Racism

There are white people in this country and elsewhere who rank human beings by race, with the whites at the top, blacks at the bottom and everyone else in between. They are convinced that whites have a divine or natural right to rule, and they abhor racial intermarriage. They are a minuscule minority, here and elsewhere. White supremacists hold no government power. Their resources are negligible. They gather in obscure places, online as in person, and their conventions are ridiculous spectacles in which the costumes are as odious as the fantasies are pathetic. It wasn’t always like this. From about the sixteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century, the world was theirs to exploit. Western politicians, thinkers and scientists theorized freely about racial hierarchy.

“If you didn’t vote for Biden, you ain’t black,” tweeted 2020 Florida Republican congressional candidate Lavern Spicer on Thursday, “I guess you’re a negro.” Spicer, who is black, was referring to President Joe Biden’s latest gaffe. Delivering his first Veterans Day address at Arlington National Cemetery to a nation reeling from the baleful effects of his failed presidency, and amid historically low approval ratings, Biden referred to the 1940s black baseball player Satchel Paige as “the great negro,” apparently because Paige could still competitively play at age 47. https://twitter.com/ForAmerica/status/1458851297378119684 Biden’s history with race is, at the risk of using a woke euphemism, troubled.

What news network did you watch on election night? Thankfully we all had plenty of options. There was CNN, where John King's magic wall grows ever more granular: "we're moving the Kelleher household into the leans-Republican column, Wolf, though their dog remains undecided. Now next door to the Smiths..." There was Fox News, where loud people shout at each other until Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum finally pull over the car and tell everyone to knock it off. And then there was MSNBC. Oh, Lord, was there MSNBC. There did we find Nicolle Wallace, one of the network's fastidiously objective anchors, declaring that Virginia governor-elect Glenn Youngkin "worshipped at the altar of Donald Trump.

Remember when Labour MP Clive Lewis got into trouble for saying, ‘On your knees, bitch’? It was at a fringe event hosted by Momentum during the Labour conference in Brighton in 2017. Lewis uttered the line as a joke to the actress Sam Swann. People went nuts. Labour bigwigs accused Lewis of misogyny. He eventually ‘apologised unreservedly’ for his ‘offensive’ language. That phrase — ‘On your knees, bitch’ — sprung back into my mind this week as I read an exchange between Alastair Campbell and Priti Patel. No, Campbell did not use the B-word. He is far too civilised for that. But he did tell Patel to get on her knees.

Tory MP Robert Halfon is right to say that the underachievement of white working-class students is a ‘major social injustice’. He is also correct to call for ‘a proper funding settlement’ so that we have an ‘education system fit for purpose’. But this much-needed debate has been overshadowed by a red herring in the Education committee's report: the use of the term ‘white privilege’. The report claims that the use of such phrases may have contributed to the neglect of disadvantaged white kids. Of course, as Halfon says, ‘it is wrong to tell a white disadvantaged family that they are white privileged even though they may come from a very poor background and may be struggling’.

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.

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.