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Tuesday 2 December 2008

Liddle Britain

The pernicious politics of ‘identity’

And the racial element of these violent crimes is the direct result of too conspicuous identification with certain aspects of black culture. Instead of Stokey Carmichael and Martin Luther King, these days the black kids admire the more pragmatic rebellions of  50 Cent and Ice T and the Yardie ganglords with their abundant wealth and strings of bitches. Keep insisting to black kids that they should be proud of their blackness and their black culture and, these days, those are the values to which they will gleefully aspire, having been given licence to do so in the name of racial awareness: nihilistic violence, criminality, machismo, misogyny, homophobia, stupidity and hard drugs. And they will carry along with them a substantial portion of those who sit next to them at the bottom of the education barrel and who live alongside them in their low-rise social-housing projects in families identically structured (i.e., dad left home not long after they were born): the white working-class boys. There is something strange and discomfiting in hearing a white kid affecting Jamaican street patois, something utilised to good comic effect by Sacha Baron Cohen in his guise as Ali G. It is an increasingly common occurrence, though, in south London. And the unpleasant name for these hopeless white boys who have come to identify with black culture is ‘wiggas’. You can work out the derivation for yourself.

If you insist to black children that there is something about the colour of their skin which marks them out as fundamentally, rather than superficially, different and then insist that they are part of a culture from which they cannot — and should not wish to — escape, then you are tacitly driving them towards criminality. It is no good later shaking your heads and saying no, no, boys, I meant James Baldwin and Maya Angelou. You cannot have it both ways. It is also a quintessentially racist approach, in as far as I understand the term — although one which has underpinned the now discredited policy of multiculturalism for the best part of 40 years. 

More articles from: Rod Liddle | this section

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