Labour’s racism problem
The Labour party dragged MP Rupa Huq through a thorn bush over her assertion that Chancellor of the Exchequer, Kwasi Kwarteng, is “superficially black”.
She also allegedly claimed that nobody hearing him on the radio would guess him to be black.
The outrage engine burst into life almost immediately and her party members quickly denounced her.
But what I found strange in the unfolding fracas was that no one mentioned what was, to me, the real story: that Huq merely put into words what her party and much of the intelligentsia actually think. Huq’s slip-up was, as far as I could surmise, a moment of honesty.
She appeared to admit this herself in her own statement of apology, regretting her “clumsy choice of words” rather than the underlying message.
She conceded, in effect, that her true crime was not accusing Kwarteng of being inauthentically black, but of doing so without using party-sanctioned Newspeak.
Had she couched her views in the accepted vocabulary of inequities afflicting minority communities, diverging covid rates, disproportionate imprisonment and the BAME wage gap, she wouldn’t have made news at all.
Her statement would have been just another soundbite competing for attention in a crowded marketplace of moral exhibitionism.
But it’s the every day cliches around race that bring into focus the unintended honesty of Huq’s statement. Her party line is that reductionist racial categories are meaningful. This includes the idea that BAME and non-BAME categories don’t just describe who people are, but who they ought to be and who they’re allowed to be.
This is likely why the Guardian was conspicuously silent about Kwarteng’s skin tone in covering his rise to stardom; it was as if the paper had suddenly discovered that race is not the only (or most interesting ) thing about someone. Such an omission is telling in a paper that relentlessly exhibits black people talking about being black and which seldom commissions pieces by black authors that don’t focus on their blackness.
Kwarteng by being who he is exposes the irony of racial thinking in our time: that those who cast themselves as anti-racists are too often the same ones wedded to negative racial caricatures they imagine themselves to be fighting.
Their romanticised image of British blackness, for example, borrows its conception from a minority Afro-carribean lineage that arrived on British shores at a particular point in British history, and which then culturally cross-pollinated over generations with a violent, entitled, work-allergic species of Englishman. The progeny of this cultural love-child disproportionately commit crime, disproportionately fall victim to crime, disproportionately go to jail for crime and disproportionately dominate perceptions of crime.
And it is this subculture that the British intelligentsia believe, consciously or subconsciously, is “authentic”.
This belief is quite obvious from who the Guardian fills its pages with. The artist Stormzy, for example, consistently gets glittering coverage. Here are just 3 articles from ten pages of search-engine results:
“Stormzy is a political pop hero young people can truly believe in”,
“Stormzy: ‘My man Jeremy Corbyn! I dig what he says’”
“Stormzy at Glastonbury 2019 review – a glorious victory lap for black British culture”
Below is a verse from the performance that earned the Guardian accolade “a glorious victory lap for black British culture”:
Yeah, I’m the best, I’m so cocky,
I’ve got a mob like A$AP Rocky
I set trends, dem man copy
They catch feelings, I catch bodies
They roll deep, I roll squaddy
Got about 25 goons in my posse
They drink Bailey’s, I drink Vossy
I get merky, they get worried
If you got a G-A-T, bring it out
Most of the real bad boys live in south
If you wanna do me something, I’m about
I’m not a gangster, I’m just about
But you see my man over there with the pouch?
In the above verse, the Jamaican street term “dem man” is used with the historically English gangster-world “gat”, exhibiting the hybrid English-Jamaican-gangster origins of the man’s thinking.
The lyrics boast of him killing people (‘I catch bodies’) and of overpowering rival gangs with superior numbers (“25 goons in my posse”).
The artist valorises settling status challenges through lethal gun violence (“If you got a gat, bring it out”, “But you see my man over there with the pouch?”).
These depictions are what Alexis Petridis of the Guardian celebrates as black British culture. That a story like this was published without a tweet of discernible protest from an outrage-prone audience suggests that the Guardian-reading class see no problem with this view, or, more likely, endorse it. As do those, presumably, who set fire to Rupa Huq’s career.
The Huq versus Stormzy dichotomy lays bare the Orwellian double-think paralysing supposedly educated people. On the one hand they believe that there is such a thing as black authenticity (which outlets like the Guardian clearly articulate without raising any eyebrows in their audience). On the other hand they insist that there is no such thing as black inauthenticity (as the rage against Rupa Huq makes clear).
The logic that black authenticity necessitates black inauthenticity, much as light necessitates darkness, is lost on them.
So too is the inescapable reality that pidgin-speaking gangsters being considered authentic is entirely consistent with well-spoken, polite people being considered inauthentic.
Stormzy is to black authenticity what Noel Gallagher is to white authenticity. That is to say, so utterly blunt and lazy in its conception of the word that it is without meaning.
And yet, such blunt and lazy thinking continues to drive public outrage as well as public policy, as Rupa Huq and the Guardian show.
The governments own conception of that catch-all “BAME”, for example, illustrates this abundantly. The Office of National Statistics (ONS) captures the following ethnic categories in its presentation of the often-mentioned BAME wage gap:
By their own definitions of ethnicity white people are BAME when in the catchment “white and black African”, “White and Black Caribbean”, “White Irish”, “Other white” and “White and Asian”.
By their own rationale talk of white people and BAME as separate categories is wrong because many different white people are themselves contained within BAME.
And by their own definitions of ethnicity, Chinese and Indian people do better than white British people do. The BAME wage gap is often trotted out as proof of systemic discrimination against ALL ethnic minorities, even when a subset of them out-earn white British people.
How can systemic racism against black and brown people be responsible for Pakistanis earning less money than white British people, but Indians and Chinese earning more?
The reason is that the spotlight only shines where it appears to support the ideology of systemic racism.
Kwasi Kwarteng is despised, or ignored, because he doesn’t fit the ideology.
The reaction to Rupa Huq shows the level of self dishonesty in admitting this.
