provoke a rise in hatred on the other side.
So, British activism was focussed on creating opportunities for greater
community cohesion and integration. The most famous upshot was the Notting Hill
Carnival, an event founded following the 1959 race riots and intended to bring
West London’s divided black and white communities together around a celebration
of Trinidadian culture.
Most people—black
or white—were unaware of ethno-nationalism in the black British community,
which was far less marked than in the United States. In the new century, some
commentators did begin to discuss the problem openly. For example, in 2004, the
outspoken British-Trinidadian activist and commentator Darcus Howe wrote about racism towards Somali
immigrants within
black communities. Similarly, there have long been tensions between some black and Asian communities. But, generally, those in the political
and journalistic classes were either unaware of such issues or reluctant to
broach them in public. So, although people raised in parts of London with large
black populations, or those in mixed relationships, experienced such bigotry
first-hand, the problem was seldom acknowledged.
This all
changed post-2010 for at least three reasons. First, the meteoric rise of
Facebook and Twitter provided people with an unprecedented ability to share
their unfiltered thoughts out loud. Second, the new “antiracist” ideology
(I will refer to American antiracism without a hyphen to distinguish it from
the universalist British kind) made this racism acceptable, because (as Lee
Jasper’s tweet indicated) it wasn’t seen as racism at all. Third, white people
on the Left, many of whom rarely socialised with non-whites in real life,
provided cover for this development by explaining to other whites that all this
new hostility was justified by societal inequity, white privilege, and
the colonial crimes of their ancestors. This precipitated a profound fracture
in British culture: a belief that bigotry could never be acceptable was replaced
with a new idea that, yes, sometimes it could be. Suddenly, racism was
everywhere and antiracists refused to condemn it.
Many black
people were appalled and embarrassed by the newly exposed mentality, which did
not just target whites but also Indians, Chinese people, and Jews. At least
three friends recounted how they had tried to oppose the anti-white sentiment
they encountered in black-only forums. But each of them was viciously attacked,
labelled an Uncle Tom, a race traitor, an Oreo, or a coconut, and retreated
rapidly. The resistance died quickly: under the new ideologies, racism was now
not only acceptable but also laudable. New terms bubbled up: anti-racism was
replaced by pro-blackness. Among progressives, this was widely
deemed to be a good thing, but it was just ethno-nationalism. Black
love was also promoted to applause from white progressives and
liberals, but this was simply an expression of hostility towards mixed
relationships. The question “Is it pro-black to marry a white person?” became
the subject of countless videos, articles, and threads. Few of us in 2010 predicted
that open opposition to miscegenation was about to mount a comeback, or that it
would be tolerated by people calling themselves antiracist. And now that racism
had been made socially acceptable, it proliferated.
Countless
stories suddenly emerged of white people being attacked for having the wrong hairstyle, wearing the wrong clothes, or cooking the wrong food. I had heard about such things from time
to time before 2010, but now it was white people on the Left and in the liberal
media who were policing and justifying these new norms and standards.
The birth of
the American Black Lives Matter movement in 2014, and its arrival in the UK
following the death of Eric Garner in 2015, made all of this an order of
magnitude worse. The BLM movement, which openly espoused black nationalism, was
cleverly branded in a way that made universalist opposition to racism
effectively impossible. Because racism by black people was now memory-holed the
moment it happened, it was allowed to spread unresisted. Occasionally,
incidents were reported—for example, in 2017, there was a nasty verbal attack on a mixed couple eating in a black
restaurant, in which the aggressor referred to whites as inferior beings. But
even when media outlets covered such things, social media largely did not. To
even talk about this kind of racism came to be seen as anti-black rather than
anti-racist. One of the telling things about this particular video was that it
was recorded and shared by the perpetrator, which suggested a belief that he had
the moral high ground. Such was the effect of the narrative shift towards pro-blackness.
I saw and
personally experienced this kind of behaviour on numerous occasions. I was able
to stand my ground better than others, because I had long experience as an
anti-racism activist, and little fear of being attacked for my white privilege.
But it turned out that my previous activism, my mixed family, and my Jewish
origins afforded me no protection—instead, they were used against me. I
eventually ended my participation in black political and music forums
(especially hip-hop ones) because they became hotbeds of black nationalism,
riddled with anti-white and anti-Jewish sentiment. White participants were
required to acknowledge their responsibility for racism and declare themselves
subordinate “allies” rather than equals. Racial equality was no longer
considered a valid objective: the Left now demanded equity. Many
others suffered worse abuse than I did. In response to the new identity
politics, a white British rapper named Alex Dutty created a powerfully emotive video with a universalist, anti-racist message.
