The game’s up for ‘anti-racist’ racism

There are only a few rules to column-writing. One of the strictest is never to waste time bouncing off the effluent of morons. So, for instance, it is a rule among British columnists not to use the term ‘Owen Jones’ in an article. It is too easy. Every couple of hours there will be another gaseous eruption. For example, this past week Jones, a YouTuber, has been engaged in campaigning to persuade a ‘queer’ British entrant in the Eurovision Song Contest to withdraw from the competition because of Gaza. It is by no means clear how much the citizens of Gaza care for the ‘solidarity’ of a couple of gay blokes in the UK. It is even less clear how anyone withdrawing from Eurovision would convince the Israeli war cabinet to halt the war against Hamas and persuade Hamas to return the hostages. But this is why the ‘Owen Jones’ rule exists. As it’s so easy, opposing him is fundamentally lazy.

For columns about America a similar rule applies: under no circumstances should you ever bounce off anything said on The View. This is a television programme that goes out most lunchtimes on a left-wing US channel and features four semi-lobotomised leftist women and a generally useless, token, vaguely conservative one. Anybody unclear on the format should ask an unemployed person or a student to explain the British show Loose Women and then imagine a less high-brow version.

Even so, rules are occasionally made to be broken, and this one is worth breaking here because last week something actually interesting happened on The View. The programme invited on the brilliant young writer Coleman Hughes to talk about his excellent new book The End of Race Politics. Hughes happens to be black, and is a member of a new generation that have seen through the race-hustle of some of their elders and have the intelligence to notice that if you view people through the prism of colour, it leads to hell – whether your obsession is with promoting white or black folks.