Anti-racism

Here is Tomiwa Owolade in the Spectator reviewing Kehinde Andrews' book The New Age of Empire: How Racism and Colonialism Still Rule the World. Owolade is a man on the rise: he's bright and sensible, and you will be seeing a lot more of him in the future.

As I read Owolade's piece a question occurred to me. 

First, some context. Go back a generation or two and there was plenty of racism in the UK. But it has got a lot better. I'm not saying the UK is perfect, of course (out of the crooked timber of humanity ...), but sensible liberal measures have made a massive difference to each measurable aspect of racism. If you were to have shown the anti-racism campaigners of the 1960s recent inter-racial marriage rates, say, or the make-up of the current Cabinet or Privy Council (here's a good detail: Kwasi Kwarteng "kissed hands" via video link - I am not the first to wonder if he kissed his computer screen) then they would have been pleased, one would think. Nearly there, they might say. The system works. One more push. Keep on keeping on.

Which bring me to my question: why do we have such strident calls for revolutionary solutions to racism now? And why are such calls not just the ravings of an extremist fringe but the mainstream writings of an academic, reviewed in The Spectator? 

There are a number of possible answers to this question. For example, one might think that campaigners need to make more of a fuss to gain attention when a problem is objectively smaller than when it is larger. Or perhaps this is just a rational decision on their part since making louder demands gains more attention: the Toxoplasma of Rage, to coin a phrase. 

But I have an alternative explanation. To see my point, you have to compare the progress of black people in British society with another small minority: gay people. 

We start our story in the late 1960s. If you were black you would notice a fair amount of racism, both in overt and more subtle forms. But you would also notice that being overtly racist was pretty low status behaviour, unacceptable in polite society and generally considered wrong and embarrassing. You would see Enoch Powell making his 'Rivers of Blood' speech in 1968 - and promptly ending his career. 

Now let's look at the position of (what you would not yet have described as) gay people. You would have seen that homosexual acts between consenting males over the age of 21 were first legalised in 1967. You would know that overt hostility to that change in the law was perfectly acceptable in polite society. 

So it seems that black people were better placed than gay people: speaking out against homosexuals in 1967 was fine; speaking out against black people in 1968 was not. There were well-established moral arguments against homosexuality, but nothing but unreasoning and distasteful prejudice against black people. 

Fast forward a couple of generations. Anti-homosexual prejudice has gone from being common and acceptable to rare and unacceptable. Gay marriage is legal. Gay culture is celebrated. Drag queens are encouraged to read stories to children in public libraries. And so on. The world has moved a lot for homosexual people. But for black people ... 

Look, here's politics. First, the LGB community:

And that does not even include the gay Conservative Mayor of the West Midlands. 

Whereas for black people we see this:

First elected Secretary of State? Only this year! First AM? That's real scraping the barrel stuff.

And we see the same story elsewhere too. According to this link, there are 2 LGBT FTSE-100 CEOs and there are also 2 such CEOs from black or minority ethnic backgrounds. You could say that that's a draw. But just 2% of the population identify as LGBT, whereas BAME people account for about 14% of the population. Where are the black people at the top?

The professions are similar. In the pre-covid days of visting my office, I would be confident of seeing gay barristers every day but I rarely saw a black one. 

Why the discrepancy? Starting from 1967/8, how did gay people pull so far ahead of black people? 

Let's put ourselves back into the shoes of our notional black anti-racist. Won't he at least be tempted to say something like this. 

Hang on a minute here. What's the deal? We came here. We were just like you - you the white people who run the country - in fact we are just like you. We're normal people - normal families - with normal jobs and normal interests. The only difference is skin colour. We settled among you, went to your schools, followed all your rules. 

But it wasn't enough. We were never accepted. 

Meanwhile, when it comes to gay people, you were prepared to turn society on a sixpence. You changed the rules for them. You overturned laws, re-wrote sexual morality, reversed thousands of years of understanding of what 'marriage' means, changed the fundamental structure of family relationships.  You did all that for gay people. But not for us. Why?

I'm serious, he carries on, why? There have been several years during which gay people spread a really dangerous disease (AIDS). Did black people ever do that? No. Instead, we played in your football teams, and your rugby teams, and your cricket teams. We served in your armed forces. We came to a Christian country as Christians, singing your hymns and going to your churches. We tried to fit in. We never rubbed your face in our differences. Do I need to go on?

You always taught that it was wrong to hate us, but you never followed through on that. You used to teach that it was OK to hate gay people - but you changed the teaching. What's going on here? Why is it one rule for us and another one for them? Why do you open your prisons to us and your universities to gay people?

I've got nothing against gay people, he continues, looking hurriedly over his shoulder. (He knows that West Indian music can easily be described as 'homophobic'. He remembers that school trip to France where we all laughed at the shop called 'Batiman'.) I'm glad things worked out for them. I just want things to work out for us too.

Surely, our campaigner concludes, surely there is only one explanation. The gays are white - the white-y whitiest of all the whites - and we are black. And that's what you really care about. Skin colour. All the rest of it - all your rules, all your liberal principles - that's nothing but hypocrisy, just as the rules in the 1960s were. Nothing but window-dressing for white supremacy. And now it's time to say: enough is enough. We're done with following your rules - you only change the rules to suit yourselves anyway. It's time for revolution.

I don't agree with that analysis. There have always been gay people at the top of society so it's not surprising that that has not changed. Nonetheless, there is surely something odd going on. The cultural accommodation that needed to be made to allow people from the West Indies to participate fully in British culture was pretty slight. Some new foods, a bit more popular music, some argot - the normal give and take. White working class culture managed it, in the end, but not the middle classes. Why? Have you, you white person, ever been to a West Indian restaurant? Not even once? Just out of interest? I know you've eaten Indian food and Chinese food and Thai food and Peruvian-Japanese fusion and those spicy Sichuan peppers, but what about curried goat or chicken, rice and peas?

And what about cultural representation? Is there any reason why Doctor Who had to be a white woman rather than a black man? You know how many hilarious camp comedians there are on television, and how few black ones (especially black British ones). What is the black equivalent to Julian Clary's joke about Norman Lamont: an episode of Desmond's? Lenny Henry doing Theophilus T. Wildebeest?

I could carry on. But instead I will just say this. When Owolade is editing The Spectator and criticising Kwarteng's old and tired government, and no one thinks it interesting to point out anything about the colour of their skins, perhaps then the calls for revolution will be made by weirdos we can safely ignore. Until then, we should listen. There is a point.