Race

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters: What really irritates Meghan’s critics

From our UK edition

Meghan’s adroitness Sir: Tanya Gold suggests that people criticise Meghan Markle because she is mixed race and a woman, and states it is because she has dared to attack the royal family (‘In defence of Meghan’, 13 March). I think that misses the point. For a great number of people, her narrative simply does not ring true. Over the past few decades, thousands of media articles have accused the royal household of being claustrophobic, pedantic and antiquated. But unlike the young and naive Diana, Meghan was a thirtysomething TV star with agents and PR people when she met Prince Harry. It’s hard to believe she didn’t know what she was letting herself in for.

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They/Them

The spies who cancel us

A regular column by an anonymous whistleblower operating deep within the heart of the Social Justice Movement. To protect their identity, they will go under the code-name ‘They/Them’. Wokeyleaks is a confidential news-leak organization for anyone who wishes to divulge classified information (and hilarious anecdotes) about woke culture without fear of getting canceled. Eat your heart out Edward Snowden — Wokeyleaks has a mole inside the British security establishment. It turns out that the people whose job it is to protect the UK are spending most of their time protecting employees from ‘harmful language’.

Sunday

Patrick O’Flynn

Britain isn’t racist. Here’s how the Tories can prove it

From our UK edition

Is it racist to wonder what skin colour a baby might have? The reaction to Harry and Meghan's bombshell interview appears to suggest some people think it is. Even attempting to weigh up whether claims of racism within the Royal Family hold water or not is deemed to be unconscionable.  'It’s not any of our places to pick apart claims of racism in order to make us feel more comfortable,' according to GMB presenter and slayer of Piers Morgan, Alex Beresford. Labour leader Keir Starmer seemed to agree, setting aside his previous penchant for forensically picking over evidence to declare that Meghan’s experiences were a reminder of the racism that is all around us.

Friday

Cockburn

Georgetown’s sad decline into affirmative-action madness

For a thousand years, Western universities were the champions and guardians of reason. Now, they know better. Such is the lesson from the sorry tale of Georgetown University Law Center professor Sandra Sellers, whose career abruptly ceased to exist Thursday for the crime of being able to observe patterns. Of course, Sellers’s remarks aren’t a shocking revelation. They’re common sense. Georgetown proudly maintains an 'Office of Affirmative Action Programs'. What is affirmative action, if not a pledge to admit less-qualified students for identity reasons, even if it means watching them struggle in class? Any poor soul who has hit the rock bottom of applying to law school knows that 'Under-Represented Minority' (URM) status is a boon for law school applications.

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harvard upper
Toby Young

The new upper-class signifier

Ex-New York Times journalist Bari Weiss has written a fascinating piece for City Journal about the trials and tribulations of white, upper-middle-class parents at the country’s most exclusive private schools. Hard to work up much sympathy for them, you might think, but the reason for their current difficulties is interesting: the wholesale capture of these elite educational institutions by the woke cult. Weiss says: ‘Brentwood, a school that costs $45,630 a year, made headlines a few weeks back when it held racially segregated "dialogue and community-building sessions". But when I speak with a parent of a middle-school student there, they want to talk about their child’s English curriculum. "They replaced all the books with no input or even informing the parents.

Thursday

Jarvis Dupont

Harry’s ‘gender reveal’ was a BIG OOPS

Before I begin, let me get one thing straight: I am not a racist. Therefore, anything negative I say in this article is aimed exclusively at Harry, NOT Meghan. I would never dream of criticizing a strong independent WoC and everything Meghan has done in her life so far, and will achieve in the future, is empowering — and a direct result of either her own inner strength, or the systemic racism she has faced while navigating the stormy seas of prejudice.  Good, now that’s out of the way, I shall get to the plant-based meat substitute of this article. The Oprah interview was nothing short of Earth-shattering. As a Brit myself (although I inwardly apologize for this every damn day), the impact Meghan’s truth has had on us as a nation has been immense.

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Robert Cherry

Stop the white lies about anti-Asian hate crime

Eighteen months ago, liberals attempted to link the spike in anti-Semitic hate crimes to white supremacist actions. New York City mayor Bill de Blasio and the ADL highlighted the activities of white supremacist groups in upstate New York, despite all of the assaults being in the New York City metropolitan area, overwhelmingly perpetrated by black men. This culminated with black men killing Jews in Jersey City and Monsey, New York. Attempts were then made to rationalize them away rather than focusing on the anti-Semitic beliefs of black-nationalist groups, including the Nation of Islam. The same dynamics seems to be unfolding with the current spike in anti-Asian hate crimes.

