Out of Africa

It is thought that the first humans emerged in Africa long before homo sapiens. This was quite a while back, about two million years ago. Prior to that we had a long line of ancestry which, ultimately, may trace back to one common progenitor, a clump of cells incapable of thought, reason or offence and from whom we could learn much. Well, not much, actually, it being just a clump of cells and all that, but one of the games humans play is a search for meaning and so far we have found none.

No evidence of a creator, no matter how much you might need there to be one. No evidence of purpose, although even when talking about evolution we often reverse engineer an intent, when perhaps we should be thinking purely in terms of beneficial but accidental mutations. That is, a species doesn’t somehow deliberately evolve a defence from predators; rather a mutation which gives a survival advantage tends to be passed on, whereas the weaklings get eaten. It is a genetic fact that if your grandparents did not survive to procreate, then neither will you.

Everything is linked in a long chain which stretches back way before difference. And one of the things which unites all humans is opportunism. A trait we developed well before there was such a thing as skin tone variance was the ability to spot a way of earning a living by exploiting the weaknesses of others. Other species, slow to escape our murderous clutches and eventually other humans, too slow to realise we were putting them to work.

So, I’ve been doing some research and as the ancestors of those who are claiming reparation for the trans-generational trauma of slavery are almost certainly my ancestors too, I want in on the action. Where is MY compensation for missing out on the experience of being a slave by ancestry? If the descendants of my ancestors were enslaved I must be a due a cut of any compensation coming and if you simultaneously say, ah but you are white and therefore you are privileged I have to demand you explain why.

Because, according to the BPAMITWP (Black People Are More Important Than White People) movement, brown, yellow and pinky-white skins are inferior mutations of the one true blackness. And whites in particular are a weak and defenceless minority among the world’s humans. So, how come it’s not we who are doing the rioting? And anyway, I thought the meek were supposed to inherit the Earth.

When you think about it we are the real oppressed. Long before anybody was working the slavery gig we set off for a walk and ended up leaving Africa for cold, northern climes where we busted our balls for millennia, inventing everything worth having. Meanwhile the old folks back home evolved into slavers and started setting their captives to tilling the fields and building the mud huts. It must have been a high old life, sunning it on the savannas while we were ploughing through cold, wet mud and rain.

But we persevered and eventually invented the foreign holiday whereby we discovered that our cousins had not been idle… or, rather, they had. What’s this? Get other people to do things for you without paying, you say? I’ll ‘ave some of that! So, for a couple of hundred years we did what they had been doing for far longer, yet now it is we who have to cough up? That makes no sense at all. All that graft and now we have to pay compo? Sod that for a game of soldiers; let’s go looting!

Genius Lives Matter

It must be Opposites Day, in which case I can present a contender for Genius Idea Of The Day to the utter, utter superbrain that is Melz Owusu. She is a crusader and a fearless champion of black values, or as we generally refer to such leading lights, a right pain in the arse who any rational establishment would be glad to see the back of. Melz wants to create a ‘decolonised curriculum’, a meaningless phrase into which much thought has gone. Erasing history would be a clearer statement of intent.

But she has run into the entirely predictable difficulty of perfectly decent people not wishing to be berated for their whiteness and steadfastly refusing to change everything about society to fit the feelings of a few malcontents with ideas way above their merits. In her own words, “I was like, hmm, this idea of transforming the university from the inside and having a decolonised curriculum isn’t going to happen with the way the structures of the university are.” Whatever that actually means. Because, of course, when black academics make statements it doesn’t matter if they make no sense.

So having failed to eradicate whiteness from multicultural campuses she has hit on the genius idea of apartheid. Black universities for black students. Perfect when you think about it because just as people like Owusu claim to feel unsafe in spaces shared with white people it is an absolute no-brainer that white people feel a good deal less safe in spaces shared with black people. So far her crowdfunding has raised £60,000, so she can afford one mediocre ‘perfessor’ for a year and perhaps a desk. Well done.

But wait, there’s more, she expects – of course she does – white people to pay for it by somehow extracting funding from existing universities. As ever with some communities of ‘the oppressed’ they want to break free from their chains and flee their bounds only to come back begging for their bus fare. But there is some merit in what she is trying to achieve; not for the benefit and betterment of the black community but for everybody else.  

Imagine if you will, an environment where speech is actually free. A place you can say what you think and argue the toss without the risk of inadvertently losing your education your future livelihood and even your personal safety by accidentally using words which were perfectly acceptable yesterday but last night were banned by some shadowy committee. Imagine a place where white lives actually do matter and that isn’t a controversial thing to say. Whiteyversity sounds like a place where business can be done.

Meanwhile in Blackiversity, they can wallow in their imaginary racism and dream up ever more perverse ways in which they are discriminated against. They can hate white people all they like and never be challenged and then when they come to leave the institution with an embedded sense of both entitlement and victimhood they will discover that they have actually created the world they thought they had fled from. No employer outside of the township campus they have just left will have any use for them; they will be forever dependent on handouts from the hated white state.

Just another campus party...

So, all in all, I see very few downsides. Not all black people are race baiting imbeciles; I suspect very few of them fall into this category, so here is the ideal place to corral them, far away from the public view. Removed from the normal world their writings will be unread, their utterances unbroadcast and anywhere outside their own little bubble of loathing they will be completely unknown. The more I look at this, the more I like it. Hell, let’s build the place ourselves!

