Race

Score one for unexpected nominative determinism! All this time, people figured Sheldon Whitehouse’s name must foretell a quixotic attempt at the presidency. Instead, it turns out he just likes sitting in a giant house full of white people. Last Friday, as part of the nation’s Juneteenth ebullience (at least eight dead so far!), some enterprising reporter decided to ask the Rhode Island senator about his membership in the Spouting Rock Beach Association, better known as the Bailey’s Beach club. Whitehouse was asked if the club was still all-white — and if he was still a member. Whitehouse was apparently unprepared for the question, which is fairly inexcusable for a politician who has spent a year seeing others consumed by America’s racial 'reckoning’.

As a black football fan who grew up going to matches in the seventies and eighties, I know more than most about the beautiful game’s troubles with racism. I can still remember my own club West Ham United being the first English Football League side to select three black players in their starting team on Easter Saturday 1972; and I can still recall, for two seasons in a row, a particular section of fans in the old west side stand ‘Sieg Heil' saluting during every home game. Nowadays, racism in football is less obvious but it still exists – and it needs to be called out. But I’m convinced that ‘taking the knee’ isn’t the way to do it.

Regular readers may be aware that in recent months I have been having a running-spat with a Canadian lawyer called Stephen Toope. I am rarely exercised by Canadian lawyers, but this particular one is the current Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University, and he seems intent on running that crown jewel of an institution into the ground.  Since taking over as Vice-Chancellor, Mr Toope has been responsible for a wide array of anti-free speech initiatives through which, as I recently remarked in the Daily Telegraph, he appears to want to transform Cambridge University into something like the Canadian bar association, but without the thrills, or the pay. Anyhow – our spat came to a head after Cambridge last month published its new guidance for informers.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s July 2021 World edition.  The American experiment is fragile. It has always been fragile and always will be fragile because it is so extremely unnatural. ‘Unnatural’ in this context means in conflict with human nature. Jonah Goldberg has described the fragility of the American system by comparing it to a garden hacked out of a tropical jungle. A garden surrounded by jungle is unnatural. The gardeners must tend it with unremitting care lest the jungle return. Treating our fellow human beings as individuals instead of treating them as members of groups is unnatural. Our brains evolved to think of people as members of groups; to trust and care for people who are like us and to be suspicious of people who are unlike us.

Until this month 'taking a knee' has not been a French phenomenon. When the Black Lives Matter movement spilled out of America twelve months ago and spread across the world, France was one of the few Western nations where it failed to make any headway. In a bold television address at the time, Emmanuel Macron declared that there would be no statues toppled in France. Meanwhile, the leader of the far-left France Insoumise, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, rubbished the idea of 'white privilege'. The French looked on in bemusement as Britain seemed to lose the collective plot, hauling down statues, denigrating Churchill and then, when the rugby and football seasons started, dropping to their knees.

Chris Matthews, the former MSNBC host who was unceremoniously canceled a little over a year ago thanks to a GQ article accusing him of sexual harassment, made his return to cable television this week. During an appearance on his old network, Matthews asserted that he takes 'ownership' of his behavior: 'I took ownership of it — using a nice modern phase — I have took complete ownership. I did not deny it. I lost my show over it. That’s it — so that’s the truth.' Matthews's not-so-triumphant comeback follows in the footsteps of other once-canceled personalities like former NBC News contributor Mark Halperin, who has been appearing as a guest on Newsmax, and comedian Louis CK, who is selling out live shows around the country.

Cockburn was vaguely aware that yesterday, May 31, marked the centenary of one of America’s darker episodes, the ‘Tulsa Race Massacre’ of 1921, when a mob of white residents rioted in Greenwood, Oklahoma, aka the ‘Black Wall Street’. Today, President Biden is in the city, to offer his sympathies to the surviving victims and their descendants. The rampage left an estimated 300 black Tulsans dead, 11,000 homeless and scores of black-owned businesses, school, churches, hospitals and homes in ruins. In the intervening years, the city has done its best to try and pretend the whole thing never happened. There have been no statues or memorials, official commemorations, or public apologies. Until the early 2000s, it wasn’t even in the local history books of Oklahoma schools.

Give some credit to Lori Lightfoot. She’s really good at wrecking things. When America’s most Innsmouth-ian politician took over Chicago in spring 2019 (presumably for lack of any other volunteers), it was hard to imagine screwing up the city worse than it already was. The city was already losing population. It already had the most murders of any US city and a top-30 violent crime rate overall. But Lightfoot rose to the challenge and then some. She inherited a city with 563 murders the year before she took office. In the 365 days between George Floyd’s death and the one-year anniversary of his demise, the city clocked more than 800, including 105 in a single month and 18 in a single day.

The trial of Derek Chauvin continues to generate headlines — weeks after the former Minneapolis police officer’s April 20 conviction of the murder of George Floyd. This week the story is about juror number 52, who appears to have added considerable weight to Chauvin’s argument that his trial was not fair. Among Chauvin’s current motions is one asking the trial judge Peter Cahill to recall the entire jury for interrogation over possible juror misconduct. He may have a case. Brandon Mitchell — juror number 52 — stepped forward to identify himself and make the media rounds. He is a 31-year-old black Minneapolis high school basketball coach.

‘If you hate wokeness, you should vote for Joe Biden.’ So said writer and academic Yascha Mounk in the Atlantic in the run-up to last November’s elections. It was a sentiment that echoed across what we might call the respectable anti-woke world: that Trump is to identity politics what kerosene is to a dumpster fire, so a win for the moderate Joe Biden would calm everyone down. As predictions go, it’s right up there with Trump saying the pandemic would be over with by Easter 2020: it’s been proven spectacularly wrong, remarkably quickly. Trump may well have been the perfect foil for the identitarian movement, but the even older, whiter guy who beat him makes an unlikely tribune. Biden’s presidency has done nothing to abate racial paranoia.

The latest target for online mobs is South Carolina’s Republican senator Tim Scott. His 'crime' is apparently being a black conservative who gave a thoughtful televised response to President Biden’s address to a joint session of Congress. The mob responded by calling him 'Uncle Tim', a none-too-clever play on the old racial epithet, 'Uncle Tom'. Twitter allowed that hashtag to trend. Scott has endured such insults before. So have all black conservatives.  They shouldn’t have to stand alone in their response. Good people, including those who disagree sharply with conservatives, should stand with them. Slanders like these, left unanswered, degrade us all. Sen. Scott spoke because Republicans chose him to give the party’s official response to President Biden’s address.