Barnardo's should know better about 'white privilege' - Spectator Coffee House, 12/11/20

Barnardo's should know better about 'white privilege'
By Patrick West

Corporations and charities virtue signalling has become a familiar spectacle in everyday life. Sainsbury's, Virgin West Coast, HSBC, Ben & Jerry's, Gillette and Nike have all pronounced their various anti-racist, anti-sexist and pro-gay, pro-trans principles. The latest to join in this festival of conspicuous compassion is Barnardo’s, which yesterday pronounced on the matter of 'white privilege'. Unveiling its new guide on this hot topic for parents, the children's charity said:

'Talking about white privilege means looking at how our own actions maintain and support racist systems and structures.'

Unsurprisingly, this has generated some angry responses. 'As a former Barnardo’s Boy, I find your stance as disappointing as it is nonsensical,' was one reply. 'Where was my white privilege when I was left in Hull Maternity Hospital at 2 days old? Where was my white privilege when I was in several short-term foster homes prior to going into care in?'

Another added: 'Been on the breadline for most of my life, been homeless too, is it too late to apply for my white privilege?'

This furious backlash is no surprise – and Barnardo’s should have known better. People are growing tired of smug institutions parroting ill-defined, contentious topics like 'white privilege'. As many of those replying to Barnardo's message have pointed out, poor people come in all colours. Being white doesn't automatically confer privilege. White working class people increasingly hate being demonised on account of their skin pigmentation, especially by affluent white liberals, who compensate by disdaining whites who are poorer and less sophisticated than them.

Walk into any bookshop and witness how the issue of race both consumes and narrows our thinking on culture and society. This monomania has made us blind to the issue of class, a category of people who don't exist in woke thought. According to Ibram X Kendi, the author of How to be an Antiracist, 'the original sin is racism', a statement which reflects how racism has become the ultimate transgression today, a heresy that has terrible consequences.

You would have thought that 'progressive' doctrine, with its emphasis on 'intersectionality' – the idea that people can face multiple forms of discrimination owing to their race, sex, sexuality and so on – would recognise that the categories of privileged and underprivileged are not a black and white matter, literally. But the public manifestation of Critical Theory, which has ravaged the academy in recent years, and which has now been adopted by big business and charities, has nothing to say about class (unlike the Marxist doctrine that preceded it, which was contrarily obsessed with it).

As Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay wrote in their recent book Cynical Theories, How Universities Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity: 'Privilege-consciousness has...nearly completely replaced class-consciousness as the primary concern of those on the academic, activist, and political left. ' They continue: 'This shift away from class and towards gender identity, race, and sexuality troubles traditional economic leftists, who fear that the left is being taken away from the working class and hijacked by the bourgeoisie.'

The desperate plight of white working class boys and men – who, on account of their sex and skin pigmentation, place them at the apex of privilege, according to woke doctrine – has been much-publicised. Not only are they among the poorest performers in schools, they are frequently outshone by their co-patriots professionally. As Trevor Philips wrote recently:

'The notion of white privilege would be baffling to the families of white boys who have fallen to the bottom of the education attainment league tables, and who are staring at a lifetime of sweeping the streets occupied by their affluent Indian-heritage classmates.'

We can just about tolerate the insincerity of corporations flaunting their political correct credentials. This is usually done to ingratiate themselves with customers, and sometimes to distract from the fact that they have very few black or Asian people in their upper echelons. We can also understand white, middle-class undergraduates attending Black Lives Matter rallies, too. Boasting a compassionate, left-wing outlook on life is intrinsic to being a young student, after all. And what footballer would dare refuse to 'take the knee' on the grounds of disagreeing with BLM, knowing the public opprobrium that would result in such an action?

What is unforgivable is a charity like Barnardo’s joining in this charade. Unlike mere hawkers of consumer goods, it has first-hand experience of dealing with poverty, deprivation and suffering. Unlike those responsible for issuing such declarations as the one we saw yesterday, its front-line workers will surely understand that poverty and a lack of privilege affects children and carers of all colours.


