There are numerous skills essential to a long and moderately successful career at today’s chalkface and not the least among these is the ability to repress one’s desire to say anything inappropriate in the presence of a class.
For me, the ultimate test of this was a mixed-race pupil who, half in jest, would invariably respond to any reprimand or rebuke with Ali G’s catchphrase, “Is it ‘cos I is black, Miss?”, to which I always wanted to reply - with a certain degree of truth - “No, Eddie, it’s ’cos you is an arsehole!”
It’s been a few years, but I immediately thought of Eddie when I read about the way Harris supporters were reacting to the election result:
“There are so many people who are against Kamala because she’s a woman, because she’s black,” said Sanaa Canady, a Howard student. (Telegraph)
Of course it is, Sanaa; what other reasons could there be? Meanwhile, social media posts have already appeared indignantly complaining about the women or minority ethnic voters who, as the authors patronisingly see it, voted the ‘wrong way’, as if sharing Harris’ ethnicity or gender should somehow outweigh the voter’s opinion on, say, her policies, integrity or suitability for office.
Part of the problem is that there is no profit for vested interests and anti-racism campaigners in, as one man eloquently put it, ‘a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character’. The doublethink of the race industry has permeated the politics of the Left - both in the US and here - to a point where many of them appear to have the whole thing completely back-to-front, even while Dr King is still revered and held up as a shining example.
How future historians will regard the divisive consequences of identity politics and Critical Race Theory on politics and society is debatable - hopefully reason will eventually prevail - but we should certainly be lamenting that fact that, to paraphrase George Bernard Shaw, ‘no sooner had MLK knocked over the dragons of racial discrimination and segregation than activists boldly set them on their legs again in the name of MLK’.
In the eyes of the left, women and black people cannot have bad ideas, terrible policies or just be crappy people.
ReplyDeleteIf you don't vote for a black person or a woman because they have bad ideas, terrible policies or are crappy people, it's you that's the problem.
Which is probably why so many womaen and minorities voted Trump. They're sick of being told they should only vote for people who look like them.
It's wierd how every white liberal woman seems to think that all latinos in America are illegal immigrants who will be deported by Trump. They are what they accuse us of
There’s an interesting perspective on this from Charlie Brooker, committed ‘guardian’ columnist but intelligent and objective enough to understand what some of his fellow journalists never will:
Delete‘When I was a kiddywink, back in that […] village, many of my views about people from different ethnic backgrounds were defined by what I saw on television. […] There was Trevor McDonald, Lenny Henry, Huggy Bear from Starsky and Hutch, and assorted musicians on Top of the Pops. Black people were often used as a sort of lazy shorthand for "cool". Consequently, I formed a spectacularly patronising general view that all black people were inherently "cool". It wasn't until I moved to London and suddenly met lots of them in real life that I realised many were massive dorks.’
So many people take 'We are not voting for this black woman' as indicative of 'Americans won't vote for black women'.
ReplyDeleteYou’re right; the trouble is that kind of reasoning is so frequently deployed as a tactic by race campaigners that I’m not sure they would recognise the flawed logic even if it were explained to them in words of one syllable.
DeleteA senior Rotherham youth worker explained to me some years ago why there was a lot of trouble involving teenagers of Asian extraction.
ReplyDelete"They have an image problem - they're pissed off because black is cool but brown isn't . . ."
A headmaster I knew used to say that teenage boys are essentially baboons; one just has to keep educating them until - hopefully - they evolve into human beings. I shudder to think what would happen if he said that today, but it’s a reasonable point - like baboons (or chimps), they emulate what they see in an admired individual or group.
DeleteThe result of what you describe is today’s melting pot of teenagers of all hues and backgrounds aspiring to and reproducing a truly horrible hybrid culture.