What is it good for?

Nobody wants white people to talk about racism unless they say exactly what they are told to say. There can be no debate when one side is informed that everything it thinks is invalid and only words from the script written for it would even get a hearing. You must not, especially, try to demonstrate your non-racist credentials. Even the many white protesters professing solidarity with the BLM movement still cannot insist they are not racists. Hell, you could be a white kid adopted by a black family and have spent your life on protests for equality and still your opinions would count for nothing.

For this is where we are. It is no longer enough to enact legislation to protect everybody from discrimination, we must now disavow any protections which give white people agency. The test of freedom of speech used to be that, short of exhortations to violence and suchlike, you could say pretty much whatever you wished, and others had the absolute right to tell you what they thought of it. Now, you may not even speak out in defence of ‘all’ people having rights because only black lives, thoughts, speech, actions matter.

That police are even considering investigating the light aircraft flying a banner proclaiming the self-evident is indicative of the mess we are in. And it is all our own fault. Even CNN has bought into the madness, citing its own survey commissioned, it appears, to demonstrate just how irrelevant the views of white people are when it comes to discussing race. Their conclusion is that white people have no idea how racist the United Kingdom is. Except it isn’t. This survey is just another example of collecting data to prove a pre-formed thesis. It is bad science personified.

But even if it was valid it does nothing to help. If anything, it plays straight into a popular misrepresentation of Enoch Powell’s most famous speech and places the whip firmly in the hands of the aggrieved. All the survey (of only 1500 people, by the way) does is tell us something that we already knew; that black people’s perception of our mostly white (in parts) country is different from white people’s. We’ve been told that for decades now and whenever ‘we’ have tried to understand we’ve been told we simply can’t.

Fine. Good. We tried; god knows we’ve tried over the years, but every inch given results in another yard being demanded; every appeasement offered has triggered an insistence that it isn’t enough. The last few weeks have been a relentless attack on white people. It has been overt, it has been hostile and all attempts at reaching an accommodation have been rebutted. Our philosophy is invalid, our compassion is rejected, our empathy is denied. We have nowhere else to go, if indeed we want to go anywhere at all.

Maybe this is as far as it can go. We asked you what you wanted but you told us we couldn’t understand. It appears that nothing less than handing over power and influence in every area of this country’s affairs to black activists with hate in their hearts will do. Well, it won’t do. This country is conservative by nature. We evolve incrementally or we get nowhere. What BLM and its agitators are calling for is the actual destruction of something that has taken at least a thousand years to build. There is a word for this. It’s war.

Pretty Polly

The go-to argument-settler these days seems to be the interminable poll, with which invalid conclusions we are regularly bombarded. Whatever the problem it can be resolved with a poll; polls are the new focus groups; if a poll said so it must be true. The incomplete and unsubstantiated polling about attitudes to immigration and other ethnic issues were raised on the BBC’s flagship, Today programme on Monday with great jubilation that positive attitudes have steadily increased. This was the finding,

“Asked if they were optimistic that the UK will be more tolerant and diverse in 10 years’ time, 66% of people say yes, up from 50% in 2009. And 84% strongly disagree that someone has to be white to be truly British - up from 55% 10 years ago.”

But as with all polls you must be careful. Who was asked? How many were polled? What, exactly, were they asked? Who was doing the asking and what result did they expect? Or, more probably, what did they set out to ‘prove’? And in the case of this particular poll, did they ask the same cohort this time as they did 10 years ago? If, for instance, this was a cross-section of Londoners it would be alarming if exactly these changes had not been seen, given that over that period London has become a minority white-British city.

Had you polled exclusively white respondents it would also be surprising if the same figures didn’t see an increase over this period. After all, for the last couple of decades white people have been relentlessly pounded with negative messages about their own ethnicity. But try asking white people who feel they have been driven out of their traditional stamping grounds by the intolerance and cultural iniquities of ‘the new Londoners’ and you might see the opposite result. Formerly tolerant people driven to antipathy. You can call them racist all you like but this isn’t helpful.

But what is the real purpose of polls? It isn’t to get a real perspective of how people feel – that is what elections and national referenda are for – but rather to push a pre-conceived notion of how people feel. And it is all about the ‘feelz’ because, as we have seen, emotion trumps reality every time, and what better way to affirm that your instincts are the correct ones than to find that a lot of people agree with you? Or at least some people… maybe a thousand or so who read the same newspaper as you do.

Polls are often used to push an argument rather than resolve it and the argument du jour is that of ‘white privilege’. Yes, we do know what you mean by white privilege; we understand that even the least privileged whites in our society do not have to struggle with the additional burden of being black. But where is that burden? There has never been a better time to be black, and in the UK it is arguable there has never been a better place to be black.

Does this look like white supremacy to you?

Right here, right now, the white man’s burden is to step aside in favour of any other ethnicity than our own and take a knee to show obeisance to black supremacy. Only black lives matter, whitey, hadn’t you heard? I know I am in a sample of one, but my impression is that all of this pandering to demands for reparation, for unequal justice, for preferential treatment can only backfire ultimately. But maybe I am not alone. Maybe in the white diaspora can be found other dissenting voices; maybe we should have a poll about it?