Patrick West is a columnist for Spiked and author of Conspicuous Compassion (Civitas, 2004) and Get Over Yourself: Nietzsche For Our Times (Societas, 2017)

Bruce Gilley and the ‘problems of anti-colonialism’ saga - Spectator Coffee House, October 12, 2020

Bruce Gilley and the ‘problems of anti-colonialism’ saga
By Patrick West


Most of us are familiar with the climate of censure and censorship we now live in. People are 'cancelled' and 'no-platformed' for having inappropriate opinions on matters of race and gender, and reprimanded for using the wrong pronoun when referring to transgender men and women. But there are worrying signs that this tendency to shut down those with the 'wrong views' has strayed into the world of books and publishing.

Bruce Gilley, an Oxford-educated professor, is being cancelled for the second time in three years, having a book withdrawn after an online campaign against him. 'The Last Imperialist: Sir Alan Burns' Epic Defense of the British Empire' was due to be the first volume in a 'problems of anti-colonialism' series. Now it won't see the light of day: the book has been scrapped following a petition set up by a Maoist philosopher, calling on publisher Rowman & Littlefield to rethink its decision to release the book. According to Gilley, who was first targeted by campaigners unhappy at his 2017 paper 'The Case for Colonialism', the 'snowballing' of the petition online was enough for the project to be ditched without explanation.

Gilley is not alone. In July, historian David Starkey said sorry after saying in an interview that slavery was not akin to genocide as 'so many damn blacks' had survived. He was right to apologise. But doing so was not enough. As a result of his comment, and the furore that ensued, HarperCollins said it would no longer publish any more of his books. This came a few months after Hachette dropped plans to publish Woody Allen's memoir Apropos of Nothing, following accusations that he molested his daughter as a child (which he denies).

But while there are, of course, plausible arguments to be made criticising Gilley, Starkey and Allen, I can't be alone in thinking it a pity that their writings may no longer see the light of day. While Starkey's recent comments were wrong, his work on the Tudors has been vital to our understanding of this period in England's history. Should we not be able to learn from his knowledge, even if we don't agree with everything he says?

As for Gilley, while his arguments against colonialism go against the grain of mainstream academic opinion, should he not be entitled to make the argument as to why, for all the bad things that happened under colonialism, there were upsides? After all, isn't the purpose of a good book to challenge our assumptions, rather than to simply confirm what we thought all along?

Yet in the world of publishing, it is becoming increasingly clear that there are two hurdles an author must overcome to get their work published. Firstly, it must be good enough. Fair enough. And secondly, the author must hold the right opinions and say the right things. Even high-profile authors are not immune to the second of these criteria. This summer, several staff members at Hachette threatened to down tools and refuse to work on Rowling’s new book, ‘The Ickabog’, because they didn't like all of her views. On that occasion, the publisher admirably stuck up to those staff members. Yet authors without the loyal following Rowling has are more vulnerable to these attempts at silencing writers.

And while the Twitter mob might not like it, the merits of publishing Rowling are clear: her latest novel which was attacked for being 'transphobic' has since shot to the top of the bestseller charts. So although some publishers are clearly fearful of the mob, toeing the line out of fear and expedience of the financial consequences should they be accused of racism or sexism, more need to take up the old newspaper mantra: publish and be damned.

Wokeness is a cult of purity - Spiked, September 4, 2020

 

Wokeness is a cult of purity

They believe cultures cannot mix and that good people must be punished for the most minor transgressions.

Patrick West


It’s a sign that normality has returned in earnest: the trivial transgression of cultural appropriation is back in the news headlines. No doubt you will have seen the story. The singer Adele has been accused of this outrageous violation after appearing in a virtual Notting Hill Carnival photograph sporting a bikini top emblazoned with the Jamaican flag and with her hair in Bantu knots, a hairstyle mostly associated with African women or women of African descent.

We are back on familiar ground, back to the notion that any form of intercultural interaction, especially undertaken by white people, is inherently racist and offensive. Some did defend Adele on the grounds that being a native of Britain’s multiracial capital city, she knew exactly what she was doing, and was less engaging in appropriation and more appreciation. Yet the affair reveals how tenacious remains the notion of ‘cultural appropriation’.

