We need to talk about Dawn Butler. Following the election of the first ever black leader of a major party in this country, Ms Butler took to X not to congratulate but to sneer. Not to cheer this final breakthrough for racial equality in the UK but to share a poisonous description of the person who made the breakthrough as the ‘black face’ of ‘white supremacy’. It is one of the worst things a member of the ruling party has done since they came to power four months ago.
Labour’s Dawn Butler retweeted tips for ‘surviving a Kemi Badenoch victory’
Yes, when Kemi Badenoch was announced as the new leader of the Conservative Party, Labour’s Butler took potshots. She retweeted some tips for ‘surviving a Kemi Badenoch victory’ written by Nels Abbey, a London-based Nigerian journalist. He branded Badenoch ‘the most prominent member of white supremacy’s black collaborator class’. She’s the chief representative of ‘white supremacy in black face’, he sniped. And Butler pressed retweet, hand-delivering to her 240,000 followers this repugnant reduction of a black politician to a witless stooge of whiteness.
How dreadful is that? Badenoch has risen through the ranks of the Tories by gumption and drive. This weekend, she shattered the final racial ceiling by becoming the first black person to head a big party. Yet here she was being depicted as mere dressing, as an exotic decoration for ‘white supremacy’, as the black mask our supposedly racist elites have decided to pull on. This is dehumanising talk: it robs Badenoch of her agency, of her very individuality, and treats her as little more than the mouthpiece of a nefarious agenda that hurts her own kind.
Butler undid her retweet. We might be generous and think that perhaps she didn’t read all of Abbey’s words before sharing them. If that’s the case, she should say so. Because it is very serious indeed that a prominent figure in the Labour Party responded to Badenoch’s historic victory by sharing the foul view that this black woman’s chief role is to do the bidding of the white man.
Abbey and Butler were not alone in suggesting Kemi’s victory was a victory for ‘white supremacy’. The writer Kehinde Andrews, in typically provocative style, shared his view that Badenoch is the ‘shining ebony example that the Psychosis Of Whiteness is not reserved for those with white skin’. Oof. Everyone’s attacked in that tiny diatribe: both white people (we have psychosis, apparently) and black people (your ‘ebony’ shade doesn’t grant you immunity to our madness, it seems).
This cruel view of Kemi as ebony packaging for white supremacy exposes the left’s creepy disdain for black conservatives. Other Tories from ethnic-minority backgrounds have likewise been branded the fodder of whiteness. Priti Patel was labelled a ‘pawn in white supremacy’. She and the other non-white members of Boris Johnson’s first cabinet were written off as ‘ministers with brown skin wearing Tory masks’ (that was Kehinde Andrews again).
There’s an ugly racialism in this slamming of non-white Tories. The belief seems to be that these people are traitors to their race, that they’ve cheaply sold their black or brown souls for a seat at the white man’s table. Yet the idea that non-white folk should all think the same way politically – that they should all be dutifully leftish, pro-Labour, pro-immigration, anti-Israel – strikes me as obnoxious. It treats people from ethnic-minority backgrounds less as individuals capable of deciding for themselves what ideas to embrace, and more as a big blob that must uniformly conform to correct-think as defined by the cultural elites.
There’s an ugly racialism in this slamming of non-white Tories
Some on the left almost seem to think they have moral ownership over ethnic-minority people, hence their spitting fury when any of them ‘betrays their race’ and support the Tories. Imagine pushing an idea like that and having the gall to call other people racist.
It wasn’t only leftists who obsessed over Badenoch’s blackness this weekend, which they view as a mask for her ‘white’ beliefs. So did some on the very online right. Among those of an ethno-nationalist persuasion – of which there are more than you would like to think – the cry went up that an African is now in charge of the Conservative Party and that must mean it’s End Times. There were dark whispers of a ‘foreign’ takeover of the Tories. I’m not repeating it here – it was nasty stuff.
There is normally little to unite the crank left and the gutter right, two of the noisiest online tribes. But on Saturday they entered into a bizarre unholy alliance on the matter of Badenoch’s race. The former have a problem with her because she’s the ‘black face’ of ‘white supremacy’, the latter have a problem with her simply because she has a black face. Neither side seems capable of seeing her as an individual. As a free-thinking woman. As someone who should be judged for what she says and does, not her ‘ebony’ look.
These people are so out of touch. Most folk out there don’t care what colour Kemi is – they just want to know if she’ll offer an inspiring alternative to the disastrous Starmer government. It is only the identity-obsessed left and blood-and-soil right who look at Badenoch and see only a ‘black face’.
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