Race

Meghan’s adroitness Sir: Tanya Gold suggests that people criticise Meghan Markle because she is mixed race and a woman, and states it is because she has dared to attack the royal family (‘In defence of Meghan’, 13 March). I think that misses the point. For a great number of people, her narrative simply does not ring true. Over the past few decades, thousands of media articles have accused the royal household of being claustrophobic, pedantic and antiquated. But unlike the young and naive Diana, Meghan was a thirtysomething TV star with agents and PR people when she met Prince Harry. It’s hard to believe she didn’t know what she was

Gstaad The sun has returned, the snow is so-so, and exercise has replaced everything, including romance. What a way to go. After a wasted year that has done wonders for my health, the diet is about to kill the patient. That is the good-bad news; the really great news is that Shakespeare has been cancelled by some woke American teachers because they think his classic works promote ‘misogyny, racism, homophobia, classism, anti-Semitism, and misogynoir’. That is a direct quote. All I can say is that, although I am perhaps overly attached to the past, it’s no wonder that so many people love Shakespeare. In old Europe people can be arrested

After the explosion of international self-abasement over George Floyd’s killing in Minneapolis, much theatrical soul-searching ensued. So your basic man or woman on the street might have reason to puzzle why it is that in the wake of all this hyper-awareness about race (which the left simultaneously instructs us both does not exist and explains everything), relations between the hues seem only to decay. In order to redress ‘structural racism’, the state of Oregon (impressively still extant, given the determination of both nature and Portland’s Antifa activists to burn it down) has reserved $62 million, out of a total Covid relief fund of $200 million, for black people. Black individuals

Have you ever claimed to be ‘not racist’? If so, sorry, but you’re a bigot. Should this seem incoherent, then you’re clearly not well versed in critical race theory: a once niche academic field that has gone mainstream and popularised concepts such as ‘white privilege’, ‘white fragility’ and ‘systemic racism’. According to Ibram X. Kendi, author of How to Be an Anti-Racist, ‘the claim of “not racist” neutrality is a mask for racism’. Alana Lentin, author of Why Race Still Matters, takes it a step further, arguing that to be ‘not racist’ is ‘a form of discursive racist violence’. If you declare yourself not racist, it’s an unequivocal sign you’re

New York There are times, living in this here dump, when I doubt if anyone’s heard of the word magnanimity. By the looks of it, no one in left-wing media circles has ever come across it. That egregious Amanpour woman compared Trump’s administration to Nazism on CNN after the election, which reminds me: during my dinner’s drunken aftermath, I noticed a man in my house. He hardly even bothered to greet me, the host. It was one James Rubin, a vulgar American who is — or was — married to that rather unattractive British-Iranian Amanpour. I never did find out who invited that bum to my house, but someone obviously

New York Election night parties are usually dreadful affairs, with the idiot box blaring and hysterical listeners screaming out the latest info. American TV pundits are smug trained seals, over made-up and blow-dried, and they all sound the same with their rehearsed stentorian voices. Brian Williams, or the ‘hero of Iraq’ as I call him after he was caught lying about a rocket attack on the chopper he was riding — he was safely on the ground and trembling — sounded sombre announcing that South Dakota had been called for the Donald. These so-called anchors no longer even pretend to be objective, and they had long faces when the predicted

New York It’s nice to finally be in the Bagel, a place where the cows have two legs and no bells around their necks. I walk daily around the park two blocks from my house and stick to the Upper East Side in general. The park is by far the best part of Manhattan, and it’s better than ever because of you-know-what. Yes, the virus has chased away the tourists, and without tourists the rickshaws that had turned the park into a free-for-all have all but disappeared. Central Park is the only part of the city that Bloomberg’s three-term despotic reign didn’t change for the worse. Bloomberg was a so-so

New York New York, New York, once a wonderful town/ The people are crap and the mayor’s a clown/ The only safe space is a hole in the ground… I could go on, but why be so negative? Arriving from bucolic Switzerland, Newark, one of America’s ‘murder capitals’, feels like Katanga circa 1960. If this isn’t a third-world airport, then I don’t know what is. My driver tells me I’m lucky that the virus is keeping people away otherwise it would take at least three hours just to get through customs. None of the electric signs that would tell us which terminal to collect our luggage from is working, so

There are two striking things about the new book, 100 Great Black Britons, which was compiled to celebrate the achievements of British people from an African or Caribbean heritage. The first is the sheer number of people included who are ghastly or mediocre or both. The second is the number of truly brilliant black Britons who were left off the list — for reasons which are not, I think, terribly mysterious. Under the ‘both’ category we have, to name but a few, Diane Abbott, David Lammy and the reliably hilarious Dawn Butler. There is also Kehinde Andrews, of course, a lecturer at a former polytechnic who will be appearing on

Gstaad Birthdays at my age are for the birds, but always a good excuse for a party. Messages of good wishes began early on, with loyal Speccie reader Arnold Taylor ringing from South Africa, and Rosemary and Wafic Saïd texting from the English countryside. (They wished me a happy 39th. I accepted.) My great buddy Michael Mailer, staying with the Kennedys at the family compound in Hyannis Port, had hoped to fly over but the you-know-what prevented it, while Charlie Glass rang from London to announce the end of capitalism as well as yours truly. I asked Charlie to answer me truthfully, because it was my birthday, and he swore

To read the press releases, you would think we’ve found the panacea to racism in the form of unconscious bias training. Numerous organisations, including the Labour party, have announced they would be putting their staff through such programmes. This follows in the footsteps of the civil service, which has required all civil servants to undertake unconscious bias training since 2018, magistrates, for whom the training is compulsory, and the Met police, where it forms part of ongoing officer training. Google, Facebook, the FTSE 100, government departments — including the Ministry of Defence and Ministry of Justice — and non-profits proudly advertise the programmes they put their staff through. But the