This popular conceit is profoundly ignorant and illiterate. All cultures are cross-breeds to some degree. I write these very words in a language that is a mash-up of Anglo-Saxon and Old French. English combines the language of the oppressed and oppressor. I punch up and down merely by typing these words.

Yet the resilient belief that cultures are sacred and incorruptible is significant. It is a symptom of a new morality of purity, a culture of cleansing and of new boundaries.

As Frank Furedi argues in his recent book, Why Borders Matter: Why Humanity Must Relearn the Art of Drawing Boundaries, our culture’s borders have shifted focus in recent decades. Traditional boundaries between nation states are deemed archaic or undesirable by some. The boundary between male and female is collapsing, as is that between gay and straight, adult and child, public and private. Transgression is the name of the game.

Or so it seems. Boundaries themselves aren’t vanishing — rather, our culture has erected new ones. One example is this boundary between cultures, which are now viewed as akin to animal species that cannot interbreed. Cultures are deemed in need of inoculation from each other. Hence the felony of ‘cultural appropriation’. Furedi also points to ‘safe spaces’, which erect a different type of boundary, as does ‘cancel culture’, which divides mankind into two categories: the elect and the outcasts.

In the United States, there is talk of introducing racial segregation on university campuses. This reification of race – between people of the same species – is but another extension of the new quasi-religious imperative to purify, simplify, to erase nuance, subtlety and shades of difference. Such is the forensic fanaticism and fundamentalism of the new puritanism that even the most tiny transgression, or ‘microaggression’, must be identified and exorcised.

This purity cult seeks to expunge society of those who fail to obey woke diktats, to cancel, ‘call out’, shame, intimidate, harass or punish the undesirables. Liberal humanism is derided as insufficient. It is not enough to tolerate people we disagree with. They must conform or be expelled. Hence the violence in America at the moment, from the puritan stormtroopers of antifa and BLM, who demand strangers show obedience and compliance, who are literally destroying America. In pulling down statues, they betray how they want to erase history itself. It’s all classic Year Zero behaviour, worthy of a cult, of which the new puritanism is but an extension.

It is often remarked that people are far more intolerant these days, and seek recourse to censorship so freely. It derives from this new morality, which can’t abide impurity and cannot tolerate difference or dissent.

The new morality worships purity. The new boundaries are the means by which this doctrine is enforced.

John Williams: the great classical composer of our time

What a joy it was to listen to Classic FM’s ‘Movie Music Hall of Fame’ throughout bank holiday Monday. It was an escapist fantasy. John Williams’ score for Schindler’s List was eventually voted the nation’s favourite piece of film music, knocking from the top slot Howard Shore’s score for The Lord of the Rings.

It was a triumphal day for Williams all round, with five entries in the top 20 alone, the others including Star Wars, Jurassic Park, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone and ET the Extra-Terrestrial. Surely John Williams should be recognised as our greatest living composer.

Purists might object that his music is highly derivative, with his scores being conspicuously reliant on Prokofiev, Stravinsky and Elgar. This is true. Yet Williams, not to mention Shore, John Barry, Hans Zimmer, Ennio Morricone and so on, have produced some of the best-loved and most enduring classical music of the second half of the 20th century and first two decades of this one. Their music has proved more lasting than anything produced by mainstream modern classical composers. Film scores today are the only form of new classical music that enjoy popularity among the masses.

Most of the new material performed at the Proms this year will be forgotten in 10 years’ time. By then the Classic FM Movie Music Hall of Fame won’t have changed much at all.

We all have bad thoughts

The singer George Ezra has revealed that he is suffering from a form of obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) known as ‘Pure O’, short for ‘purely obsessional’, the symptoms of which include distressing or disruptive thoughts associated with OCD, but none of the physical actions to relieve them, such as internal counting, blinking or other repetitive physical rituals.

Upon reading the confession, I began to suspect that I, too, had ‘Pure O’. I have three classic psychological OCD symptoms: hoarding, repeated checking of door locks or oven knobs, and indeed disruptive thoughts.

