I CANNOT be the only person who feels both angry and deeply offended by the general slur of racism and white privilege cast against my country and my fellow men; angry that this slur is being so casually endorsed without contest or analysis, especially on the broadcast media, and even in the formerly responsible Sunday Times, and offended that British society is being treated as guilty as charged at both an individual and institutional level.
Like Ben Pile (and I am older) I am bemused too about our assumed lack of condemnation of slavery
and the need to repeat apologies that have been made many times since but no more coherently or passionately than in William Pitt’s heartfelt call for ‘an atonement for our long and cruel injustice’ in 1792.
Nor can I be the only person who refuses to accept that in order to prove I am not a racist (whether because I happen to be white, or by virtue of being a white member of society that is said to to be systemically racist or ‘riddled with implicit bias’ as the racing driver Lewis Hamilton asserts) I must declare my ‘anti-racism’ credentials, thereby acknowledging my guilt and confessing to a crime that neither I nor the society I live in as a whole is guilty of.
The enthusiasm with which politicians, celebrities and corporations are competing to declare such worrying and woke admission (‘guilty as charged but we have seen the light’) to prove their BLM revolutionary credentials – the Church of England, the Bank of England, Waitrose, Airbnb, the list goes on – is matched only by a slavish media, which appears almost entirely lacking in curiosity about a narrative which flies in face of the facts. Over the last weeks there has been an abysmal failure to interrogate it.
David Goodhart and his eminently fair thesis on ‘Facts vs feelings’, John McWhorter’s counter-analysis of anti-racism, ‘our new flawed religion’, other black conservative opinion the mainstream media here ignore and Heather Mac Donald’s debunking of the US police discrimination myth might not exist for the all the interest the MSM has shown in these counter-factuals to the dominating perceived injustice and discrimination meme. Even more discreditable is the treatment of those who refuse to concur with this narrative; as in this disgraceful Piers Morgan episode on Good Morning Britain a week or so ago, in which Nigel Farage was brought on, not to be allowed to challenge it but to be subjected to a public pillorying for daring to, to be relentlessly and speciously harried by Morgan, set on by hosts and guests (lawyer and activist Dr Shola Mos-Shogbamimu and historian Professor Kate Williams) alike and slandered and ridiculed in the process.
Even more alarming than the bullying and harassment was their total absence of awareness not just of the conflicting facts but also of the unedifying prejudice they themselves are party to.
This is what Jordan Peterson explains – something that is obvious when said but badly needs to be said and said again – in this video released on Twitter by Prager U a couple of days ago.
Critically he debunks the whole notion of white privilege as racist itself: ‘The idea that you can target an ethnic group with a collective crime regardless of the specific innocence or guilt of the constituent elements of that group – there is absolutely nothing that is more racist than that.’ Please watch.
