The blundering generals leading Negrodom to death. Part I: Afua Hirsch

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The blundering generals leading Negrodom to death. Part I: Afua Hirsch

‘Had my council properly advised me, had they opposed me at times, France would have ruled supreme.’

Napoleon Bonaparte

With the release and excessive laudation of Marvel’s Black Panther, and Afua Hirsch’s much publicised book ‘Brit(ish): On Race, Identity and Belonging’, new battles are taking place with increasing aggression and heightened passion. As the days pass and the stakes continue to rise it becomes easier to chart the course, and reveal the instigators of this quasi-war. We see more clearly who it is that seeks to make war upon ‘everyday racism that plagues British society’. It becomes evident who, in fact, deems the release of a comic book movie an ‘Afrocentric epic’ which is ‘both a celebration of blackness and perfectly timed political commentary’, with the ability to render some of the warring party’s concerns but a distant memory.

These scholars, journalists, and academics lead the way as they have attained a position of prominence within society which grants them a stage upon which to perform, speak and thus lead. They do indeed perform and speak; but, where exactly are they leading the black race? Who are they? What are the credentials which have granted them a position of prominence? Are they qualified to lead? Do the masses wish them to lead? These are questions all those who class themselves as black and ‘of colour’ need to ask themselves. For whether they know or not, approve or disapprove, they are being led by men and women who have no mandate, dubious motives, and little sense; but who lead them nonetheless. After decades of talented race leaders, many of whom fell upon honourable swords, what we are left with now is educated liberals with dusky skin, warped notions, and limited vision.

It is the age of the blundering generals.

After a stinging experience with white women on national television, Afua Hirsch opined ‘It’s fascinating when white people, who invariably have no personal experience of the frequent othering and subtle prejudice that comes from being born or raised in a country that does not recognise your unconditional right to its identity, tell you what you have and have not experienced.’ For those who are unaware, Hirsch is a mixed-raced woman whose father is Jewish and mother Ghanaian (her husband too is Ghanaian as we are repeatedly informed). She grew up in white ‘middle-class’ Wimbledon, attended private schools, went to Oxford University and completed the PPE course (Politics, Philosophy, Economics) which those who seek to govern this country ensure they take.

In an article, the course was described as ‘the Oxford degree that runs Britain’. ‘Oxford PPE is more than a factory for politicians and the people who judge them for a living. It also gives many of these public figures a shared outlook: confident, internationalist, intellectually flexible, and above all sure that small groups of supposedly well-educated, rational people, such as themselves, can and should improve Britain and the wider world.’ Little wonder then, she has undergone a ‘lifelong search for identity’ which has culminated, at age 36, in Brit(ish): little more than a memoir of racial befuddlement.

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‘A country that does not recognize your unconditional right to its identity’, Hirsch calls England, in a fit of infantile ire at love unrequited. The Ebony Muse has indeed mused over what it is that those who have asked for legal equality, and received it, mean when they deny this equality exists (https://goo.gl/ebG7Pa). In what ways does the state not recognise mixed-raced people’s right to be deemed British? As loathsome as is this history of the British government and its nefarious attitude toward its black subjects, it is 2018; black and white are legal beneath the law. The Ebony Muse has no love for the British Government. Yet, it has for honesty and intellectual integrity.

When a census was conducted in 2011, a plethora of racial categories were included to encompass an increasingly diverse populous as the table below shows. Yet, as a former barrister Hirsch knows the law intimately; it is not legal classifications of which she speaks. The complaint, beneath the deceptive rhetoric, is that parts of the population, which does not include officialdom, do not recognise her new right to their historic identity. In short, some white English people still recognise that she has a racial heritage beyond British shores; oh, the horror!

It is clear that now the war for legal equality has been won, the war for lover’s parity has begun.

Hirsh bemoans the fact that she is asked ‘the question’ one which evidently plagues her entire being, ‘where are you really from?’ As if blackness is something to be ashamed of, something ugly to hide behind glorious white Britishness, a thing to be left in the past in the face of an elevated status. Well, The Ebony Muse encourages all those with a single drop of African blood to dismiss those mortified by their blackness; and when the apparent dreaded question is asked, respond with unshakeable pride ‘Africa!’

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‘The high priestess’ of the Church of Anti-Racism, as she has been dubbed, after a career as a barrister worked as a correspondent for The Guardian (who themselves have questions to answer about the black agenda being set in their pages). ‘I seek white acceptance’ she announces in an interview which reads as a Fanonian case study ‘And I think that is a huge problem for us: in many subtle ways, people of colour in this country are given the idea that success is achieving white acceptance. And so it’s something that people aspire to – to be recognised by mainstream institutions, to behave.’ As a fortnightly correspondent for The Guardian, author of a race-related book, and having made television appearances (not to mention her place in the bosom of bourgeois PPE society) Hirsch has been able to position herself as one of Britain’s foremost thinkers and speakers on race in Britain; a weighty title to bear.

Yet, it is clear, she is not fit to lead. She speaks of ‘people of colour’ and their travails as a ‘huge problem for us’. When exactly did she abandon the middle-class, Oxbridge, PPE set and decide she was part of a black ‘us’? And who exactly accepted her entrance? Or leadership? Her book reads like a sorrowful diary of a racially confused, mixed-race girl, in a white affluent world; with undertones of racial longing and overtones of disappointment that white people recognised that she was, well, not white. This is not an apprenticeship for leadership of any black community. It is little more than a well-baked recipe for disaster.