I’ve always had all sorts of strange and unpleasant thoughts. But no one is in charge of their subconscious, and who governs what might spring from it unannounced, so I’ve learnt not to hate myself for such thoughts, just as most of us eventually don’t blame ourselves for the weird and horrible things we do in our dreams.

My most common disruptive thought is the temptation to throw myself in front of an oncoming train or from a tall building. But again, many of you will have had this temptation. It’s a common cause for fear of heights, and not remotely connected with actual suicidal thoughts.

Most of us have strange thoughts from time to time. Most of us have some form of OCD, in which case we should accept that behaviour associated with it is otherwise known as ‘being human’.

Why so many BLM ultras are white - Spiked, July 3, 2020

Why so many BLM ultras are white

The race wars they are stoking won't blight their affluent neighbourhoods.

Patrick West


Many people have made the observation that most Black Lives Matter activists aren’t actually black. To judge by television coverage, photographs and YouTube videos, most BLM protesters indeed seem to be white, middle-class students. In a further paradox, it is becoming more evident by the day that many black people and ethnic minorities vehemently oppose BLM.

On Tuesday, the black comedian and actor Terry Crews, known to UK viewers from E4’s cop comedy Brooklyn Nine-Nine, warned that Black Lives Matter shouldn’t morph into ‘Black Lives Better’. The devout Christian tweeted: ‘If you are a child of God, you are my brother and sister. I have family of every race, creed and ideology.’ Crews was consequently subject to online denunciation, which is not surprising, as he was essentially saying that all lives mattered – a sentiment that infuriates BLM advocates.

Closer to home, this week also saw the mixed-race former footballer Karl Henry publicly call into question BLM UK. ‘I think the majority of the UK have now had enough of that organisation’, he tweeted. ‘Black people’s lives matter! The divisive #BlackLivesMatter organisation, however, DOES NOT!’

Another British mixed-race former sportsman, Matthew Syed of The Sunday Times, asked of BLM whether ‘toppling another statue’ will ‘help the black person cowering from gangs in a drug-infested neighbourhood, the graduate denied promotion because of unconscious bias, the child growing up without hope in a tower block?’.

While in Britain we have the brave Trevor Phillips, in Australia one of the best-known detractors of woke politics and BLM is the journalist and television presenter Rita Panahi, who this summer has described BLM as ‘anti-police, anti-white, anti-capitalist but also proudly neo-Marxist’.

America’s veteran conservative writer Dinesh D’Souza has said that ‘the left has deployed a paramilitary’ in militant anti-racist protesting. ‘It’s not just Antifa. It’s all the other groups: Refuse Fascism, Black Lives Matter, and on it goes… This is something that Mussolini had, the black shirts… A roving band of thugs that are protected by powerful people in Hollywood [and] the media.’

It’s not only conservative ethnic-minority voices who reject BLM. Last week Africa’s elder stateswoman, the politician and humanitarian Graça Machel, formerly of Mozambique’s freedom movement and widow of Nelson Mandela, criticised BLM’s tactic of pulling down statues of slave-owners. They should remain, to ‘tell generations to come, this is how it started, and this is how it never should continue to be’.

In Britain, Sir Geoff Palmer, Scotland’s first black professor, has campaigned for years for explanatory plaques to accompany statues of slave traders. He believes toppling monuments will only erase the memory of their crimes against humanity: ‘You remove the evidence, you remove the deed.’ Indeed. Many black Americans have this summer come out in defence of the Emancipation Statue in Washington DC, paid for by freed slaves.

This paradox veers into genuine irony. Witness the spectacle of a white man attacking a black man for trying to remove BLM posters from a fence. Observe the white man scream at his uppity, negro inferior.

What’s behind such dissonance between whites who think they know best for blacks, and many blacks who disagree? Why are there black people proposing constructive ways of dealing with the past, but nihilist woke white protesters hellbent on destruction of statues, and capitalism itself, who offer no vision and no future?

