I like to spend time
listening to people whose opinions differ from my own. During the financial
crisis, I went to engage with the protesters who were camped outside banks;
I've been to several Black History Month events; and I've even spent a weekend
camping with environmentalists. All those experiences have been very useful in
trying to understand how these groups think and what their motivations are.
I've written a lot about socialism and environmentalism on this blog, but not
much on racism, which is what I intend to do here.
The first thing to say about racism is that it is clearly a learned phenomenon. When young children are put together to play, they don't show any signs of racial discrimination. We are not born racist; it is implanted from other humans. What struck me from my conversations with people at the Black History Month events is how preoccupied they were with skin colour and racial wrongs from the past. I’m sure that is even truer of more hostile groups like Black Lives Matter – there is a propensity to see the world through the unhelpful, divisive and counter-progressive lens of group identity and ethno-tribal polarisation. Personally, I tend to live as much in the present as possible, I try to treat everyone as though they are loved and infinitely valuable, and I couldn’t care a jot about the things (like skin colour and ethnicity) that seem to cause so much prejudice. I care about you as a person, and am interested in you as a unique individual – not as a secondary group member to which you may happen to belong.
Now, I’m not saying the past doesn’t matter, and I’m not saying this country has no present day racism to contend with. But it seems clear to me that continually going on about past legacies, and remaining preoccupied with skin colour and so-called racial identity is only perpetuating a stratification that most people have moved on from (and most prejudice that appears racist probably isn’t racist anyway – see my blog here). This point is compounded by the fact that people who are preoccupied with what others have done to people like them in the past are generally preoccupied with what people have done to black people, as though that particular category of racism is the primary one in history. But the reality is, history is replete of all kinds of injustices committed by every kind of skin colour and ethnicity: white on black, black on white, black on black, Asian on black, white on Asian, and so on, dating back thousands of years.
We are living in a time when the anti-racists are behaving a lot like the historical racists, and the anti-fascists are behaving a lot like the historical fascists – and we need to move forward. As Marcus Aurelius said: “The best revenge is to be unlike him who performed the injury.” Suppose a magic switch was flicked, and everyone woke up tomorrow morning with no awareness of past ethnic, racial and religious injustices. Black and white people, Catholics and Protestants, Jews and Muslims, and so on, would no longer see each other through the prism of past troubles, but simply as different people co-existing alongside one another. I’m not saying that cultural identity and heritage isn’t important. But if we stopped making so much of past racial prejudices and began to refrain from preoccupations with skin colour and group identity, we’d prime ourselves for a future of diminished racial tension.
What about the Lady Susan Hussey and Ngozi Fulani
debacle?
I think Lady Hussey's line
of questioning could have been better, of course - but the same can be said
about Ngozi Fulani's response too, which looked to be opportunist, disingenuous
and self-serving. Lady Hussey was stitched up by Fulani, and then subsequently
thrown under a bus by the Royals, including her own Godson, Prince William -
who, if the media account is accurate, responded ignobly in this. After her 60 years of loyal service, Lady Susan Hussey deserved far better than this - and I
think this has reflected very badly on the Royals.
To be fair to Ngozi Fulani,
I have sympathy with the fact that it must be difficult to have your
nationality questioned when she was born in the
"It seems clear that most tribal groups that peddle extremist propaganda (whether that's extreme left or right wing movements, environmentalists, woke social justice warriors or feminists) are doing so because they want to seek attention, find some meaning and purpose in their life, assuage their own insecurities and moderate their own self-dislike. And in order to this, they have to artificially construct injustices that aren't really there, or inflate the ones that are already there into something much more severe and unrepresentative of reality. An analysis of radical extremism that fails to consider what the participants personally get out of it is an anaemic analysis - and it is absurd that people go about their business as though this consideration doesn't matter. It really does matter; because if you find what's lurking beneath their virtue signalling and agenda-driven search for purpose, you'll find something dark and horrible (I'm sure it's in most of us)."
Ngozi Fulani and the aforementioned group are racial grifters in the same way that Owen Jones, Jeremy Corbyn and Ken Loach are poverty grifters; and in the same way that Greta Thunberg, George Monbiot and the numerous wacky environmentalist hysterics (Extinction Rebellion, Just-Stop-Oil, etc) are climate grifters. They make their living and their reputation on the attempted prolongation of the thing to which they claim opposition, seizing every opportunity to cry foul and attribute malice or bigotry where none exists or is intended.
And this leads us full circle to the opening points. Unless social and cultural grifting is shown up for the pernicious creep that it is, we are doomed to keep repeating the taints of the past, from which the vast majority of folk in the UK have moved on.
