We hear a lot about white supremacy these days. But for some reason we rarely hear about black supremacy. I wonder why? There’s a lot more of it around.
For Butler, describing someone as white or as trying to be white is clearly a great insult
While it is vanishingly difficult to find an overt white supremacist in British public life, it is extremely easy to identify their black counterparts.
As exhibit A I would present the Labour MP Dawn Butler. I have written about her once before, in 2020, when Ms Butler was in a car that was stopped by police. At the time I speculated that the coppers may have pulled the vehicle over in the hope of reclaiming the whirlpool bath that Butler had treated herself to at taxpayers’ expense a few years before. But it was not to be. The incident simply gave Butler the chance to tour the television studios claiming, with great originality, that the British police are ‘institutionally racist’.
Butler was back in the news this past week because of her response to the election of Kemi Badenoch as Conservative party leader. Some naive Tories imagine that Badenoch’s appointment is somehow going to snooker the furthest fringes of the Labour attack machine. They could not be more wrong. Those fringes are populated by people who will call anyone anything they want, however nonsensically. Erstwhile restraints like consistency, honesty or sanity do not hinder them. In 2022 the charmless Labour MP Rupa Huq attacked Kwasi Kwarteng (then, briefly, chancellor of the Exchequer) as ‘superficially black’.
Inevitably, after the news of Badenoch’s victory, it was Butler’s turn again. She retweeted a post describing the Tory leader as ‘white supremacy in blackface’ and ‘the most prominent member of white supremacy’s black collaborator class’. While this is something that most people will rightly regard as utterly crackers, there are a few things worth noting about it.
First is the apparent view that a surprising number of people on the ‘progressive’ side of politics hold, which is that a person’s politics should not be decided by their intellect but by characteristics over which they have no say. These ‘progressives’ take it as axiomatic that anyone who is not white must always vote for the political left, as should anyone from a sexual minority. Also anyone who is unfortunate enough to be born white and heterosexual but is willing to provide temporary proof that they are not, at present, an active member of the KKK.
This is an unfortunate misunderstanding of the left. But it is not evidence of malice per se. Butler on the other hand now exhibits something different. Because for her, describing someone as white or as trying to be white is clearly a great insult. Butler does not seem to believe that skin colour should not matter. She apparently believes it should matter a great deal – and that her skin colour makes her superior. We have her own words to go on.
Last month, to kick off another ‘black history month’, Butler posted a video online that was bonkers even by her standards. It was a sort of vainglorious rap video. I have watched it quite a number of times and still cannot believe it. If you too don’t believe what I am about to relate, you will just have to go online and watch it for yourself.
At the beginning of the number, Butler chants: ‘You wanted to see me broken?/ Head bowed and tears in my eyes?/ More fool you, you didn’t realise/ That my strength is powered by your lies.’ Quite who the ‘You’ is in this is not made clear but you can make the reasonable assumption that they are white. She goes on: ‘You are the wrong one./ The violent one./ The weird one./ Whereas I, I am the chosen one./ Because I am of the first ones.’ I will give us all a brief moment to recover from that – but only to reflect on those last two lines. There used to be a moratorium in public life on allowing people to go around proclaiming themselves ‘the chosen one’. It is widely regarded as a sign of mental sickness. In Jerusalem it is known as ‘Jerusalem syndrome’ and sees a number of people confined each year. But what to make of that follow-on claim – ‘I am of the first ones’? For elucidation we must, I fear, once again, return to the verse of Dawn Butler.
‘You see this skin I’m in?/ This beautiful mahogany brown?/ The skin you don’t like, I believe./ So why you try so hard to achieve/ By burning yourself in the sun? /For me there’s no need / Because I am the chosen one./ For I am of the first ones.’
To conclude Butler says: ‘You, my friend, don’t matter.’ Then there’s yet more stuff about being the chosen one and the first one, before she reaches the searing insight: ‘You created a structure/ That made you seem great./ When the simple reality is/ It is all fake.’
Enough. It is time to come to some conclusions about Butler’s work. If a white MP made a video describing themselves as the chosen one because they have ‘white skin’ unlike all these ‘loser’ black people, then I think it would be fair to say that their career would be over pretty sharpish. The grandiosity would be laughed at, but the white supremacy would be the death knell.
Yet what Butler has been displaying for some time, like a number of others on the Labour left, is the exact black counterpart to that. Butler does not appear to think she is the equal to her fellow countrymen. She seemingly believes she is superior to them if they are not of her skin colour.
There is a term for that. The one I mentioned at the start. Perhaps we should start using it more often.
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