A popular historian in England named David Starkey, who is a kind of David McCullough-type who makes television series about the Tudors, was on a British TV talk show last night (see video here), and now he’s in trouble for saying out loud what everybody realizes is true, and therefore all sorts of tension builds up over whom will be the first to say it on TV. Nothing makes people madder than saying what’s obviously true.
These are Ali G Riots, with blacks in the cultural vanguard and idiots of other races following their example of what’s cool. (Here’s the classic interview with Andy Rooney, who along with Donald Trump was just about the only celebrity in America who didn’t try to help Ali G along.) The riots are a triumph of multiculturalism over white racism, something that Enoch Powell never foresaw.
From the Guardian:
Historian provokes storm of criticism after remarks during a televised discussion about the riots on BBC2’s Newsnight
The historian and broadcaster David Starkey has provoked a storm of criticism after claiming during a televised discussion about the riots that “the problem is that the whites have become black”.
In an appearance on BBC2’s Newsnight, Starkey spoke of “a profound cultural change” and said he had been re-reading Enoch Powell’s rivers of blood speech.
“His prophesy was absolutely right in one sense. The Tiber did not foam with blood but flames lambent, they wrapped around Tottenham and wrapped around Clapham,” he said. ”But it wasn’t inter-community violence. This is where he was absolutely wrong.” Gesturing towards one of the other guests, Owen Jones, who wrote Chavs: the Demonisation of the Working Classes, Starkey said: “What has happened is that a substantial section of the chavs that you wrote about have become black.”
An outcry on Twitter began with the Labour MP Jeremy Corbyn asking the BBC: “Why was racist analysis of Starkey unchallenged? What exactly are you trying to prove?” A spokesman for Newsnight said: “I think that [presenter] Emily Maitlis very robustly challenged David Starkey.
Jones told the Guardian he believed Starkey’s comments were “a career-ending moment”. He said: “He tapped into racial prejudice at a time of national crisis. At other times, those comments would be inflammatory but they are downright dangerous in the current climate. ”I fear that some people will now say that David Starkey is right, and you could already see some of them on Twitter. I am worried about a backlash from the right and he will give legitimacy to those views in the minds of some.”
Don’t you love how nakedly careerist young journos are these days? And how they don’t even pretend that jobs in the media are about free expression, but instead admit that they are about controlling speech?
On the programme, Starkey said: “The whites have become black. A particular sort of violent destructive, nihilistic gangster culture has become the fashion and black and white boys and girls operate in this language together.
“This language which is wholly false, which is this Jamaican patois that has been intruded in England and that is why so many of us have this sense of literally of a foreign country.”
The historian and broadcaster, whose historical documentaries on Channel 4 about the Tudors established him as a household name, went on to name-check Tottenham’s Labour MP: “Listen to David Lammy, an archetypal successful black man. If you turn the screen off so that you are listening to him on radio you would think he was white.”
He was challenged by Mitchell, who ridiculed his theories about the speech patterns of young people. ”You keep talking David about black culture. Black communities are not homogenous. So there are black cultures. Lots of different black cultures. What we need to be doing is … thinking about ourselves not as individual communities … as one community. We need to stop talking about them and us.
Don’t you love how to the Guardian this ineffectual sputtering of cliches is conclusive demolition?
