I don’t know about you, but I love a bit of topical reading when I go abroad. That’s why, in my last week of travelling between lush, green, untouched Cambodian islands, I’ve been immersed in apposite books like Julia Lovell’s Maoism: a Global History, and Frank Dikotter’s The Cultural Revolution.
So far, I’ve been pleased with my choices. First, they are properly appropriate: one of the reasons Cambodia’s islands are so untainted by tourism, or even inhabitants, is because the ultra-Maoist, Chinese-funded Khmer Rouge evacuated all the occupants and forced them into deadly labour on the mainland. Also, the books are truly astonishing, perhaps in a consoling way. By which I mean this: our own Cultural Revolution – that of Wokeness – might be bad, but at least Anglo-American students aren’t forcing their professors to eat excrement, then beating them to death with planks. Yet.
It does rather feel that the boffins went looking for evidence of racism, and found, to their chagrin, that actually there was no racism
But then I caught a news story from London which did give me a faint but distinct hint of communist madness.
The story, reported from the BBC to the Daily Telegraph to the Guardian, was this: ‘Black women most likely to die in medieval London plague’. The subheading of one was: ‘Museum of London study also claims “misogynoir” – prejudice against women of African descent – increased deaths during 14th-century disease.’
One of my first reactions was: were there really that many black people/women in London in the 14th century, enough to make a study like this remotely credible?
But then I remembered one of my favourite examples of Chaucer’s work in the original Canterbury Tales, The Tale of Ye Personne of Colouyre, and how they mette the Transgenderye Genderyequir and Spake of Misogynoirye, and I thought OK, let’s be fair, let’s check the actual data. Maybe it does add up. So I did. As much as I could anyway, given that the actual study is yet to be published; all we have is surrounding research. And this is where it gets weird.
To reach their conclusion that medieval bacteria, rats and people were horrible racist misogynoiristes, the archaeologists – a mix of Americans and Brits – apparently checked, in their underlying research, about 150 bodies (approximately 35,000 Londoners died in the Black Death).
Or these 150, only a few were ‘nonwhite’, and even fewer were ‘African’. So the scientists’ conclusion that higher death rates among people of colour and women of black African descent was a result of the ‘devastating effects’ of ‘premodern structural racism’ in the medieval world seems to be based on a sample of nine.
I was particularly intrigued by scientists Rebecca Redfern (Museum of London) and Joseph Hefner (Michigan State University), who authored that prior research. One of their scholarly endeavours ends with this superb conclusion:
In archaeology, social inequalities can be identified in many different ways, and one way is how people are buried. When we looked at how the skeletons were buried at East Smithfield, we found that none of the plague victims with Black African or mixed heritage had been maltreated as you might expect to see in a population group that might have suffered from discrimination. We could see that their bodies were placed in the graves with care and respect, as can be seen in the image. What exactly this might have meant requires further research.
It does rather feel that the boffins went looking for evidence of racism, and found, to their chagrin, that actually there was no racism. Picture them hurling ‘non-maltreated skulls’ to the ground with disgust.
And here we reach the next obvious question: how can these academics tell these skeletons are black Africans anyway? Isn’t it a shibboleth of the Left that race is a social construct, and has no genetic, anatomical reality? My suspicions on this point were heightened by this paragraph in the Guardian: ‘[To discover the race] the team looked at five features of the skulls, such as the shape of the eye area… The approach, the researchers say, is an established forensic tool, and is not based on controversial methods involving cranial measurements.’
To me that reads very much like, ‘No, we don’t do creepy skull-size measurements to determine race, like Joseph Goebbels, instead we measure different parts of the skull to determine race, which are totally fine.’
And, as it happens, this is the case. We know this because the Skull Guy here is Joseph Hefner, a forensic anthropologist who uses a ‘refined’ version of racial skull-measuring techniques which were pioneered by one Earnest Hooton (Hefner has written multiple papers referencing Hooton and his skull measuring, now handily renamed ‘macromorphoscopics’).
For those that don’t know (including me, until about an hour ago) Harvard’s Earnest Hooton was really one of the skull caliper guys. This is from his Wikipedia page to give you a flavour: Hooton was a member of the ‘Committee on the Negro, a group that “focused on the anatomy of blacks”’. In 1927, ‘the committee endorsed a comparison of African babies with young apes’. In 1932, Hooton personally published an article ‘Is The Negro Inferior?’, and so on.
So there we have it. This BBC headline ‘Black women most likely to die in medieval London plague’ actually derives from a dubious study, based on tiny samples, authored by academics with a prior agenda, who only seek to confirm their own biases, as long as they can prove that such-and-such is racist. And the BBC made it a headline.
Does it matter? I believe it does, and this is where I come back to Maoism and Chinese communism. There are, as I’ve implied, a number of parallels between the Cultural Revolution and Wokeness: the Red Guards used to put labels on suspect art the same way we now put warnings on unwoke movies and TV (or hide them altogether). The Red Guards were also quite keen on statue toppling. But more importantly, what the Cultural Revolution tried to do was erase the past, and reframe it in a bogus way that suited their politics.
And that is what is happening here. Because this piece of dreadful ‘race research’ from the Museum of London is, it seems, going to ‘inform exhibitions at the Museum of London’s new home in Smithfield, opening in 2026’. In other words the new Museum of London may yet become another museum determined to force a false, race-obsessed narrative down our throats: a narrative which tells us that medieval Britons were racists and that, anyway, Britain was never really white. As Xi Jinping once put it, so pithily: ‘To destroy a country, you must first destroy its history’.
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