In one respect, the scaremongers are right: Racism is alive and well in this country, being imbedded in our institutions and abetted by the arms of the state. But this scourge manifests itself not in the hackneyed and often illusionary variety forever invoked by the liberal-left. This is the benevolent, ‘nice’ form of racial discrimination, one which bizarrely presents itself as an extension of anti-racism.
Those with a morbid fascination with skin colour are being actively encouraged in their hobby
Race obsessives not only remain a real presence, but those with a morbid fascination with skin colour are being actively encouraged in their hobby. Taxpayers are now funding a music festival which bans white people from its leadership. The annual Decolonise Fest, a London event for ‘punx [sic] of colour,’ one which aspires to undo the damage of colonialism and ‘dismantle white supremacy’ in the punk scene, not only forbids whites from its hierarchy, but has received money from the Arts Council, National Lottery and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport.
In the words of the festival’s organisers, ‘white people cannot join the organising group’, as the event seeks to ‘focus on people of colour’ and the ‘contribution punx of colour have made to the punk scene since its inception.’ The festival has featured the most infamous hard-left punk band of our times, Bob Vylan, whose mixed-raced lead singer, Pascal Robinson-Foster, led chants of ‘death to the IDF’ during their Glastonbury set last summer. As Decolonise Fest’s manifesto elaborates: ‘We are uncompromising and strong and will dismantle the white supremacy, patriarchy, classism, ableism and Islamophobia that infests the punk scene’.
This roll-call of right-on causes. The turgid verbiage. The hope of introducing an edgy-sounding neologism ending in ‘-x’ to the lexicon. These are tell-tell signs of an event whose organisers remain beholden to the language of wokery, who believe that they can cajole and blindside the gullible by simply invoking its mantras and regurgitating its slogans. As the festival organisers continue, the event aspires to ‘talk about racism but not in a way that centres on whiteness or priorities the feelings of white people. No white tears.’
We shouldn’t therefore be surprised to read about the existence of such a festival. If Piers Morgan is to be believed, ‘woke is dead’. But it isn’t. This festival is evidence that this philosophy is very much alive.
One of the most persistent legacies of wokery is the the idea that colour-blindness is a complacent, impossible and even oppressive delusion. This ideology said instead that people of white pigmentation should become attuned to the original sin of ‘whiteness’. It also explained that those with dark skin should be taught that ‘black’ represented a fixed, essential entity which needed to be capitalised accordingly. Declaring yourself ‘colour-blind’, or denying one’s racism, became for white people a thought-crime, merely damning proof of innate, subconscious racism.
According to one of the gurus of hyper-liberalism, Ibram X. Kendi, it was no good being ‘non-racist’: we all had to be pro-actively ‘anti-racist’. According to the similarly-influential Robin DiAngelo, author of the best-selling 2018 book White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk about Racism, all white people are guilty. As Nellie Bowles wrote in her 2024 expose of hyper-liberal excess, Morning After The Revolution: ‘In the DiAngelo doctrine, there are not individual racists doing singular bad acts. All white people are racist, because racism is structural…To fix one’s inherent racism requires constant work and it requires white people to talk about their whiteness. They must identify as white.’
The u-turn among activists on the left, from progressives of all hues, has been something to behold. Sixty years ago, good, decent, liberal voices urged us not to judge people by the colour of their skin. Thirty years ago, those at the vanguard of liberalism could dismiss race as a chimera and ‘social construct’. But now we’re back where we started, seeing skin colour as something that determines one’s thinking and one’s moral worth.
This thinking is in rude health today. The increased ‘racial awareness’ of recent years has entailed more recruitment policies in the workplace based on race, more officially-sanctioned segregation. The Decolonise Fest carnival represents merely the extension of this tendency. ‘Black Out’ theatre productions, which effectively advise against the attendance of white people, have been with us in this country since 2019, while the Decolonise Fest has been in existence for even longer, founded in 2016.
If racism of the old-fashioned variety seen in the 1970s is resurgent, and if ‘ethnonationalism’ has become a force to be reckoned with today, it shouldn’t surprise us. It’s the new racialists who have helped to re-racialise our society and even our very thinking. Much like those cranky European taxonomists of the 19th century, it’s today’s hyper-liberals, with their unsubstantiated and corrosive theories on race, who are driving everyone mad.
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