It’s because for black people racism is a real-life everyday potential experience. It may not be as bad as times past, and race relations are worse in the US than the UK, but racism remains in black folk memory and its shadow is always there. Hence the real desire to educate and to offer positive solutions that encourage mutual understanding and erase superficial differences. Many black people are also more concerned about the present than the past: in 2018, 2,925 black people were murdered in the United States, 2,600 of that number by other blacks.

For Black Lives Matter – the very name epitomises its philosophy of division – it’s all a bit of a posture and a pastime. Racism rarely affects white liberal twentysomethings. But street protests do afford a feeling of righteousness, an opportunity to virtue-signal, to satiate that young man’s power-lust and feeling of importance – and to alleviate the boredom of lockdown. The white BLM protesters don’t think about the dangerous consequences of their actions or politics because they won’t be affected by them. The race wars that they are stoking won’t blight their affluent all-white neighbourhoods.

Black Lives Matter are dangerous narcissists whose driving force is self-aggrandisement. Let’s hope the tide really is turning against them.


There’s nothing racist about White Jesus

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, has called for a review to decide which representations of Jesus should remain in Anglican cathedrals and churches, given that most of them portray Christ as white and north-European looking, whereas he was Middle Eastern.

This literal-mindedness is dubious – and for the church, dangerous. Christ is white in most churches because, before Windrush, so was England. Religious icons are always traditionally portrayed in accordance to the ethnicity and culture of worshippers, with Jesus being black in Sub-Saharan Africa, Filipino in the Philippines and resembling previous depictions of Zeus in Greece.

Most cathedrals were built in the Middle Ages, when most people didn’t even leave their hometown in their lifetimes let alone travel to the Middle East. There was very little comprehension of there being people who weren’t white.

The archbishop’s literal-mindedness sets a perilous precedent. If Jesus should be rendered ‘realistic’, should the Bible be rewritten to make it historically accurate?

I really wouldn’t recommend going down that path. The ‘virgin’ Mary was originally the ‘maid’ Mary, and Lazarus was returned from social ostracism, not brought back from the dead. Such are the legion translation mistakes from the Hebrew to the Greek.

The real reason there aren’t more women on Mock the Week

The female comic Katherine Ryan has attacked the gender tokenism on BBC panel show Mock the Week.

I can explain why the programme has always been dominated by men, despite efforts in recent years to introduce more gender balance. It’s because the format of the programme is competitive, and men are more competitive than women.

It’s also because on average men are funnier than women. As Camille Paglia famously argued, men are given to extremes: there are more men of genius for the same reason most serial killers and lunatics are male.

Comedy is fundamentally about cruelty or the distortion of reality: it appeals to the dark side of humanity found mostly in the male of the species.

The rise of Britain’s new class system - Spectator Coffee House, July 1, 2020

The rise of Britain’s new class system

Patrick West

Television chef Prue Leith believes that snobbery is still rife in Britain, and that it's keeping working-class people in their place. Speaking to the Radio Times this week, Leith described Britain as 'the most unbelievably class-ridden country'.

She is right, but not for old-fashioned reasons we associate with that Frost Report sketch with John Cleese and the Two Ronnies. Snobbery no longer emanates from the landed gentry or the social-climbing bourgeoise. The most overt snobbery today can be found coming from some on the liberal-left and that minority of Remainers who like to deride 'gammons'. These are the people who for over three years – in the Guardian, on Radio 4's Any Questions, BBC comedies and on Twitter – have castigated and mocked the stupid and ignorant working-class in northern England and the midlands for voting Brexit.

It's acceptable to be openly prejudiced against the working-class in the way it isn't along racial or gender lines because our society is no longer class-aware. While from an early age we are relentlessly told that our country is rife with racism and sexism, we are seldom taught about snobbery and class-prejudice.

Class-ignorance and outspoken class-prejudice among the affluent has hastened the demise of working-class support for the Labour party in recent years. As Labour and the left in general has become obsessed with race and gender and other woke issues, the economically left-leaning but morally conservative working-class sees the Conservative party as a better – or less worse – prospect. The perceived anti-patriotism of Jeremy Corbyn was another key factor. During his tenure left-wing commentators ceaselessly belittled and mocked Brexiteers as brainwashed 'low information' voters who didn't understand what they had voted for.