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Daisy Dunn

Barack Obama will make you cringe: Renegades: Born in the USA reviewed

From our UK edition

Barack Obama wants the world to know how much he loves singing. In his new podcast, which takes the form of a series of conversations with Bruce Springsteen, he’s rarely without a tune on his lips. ‘Further on up the road…/ you been laughing, pretty baby…’ A shower-singer, a bedroom warbler, an Air Force One air guitarist with an okay voice, the former president is proof that you really can be embarrassing without feeling an ounce of embarrassment. Oh, to have seen his daughters’ faces when he broke into ‘Let’s Stay Together’ in front of Al Green. The sound team at the fundraiser in Harlem urged him to do it, he tells Springsteen, but no one’s buying it.

Anil Bhoyrul

Why is it racist to wonder what colour your child’s skin will be?

From our UK edition

Maybe I missed something here. Or maybe I am just completely naive. But why is it racist to ponder what the skin colour of a new baby will be? According to most of the American and British media, post the Harry and Meghan interview, it absolutely is racist. It’s horrendous. Evil. Bigoted. Especially so in the US (a country where barely over 10 per cent of the married population is actually inter-racial). But these are generally the views of people who don’t actually know what they are talking about. Because they are not part of, or in the slightest bit close to, an inter-racial couple. So first the obvious declaration of interest: I was born in Mauritius. I look Asian. Or brown if you prefer. My wife was born in Slovenia. She is white and blonde.

Deborah Ross

The best film of the year: Judas and the Black Messiah reviewed

From our UK edition

Judas and the Black Messiah is a biopic about Black Panther leader Fred Hampton, but it’s not your regular biopic because it’s told as crime thriller, through the eyes of a snitch, who may be found out at any minute. This film says what it has to say — about race, injustice, police brutality — but excitingly, thrillingly and non-formulaically. It’s the best film of the year so far, which may not be saying much, given how few films have been released, but you get the sentiment. (The Bond film No Time to Die has been postponed so many times I fear none of us will see it in our lifetimes.) Directed by Shaka King, and written by King, Will Berson, Kenny Lucas and Keith Lucas, the film is based quite accurately, as far as I can fathom, on true events.

Hermione Eyre

The truth about my father, Philip Guston

From our UK edition

Philip Guston’s later work is — and I say this with love — nails-down-a-blackboard weird. The vapid pinks and flat reds lend a nightmare cheerfulness. The menacing American figure wearing Mickey Mouse gloves is rendered in cartoonish style. The clock shows it is time to panic, challenging you to call out the hood for the Ku Klux Klan symbol it appears to be. By the time he started making these paintings, in 1968, Guston was pretty much post-everything: post-realism, post-abstract expressionism, post-criticism (he and his wife Musa sailed to Italy the day after the show’s opening night, and when a review found him in Venice, poste restante, he dropped it in a canal).

Tuesday

Roger Kimball

Justice for Derek Chauvin

As I write, jury selection for the murder trial of Derek Chauvin is about to begin in Minneapolis. You remember Derek Chauvin, right? He is the (former) policeman charged with the murder of St George Floyd, race martyr (also drug addict, woman abuser, and career criminal). Chauvin and his three colleagues disgusted civilized opinion last spring when a bystander’s video clip of Officer Chauvin kneeling on George Floyd’s neck was released. Nine minutes. Chauvin kept Floyd pinned to the ground for some nine minutes. ‘I can’t breathe,’ Floyd can be heard crying. An ambulance eventually came to whisk Floyd off to hospital. Too late. Floyd died, murdered by the brutish policeman who cruelly, gratuitously, asphyxiated him by kneeling on his neck, cutting off his air supply.

derek chauvin

Saturday

Peter Savodnik

How the West was lost

One feels for the olds who birthed this cancer. They just wanted to placate the youngs. They had no idea they were disemboweling the same institutions they were charged with safeguarding against the idiot-children. The olds, the so-called progressive elites (so-called because they lacked any sense of noblesse oblige), were scared of being ‘on the wrong side of history’. They wanted the youngs — the new radicals — to like them, to follow them on social media. They wanted to hold onto their power, and they were shallow, and they were vulnerable to their own spinelessness. Blinded by it.

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Thursday

Cockburn

‘The N-word Republic’ is a disgrace!

