The Black Lives Matter movement is re-racialising society

Every day I thank God for the British Empire. Without it I wouldn’t exist. My Gold Coast-born mother would never have met my English father. She herself is the descendant of a Scottish merchant called Bruce. Now she lives happily in rural Perthshire. She’s the only black in the village.

Growing up in the 1990s, I faintly remember debate over whether non-whites could be British. Certainly the question had receded by the time Monty Panesar made his England cricket debut midway through the following decade. Meanwhile, however, Britain quickly became one of the best places for cultural entrepreneurs to promote the pernicious fallacy that we are best understood through the prism of race and culture. So we have ‘blackness’ and ‘black culture’ pushed by people and groups state-funded via quangos and academia, or propped up with charity money. These cultural entrepreneurs’ livelihoods depend on the continuance of grievance, so they encourage division between groups while suppressing diversity within groups. Black Lives Matter organisers are cultural entrepreneurs par excellence. They are re-racialising society along the lines of white history vs black history. In fact, the only time I’ve ever been told to ‘go home’ was last Christmas, by a Jamaican.

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I can see how some blacks might reasonably find a victimhood of blackness seductive, but it’s to their detriment. To see race as a component of all social interaction is psychologically damaging. It induces a conspiratorial mindset where every comment or gesture is decoded for racial bias. My favourite instance of many I’ve recorded concerned last year’s royal baby. I had visited my Afro barbershop. Inside, some men were hollering at BBC footage of Nicholas Witchell, accusing him of avoiding calling baby Archie ‘black’. I pointed out that ‘Anglo-American’ referred to his nationality as opposed to his race.