But he provocatively (and unwisely, in hindsight) named it “Proud to Be White.”
He was viciously attacked by other rappers and music journalists (most of whom
had presumably not watched the video), and cancelled by the UK hip-hop
community.
In the past
few years, black nationalism has surged in popularity, protected by the shield
of Black Lives Matter and ignored or played down by a liberal press anxious not
to find itself on the wrong side of the racism debate. Violent (and sometimes
deadly) antisemitic attacks, perpetrated by black people on both sides of the Atlantic, have been largely ignored, even as the
cultural mainstream continues to insist that racism cannot be tolerated. In the
past few days, the latest in a series of assaults on Jews in London by black
men has been reported. In 2018, the head of the Nation of
Islam, Louis Farrakhan, an outspoken antisemite and one of America’s most
influential hate preachers, made an album with stars including Stevie Wonder,
Chaka Khan, Snoop Dogg, and Common. Alice Walker, Nick Cannon, and other leading lights in the African
American establishment have made antisemitic remarks. Even Whoopi Goldberg blundered into trouble as she
clumsily navigated the new discourse on race. In the UK, there has been a rallying
of support for Wiley, a well-known music artist, following a series of antisemitic outbursts over the past couple of years.
Jews have not
been the only target. Violent attacks against East Asians—disproportionately
carried out by black people—have recently spiked in America, a foreseeable
consequence of a decade’s worth of antiracist agitprop that blamed white,
Jewish, and Asian privilege for black oppression. The progressive
response to this development has been to blame white supremacy. The antiracist narrative is so far
through the looking glass that white people are now held entirely to blame for
the worst behaviours of a small minority of black people. This denial of agency
and moral responsibility is not just deeply patronising—a soft bigotry of low
expectations—but it also amounts to a kind of incitement, as white progressives
line up as apologists for racial violence.
White people
have also become targets for black nationalists, a development even less likely
to be publicly acknowledged than black attacks on Jews. The murderous attack on
a Christmas parade in Wisconsin, which killed six and injured 62, was almost
certainly racially motivated. The attacker had previously posted black
nationalist sentiments, but the New York Times hastened to declare that the motive was unclear. This
was a departure for a newspaper that in recent years has been quick to offer
racial explanations for almost everything. A Black Lives Matter activist
declared the Wisconsin attack to be the start of the revolution.
The antiracism
establishment has crumpled before this ideological onslaught. When the Southern
Poverty Law Center reported a steep rise in black nationalist
extremism in 2018, its report was couched in almost apologetic language: the
rise in black nationalism was (of course) the fault of Donald Trump’s alleged
promotion of white supremacists. The report, which did not explicitly point out
that black nationalism had risen far more than white nationalism, quoted
arch-racist Louis Farrakhan. The SPLC also went to great lengths to absolve
Black Lives Matter: “... these black nationalist groups should not be confused
with activist groups such as Black Lives Matter and others that work for civil
rights and to eliminate systemic racism.” This SPLC positioning comes
despite attacks on synagogues and other antisemitic events that have taken place during BLM
protests. In Toronto, a leading BLM activist labelled whites as genetic defects (an old belief of the Nation of Islam). When
racists are redescribed as antiracists by the media and political class, there
is no room for anti-racism.
The official
response to the rising influence of racist black nationalism has been to ignore
it. Today, the SPLC site no longer lists black nationalist groups separately,
instead choosing to include them under the inane heading of General
Hate, which is by far its largest category, and appears to be dominated by
black nationalists. FBI hate crime statistics also suggest that, per
capita, more hate crimes are committed by black people than any other
group. In 2019, 23.9 percent of recorded US hate crimes were committed by black
people who make up just 12.1 percent of the population. Whites, meanwhile,
committed 52.5 percent of hate crimes while making up 57.8 percent of the
population.
It is, of
course, important to point out that hate crimes are committed by only a tiny
proportion of any demographic group. But the bottom line of the past decade is
this: while the media and antiracism community have focused increasingly on
white people (and, implicitly, Jews and Asians) as the root of all racist evil,
a disproportionately large and increasing amount of racial hatred is emanating
from black nationalist movements. The failure of the mass media and antiracism
establishment to discuss this dismal development honestly is a scandal.
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