Liddle Britain

The pernicious politics of ‘identity’

21 February 2007

There’s a possible, unexpected answer to those callous questions I asked in my first paragraph. Let me run it by you and see what you think: black people are shooting each other because we don’t discriminate against them enough. Back in the days when there were signs saying ‘No Blacks!’ all over the place and young black males could be arrested in the street for being in possession of dreadlocks, they didn’t shoot each other. Now we’ve tackled institutional racism, the black community has been robbed of its identity and solidarity — and out come the guns.

This is not my thesis, but that of a black criminologist, Suzella Palmer, expounded in her dissertation ‘Made in the Ghetto: Black Identity, Resistance and Criminality’. It is reported, admiringly, on one of Britain’s biggest websites for black people, Black Britain. It seems that black youths in the 1980s were deeply ‘influenced by broader political currents of the time’ — black consciousness movements, civil rights and so forth, and thus united in their oppression. And so if they were going to kill anyone, I suppose, it would be whitey. Those days, sadly, are gone. And incidentally, the inclusion of the word ‘Resistance’ (a good thing, of course) in Ms Palmer’s dissertation should tell you all you should possibly need to know.

Elsewhere on the Black Britain portal you can find a cogent attack upon the decadent festival Valentine’s Day (the Western perception of love is shallow compared to its African equivalent, OK?) and the perorations of a lunatic called I.M. Nur who has written a book called The Meaning of Blackness. Mr Nur has had enough of ‘white supremacy’. ‘Being Black represents our connection to our Creator and to one another from a cosmic or spiritual perspective,’ he says. The nature of blackness is ‘unfathomable’, he argues, before pointing out that all of the gods we humans have created (or that maybe really existed) — Krishna, Buddha, Zeus, Osiris and the second division Mexican god Ixtliton — were as black as the ace of spades. So shove that in your pipe and smoke it, cracker.