Racism

Last week, a bill cleared the US House Judiciary Committee that would establish a 13-person commission to consider federal reparations for slavery. Although similar legislation has been introduced in every Congress since 1989, this is the closest such a bill has ever advanced towards a full vote in the House. The President’s support for this pet far-left project is unsurprising. A reparations commission featured in Joe Biden’s campaign platform. Advocating the establishment of this commission is a hop, skip and a jump from advocating reparations, full stop. The UK’s proliferating parliamentary inquiries often function to kick sensitive subjects into the long grass. But an American panel convened to address such

And so the National Trust’s crazed attack on its own properties goes blazing on. Their latest self-hating wheeze is to get children to write poems attacking Britain’s history. One hundred primary school pupils have been taken around the Trust’s country houses before they compose poems about the former owners’ connections with the British Empire. It’s all part of the Trust’s ‘Colonial Countryside’ project, which since 2018 has been highlighting ties between the Trust’s houses and imperialism. And so, at lovely Charlecote Park, Warwickshire, one child wrote this about the jewelled dress sword and scabbard looted from Lucknow during the Indian mutiny of 1857: ‘Stolen by the English; a freedom sword, a

Back in the 1960s, my brother Asim and I were smitten by the magical Manchester United trio of Law, Best and Charlton. We became London Reds and travelled on the MU Supporters’ Club coach to Old Trafford to watch our team — and we always went to see them play London clubs. But we stopped going in the 1970s; we feared for our physical safety. Marauding bands of skinheads outside the grounds were on the lookout for a spot of Paki-bashing. Instead, during the 1970s, we went on Anti-Nazi League marches and routinely confronted members of the National Front, a fascist party that was briefly the UK’s fourth-largest party in

The Sewell Report on race and ethnic disparities is courageous, thoughtful and measured. Its relative optimism has triggered a torrent of bile from those personally or professionally wedded to the idea that Britain is a systemically racist society. They accuse the report of disregarding what is fashionably called ‘lived experience’ — in other words, anecdotal evidence and subjective impression. Its use of carefully considered objective data, the critics allege, devalues the lived experience of ethnic minorities. Lived experience has validity, but — by definition — only for those who have lived it. It proves nothing beyond itself, and certainly nothing systemic. If we wish to be rational creatures, we check

I have a thought for the students of Loyola University in Baltimore, Maryland: this Easter, why not resurrect Flannery O’Connor? Why not show that you appreciate America’s greatest Catholic writer even if the poor, frightened duds in charge of you do not? Last summer, the university’s president, the Revd Brian F. Linnane SJ, removed O’Connor’s name from its halls of residence. The New Yorker had published a pompous piece about racism in O’Connor’s private correspondence, the George Floyd protests had begun and so… best not make the students uncomfortable, said Father Linnane. The cosmic joke of this has stayed with me ever since. It’s not just that it’s the duty

A new report by the UK government’s Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities has been published today. At over 250 pages, it is a meaty document that makes a total of 24 recommendations, based on four broad themes: ‘building trust’, ‘promoting fairness’, ‘creating agency’, and achieving inclusivity’. But one of its more eye-catching conclusions – which will inevitably cause a stir in the ‘anti-racism’ circles which have rallied behind the Black Lives Matter movement – is that the report says Britain is a successful multi-racial democracy. It argues that the country has come a long way over the past 50 years in terms of race relations, and as a result

Gstaad Some of you may have noticed that I have not commented at all about the ongoing soap opera and latest brouhaha concerning the halfwit and Meghan Macbeth. That’s because I decided long ago that the best way to counter their publicity machine is never to mention them. But I’ve also done something that most of the hacks writing about the couple have not: I’ve been a guest on Oprah’s show twice, on one occasion by my little old self for a whole hour. Although wince-inducing, squirming, cringeworthy and gushing, The Oprah Show always has a theme and, more importantly, a hook. The hook is what will make people’s ears

Does Black Lives Matter speak for black Brits? The organisation’s objectives are certainly radical: it has professed public support for direct action in the name of ‘black liberation’, along with aspirations to dismantle the capitalist economy. It has also said it wants to get rid of the police and abolish prisons. It’s safe to say those views are not shared by many of those BLM claims to represent. A new report by the Henry Jackson Society reveals that, while nearly six in ten black people in Britain think the UK is a fundamentally racist society (a view shared by three in ten people in the general population), the core objectives of

Ah, a story for our times. And I think you know how it’s going to go. There was this junior school in Yorkshire which had houses named after various figures in English history; Francis Drake, Sir Walter Raleigh, Lord Nelson. And then? You can take it from here.  Some very agitated pupils got together and sent round a petition which frightened the headteacher so much that he renamed the houses? Well, you’d be right except for one thing. It only takes one really annoying person to write the Great Men out of a school; that and a suggestible head teacher, one Lee Hill, who posts school news on Twitter with

Gstaad Martha Gellhorn was a long-legged blonde American writer and journalist who became Papa Hemingway’s third and penultimate wife. She got her start when H.G. Wells, then nearly 70, fell for her rather badly, advised her on her writing, and paid her a small retainer to keep him up to date on American trends. She was 27 at the time. Wells had met Martha at the White House during the Franklin Roosevelt years before the war, Eleanor having been a friend of Martha’s mother, who was known around St Louis for having a mad crush on the First Lady. Yes, dear readers, sex existed even back then, but people didn’t

Have you ever claimed to be ‘not racist’? If so, sorry, but you’re a bigot. Should this seem incoherent, then you’re clearly not well versed in critical race theory: a once niche academic field that has gone mainstream and popularised concepts such as ‘white privilege’, ‘white fragility’ and ‘systemic racism’. According to Ibram X. Kendi, author of How to Be an Anti-Racist, ‘the claim of “not racist” neutrality is a mask for racism’. Alana Lentin, author of Why Race Still Matters, takes it a step further, arguing that to be ‘not racist’ is ‘a form of discursive racist violence’. If you declare yourself not racist, it’s an unequivocal sign you’re