Rupa Huq and the politics of prejudice

The Labour party’s contribution to the national debate this week has included the idea that someone can be ‘superficially’ black. Rupa Huq, a Labour MP, used this phrase to describe Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng. ‘If you hear him on the Today programme,’ she said, ‘you wouldn’t know he’s black.’ It was a daft yet revealing comment. In her moment of unintended (and perhaps career-destroying) candour, Huq exposed a prejudice that remains pervasive in British politics.

Any such suggestion is, of course, racist, and Labour could not deny it. Huq has been suspended. But she was articulating an attitude that has become widespread. She probably thought that her comments were uncontroversial for the audience at a Labour party conference debate. She will have assumed that they, like her, see real (as opposed to superficial) ethnicity as something to do with attitudes, speech and more. This is a pernicious assumption which deserves to be challenged.

When Kemi Badenoch was equalities minister, she spoke about the special bigotry that confronts those on her side of the debate: the assumption that black people can only think in one way and that those who demur are traitors. Ben Obese-Jecty, a former infantry officer, recently described how stunned he was by the racist abuse he received when running as a Tory candidate. He was called ‘token’ and a ‘sellout’, and worse. ‘I had no idea this kind of vitriol existed,’ he said.

The sewers of social media are full of such abuse. Phrases like ‘Uncle Toms’ and ‘coconuts’ are used to describe those deemed to be brown on the outside but white on the inside. Charlene White, an ITV presenter, said this week that for most of her childhood she was referred to as a ‘Bounty’ and derided for having a ‘posh’ accent.