John 'Rick' MacArthur, the president of Harper’s, is one of those old-fashioned cats on the American left who think that journalism should be lively, provocative, interesting to read. He doesn’t think that the purpose of all writing is to treat every reader as a vile racist who must be reeducated through endless hectoring. That makes him a heretic, of course, in New York media circles, so the knives must come out. Somebody called Ryu Spaeth, a school-hall monitor manqué who’s had to settle for the less elevated role of features editor at the New Republic, has decided that enough is enough. 'John R. MacArthur is a disgrace,’ his latest article declares. A disgrace! Oh dear, what has Rick done now?

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Wednesday

Cockburn

Is your three-month-old baby racist?

Conservatives like feeling outraged, but they don’t often like to earn their outrage. For most, it’s enough to wait for the AP to mention Dr Seuss getting canceled, briefly become upset, then return to waiting for the next setback to kvetch about. This passivity has created an excellent opportunity for one Christopher Rufo. In the past year, Rufo has carved out a career niche by adopting the novel strategy of actually finding all the poisonous propaganda embedded in America’s schools and government departments, and suggesting that, just maybe, these insanities should actually be tackled instead of being the subject of an instantly-forgotten Fox News segment. Rufo’s latest find is from Arizona, where the Department of Education has crafted an 'equity toolkit'.

arizona racist kids three
colorblind casting
James Innes-Smith

A double-standard in colorblind casting

When it comes to who can play what in movies and on TV, producers have been quick to apply a double standard. It is deemed progressive and interesting for black and brown actors to play white characters but inappropriate and offensive the other way round. Colorblind casting only applies to people of color, which somewhat defies the point. After more than 30 years playing African American cartoon character Dr Julius Hibbert, actor Harry Shearer has become the latest victim of a campaign to un-whiten the entertainment industry.

Tuesday

Roger Kimball

There’s no equality in equity

It’s hard to keep them all straight, but among the many diktats emitted by the Biden administration during its first days in office, one deserves special commendation for its brazen mendacity. I mean the ‘Executive Order On Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government’. The key word, as we’ve heard over and over again these last few weeks, is ‘equity’. The diktat (a more accurate term for what is happening than ‘Executive Order’) promises ‘a comprehensive approach to advancing equity for all’ by ‘affirmatively advancing,’ well, ‘equity’. If you think you discern a little whiff of tautology, you’re right. You are also right if, on second sniff, you catch the acrid scent of contradiction.

equity

Saturday

Jonathan Sacerdoti

The trouble with ‘BAME’

From our UK edition

Are Black people and Asians the same? Are they different from other ethnic minorities? What about Jews? And who do we include when we talk about Asians? Korean, Thai and Chinese people, or those from Afghanistan, Pakistan and India? Does ‘Asian’ refer to a set of skin colours or geographical locations? And what exactly is BAME? One of the hallmarks of a functional democracy is to protect the needs of minority groups. As well as ensuring they are not unfairly discriminated against, we must also make certain adjustments to accommodate their specific needs. But modern sensibilities and sociological fashions risk lumping groups together and simply emphasising differences. The effect of this can be division and confusion rather than fairness and harmony.

Thursday

Taki

Is it time to cancel Sophocles?

From our UK edition

Gstaad The sun has returned, the snow is so-so, and exercise has replaced everything, including romance. What a way to go. After a wasted year that has done wonders for my health, the diet is about to kill the patient. That is the good-bad news; the really great news is that Shakespeare has been cancelled by some woke American teachers because they think his classic works promote ‘misogyny, racism, homophobia, classism, anti-Semitism, and misogynoir’. That is a direct quote. All I can say is that, although I am perhaps overly attached to the past, it’s no wonder that so many people love Shakespeare. In old Europe people can be arrested for saying mean things. But America is in a league of its own.

Thursday

Lionel Shriver

No one wins in the race race

From our UK edition

After the explosion of international self-abasement over George Floyd’s killing in Minneapolis, much theatrical soul-searching ensued. So your basic man or woman on the street might have reason to puzzle why it is that in the wake of all this hyper-awareness about race (which the left simultaneously instructs us both does not exist and explains everything), relations between the hues seem only to decay. In order to redress ‘structural racism’, the state of Oregon (impressively still extant, given the determination of both nature and Portland’s Antifa activists to burn it down) has reserved $62 million, out of a total Covid relief fund of $200 million, for black people.