As someone who has recently discovered he is black, I have watched with incredulity the treatment doled out by the white liberal media to the theatre director Anthony Ekundayo Lennon.
Like me, Anthony has shoved a name which sounds a bit exotic between his Christian name and his surname in order to convince people he is black. He has also said that while he does not have any African genes whatsoever, he feels black. That’s good enough for me, and it has proved good enough for organisations which bung people large sums of money on account of their skin colour — or what the individuals, on a whim, deem their skin colour to be. Anthony has been the recipient of part of a £406,500 grant for black and ethnic minority people and now occupies a role designated for a person of colour.
I hope similarly to gain financially from my remarkable discovery, at the age of 58, that I am in fact black. Like Anthony I was teased as a child on account of my appearance. I also have a very strong sense of rhythm and am usually cheerful, both qualities which my mother told me were associated with people of African-Caribbean descent. My denial of my blackness I put down to the pressures imposed by a white supremacist society in which I have struggled to survive for so long. I am black — get over it. And gimme the money.
The arguments from the liberals against Anthony (and thus, by extension, me) being black are hilarious. They claim, for instance, that he is not black at all, factually. Ah, but surely what matters is what he feels himself to be, no? Isn’t that the criteria we apply in other cases? Likewise, the assertion that he is diverting funds away from people who are truly deserving because they actually are black and that further to this he cannot be objectively black because however black he might think himself to be, he has not suffered as a black person has suffered: he does not have slavery and colonialism hanging around his neck, no matter how much he (and I, obvs) might identify with people who do.
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