By far the most insulting phrase employed today is 'white privilege'. Many have become so consumed by racial and gender politics, they think that genitals and skin pigmentation are the only determinants of social status. This is not only contrary to the spirit of progressive politics, but astonishingly ignorant. A duchess living in a country estate probably does enjoy 'white privilege'. An unemployed white man in Margate or Doncaster certainly does not. They are separated by vast degrees of class.

That so many on the left, which exhorted class consciousness for over a hundred years, can't even perceive it now is one of the perverse transformations of recent decades. Even when they talk of gender inequality, it's usually framed in terms of how much women in the boardroom earn. It's never about women in factories. This is the ultimate legacy of the culture of identity politics that is socially aware but economically illiterate. And it has some lamentable and even devastating consequences.

In March last year, former news presenter Michael Buerk remarked that the BBC had become so preoccupied with gender balance and racial diversity that it had become less representative of the country it serves. The corporation, now dominated by the metropolitan middle-class, had become ignorant to matters that concern the working-class, because there are so few of its numbers left in its ranks. In anticipation of John Humphrys's departure from the Today programme, Buerk remarked:

“When John goes, all four of the Today programme’s regular presenters will have been privately educated, like a quite remarkable proportion of other people working for the BBC… These are more uniformly middle-class, well-educated, young, urban and bright, with little experience of – and sometimes little sympathy for – business, industry, the countryside, localness, traditions and politicians."

It's no coincidence that the BBC has been manifestly – or as they say, 'systemically' – anti-Brexit in the past four years. It's also why Mock The Week, the Now Show and other BBC comedies have spent four years contrasting industrious Polish plumbers with lazy, native Brits lounging at home watching daytime television.

Class ignorance is also why working-class boys are behind almost every other group at GCSE lvel, and why white working-class pupils in the 2010s performed worse than their BAME working-class counterparts.

Class is a problem in Britain – but our problem is that we don't speak about it enough, or understand that it's just as important as gender and race.

Spiked, June 7, 2019

Everyone’s turning into Rick from The Young Ones
Branding people you don't like ‘Nazis’ is infantile and dangerous.

Spiked, September 10, 2018

Serena was no victim of racism or sexism
What we really saw was a rich person intimidating a person of lesser standing.

Spiked, September 7, 2018

What Nike and Nietzsche have in common
Both preach that it is better to ‘just do it’ than to believe in something.

Spiked, August 31, 2018

Diversity quotas kill comedy
Michael Palin was dead right to criticise the BBC’s PC box-ticking.

Spiked, March 23, 2018

Hope Not Hate: Anti-fascist authoritarianism

Well-meaning censors are the most dangerous of all

Spiked, January 5, 2018

Meet the new pearl-clutchers
Today it’s the liberal-left who punish moral transgressors.

Spiked, November 30, 2017

Self-censorship: the modern scourge
Grow some balls, people, and express that unpopular opinion.

Spiked, November 11, 2017

Remember, the past is a foreign country
It’s wrong to judge people of the past by today’s moral standards.

Spiked, August 31, 2017

TV ads: why whites and straights are out

The obsession with ‘diversity’ in advertising feels a little sinister.

Spiked, January 26, 2017

We have reached peak 'you're racist!'
The charge of racism is now used to silence people we disagree with.

in Spiked, August 7, 2015

L’Étranger: absurdist, not racist
It’s folly to view Camus' great novel through the lens of post-colonial theory.

in Spiked, June 26, 2015

Should the confederate flag come with a trigger warning?
Destroying symbols won't change the past

in Spiked, February 20, 2015

A trip down Chelsea’s hooligan lane

There was a time when racist abuse really was a Chelsea-fan staple – it’s not now.

In spiked, May 18, 2012

Does it matter if you’re black or white?
The deaths of culture-defying musicians Adam Yauch and Donald ‘Duck’ Dunn are a reminder of music's skin-tone sensitivities.

In Telegraph blogs, February 23, 2010

Why 'blacking up' white actors isn't necessarily racist