We have seen the outcome before. People disillusioned with the fact that their own ‘elevated blackness’ is not worthy of a place in the white world attempt to rule over the lowly blacks who will accept them. They often do more damage, on what is little more than a personal crusade, than oppressive officialdom itself. What does the black community want with a woman who self-admittedly seeks white acceptance? What can she bring to the struggle, save a cornucopia of dubious tales, and self-loathing manifested in powder-puff academia?

A critic, in the degraded Evening Standard, remarked ‘Do black people have it harder than other minorities? Probably, yes, but there is no clear discussion of this in her book nor of why black Africans have tended to do better in Britain than black Caribbean’s who, conversely, are more successful in the US.’ Herein lies the grand paradox. What is being sought is not an intellectual, political, or economic solution to the problems ‘people of colour’ face today. Instead what we have is a very public show of one person’s fractured and mendacious relationship with their limited blackness and an unashamed attempt to apply those experiences to a formula to improve Britain (not the black race).

For someone who took the country’s leading course, in one of its historic academic powerhouses, her lack of intellectual ideas on the problems of race is truly scandalous. It is worthless to reel off a plethora of racist anecdotes that you and your ‘BME elite’ friends have suffered, say that is not right, and move on to the next money-spinning article or book. All one has done is told a melange of meaningless stories, exhumed your own inner demons, proposed no solution to the great race questions, taken our money from your book sales and sailed off back to bourgeois dolour.

This is not only a general who blunders, but one who leaves the field of battle, laden with the wealth of the dying, having fired not a single shot in anger.

“The message I’m trying to get across is there’s not a healthy space to explore our history and why we are the society we are,” she claims. Hirsh has so many conflicting identities that she says ‘we’ with unthinking freedom, about such varying groups, that without her zealous repetition you would forget she is a ‘woman of colour’. It is ‘we’ for the black community, ‘we’ for the mixed raced community, ‘we’ for the of colour community, ‘we’ for the British community; presumably its ‘we’ for the Jewish community too, ‘we’ for the Oxbridge set, ‘we’ for the middle-class group of which she is a member, and ‘we’ for the BME experiment of which she is certainly a zealous high-priestess. In historical academia, they talk of ‘fluid identity’ for people who adapt to new cultural surroundings, acquire new identities, and merge these new identities with existing cultural facets. Hirsch epitomises this fluidity; her identity meandering wildly, bursting dams, criss-crossing continents, conjoining more powerful streams, in a disorientated frenzy to escape its source.

“A lot of British people,” she argues, “don’t fully accept that you can look like me and be British. That’s the issue.” This is axiomatically the central issue behind her misguided crusade. White people do not accept me. It always comes down to the same issue for the fraudulent contemporary revolutionaries. They attempt to reside in the white world as a fully fledged and accepted member; the white world does not accept them to the extent they hoped, and they tiptoe over to the masses purporting to lead the black race and solve its problems. The issue is not black suffering, poverty, mis-education, and mis-direction. It is not a lack of competent leaders, independent political movements, intellectual foresight, scholarly unity, nor academic creativity or independence. It is not the erosion of family values, the adoption of British culture, the alarming death of novel academic thought, the end of radicalism, the disunity of constituent parts, the utter failure of its leaders, or the nefarious nature of the British state.

What it all comes down to, in the end, is the old pathetic cry of ‘I tried to fit in and they won’t accept me’, and then inevitably ‘we must change society for all (by the way: including the group I happen to physically resemble). This is not the war cry of a people seeking freedom, but the wailing of a confused blunderer so eager to be accepted into the bosom of whiteness she is blinded by her own self-seeking desperation. She bewails “the failure of Britishness to be an identity that we all accept encompasses someone like me” with the same revulsion with which she lamented her blackness in youth, adolescence and adulthood. This is a dangerous general. One who veils her reforms for the improvement of the British state as a programme of racial awakening for oppressed ‘people of colour’.

Like her classmates: BBC’s political editor, Oxford PPE graduate Nick Robinson, BBC’s economics editor, Oxford PPE graduate; Robert Peston, the host of ITV political show Peston on Sunday, Oxford PPE graduate; Paul Johnson, British civil servant and economist, currently serving as Director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies; former prime minister, Oxford PPE graduate David Cameron; Former Labour shadow chancellor, Oxford PPE graduate Ed Balls; former Liberal Democrat chief secretary to the Treasury, Oxford PPE graduate Danny Alexander; former Lib Dem minister, Oxford PPE graduate Sir Ed Davey; former Ukip MP, Oxford PPE graduate Mark Reckless; Michael Crick, Oxford PPE graduate and political correspondent of Channel 4 News; and Times and the Sun proprietor, Rupert Murdoch, PPE at Oxford; she is part of a political/media British elite which has no interest in the improvement of the black community, but have a stake in the improvement of the British state. It should never be forgotten that Hirsh talks first of the ills that ‘plagues British society’, not the black community.

She is no race leader, but an Oxbridge, domestic reformer; tout court.

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‘It’s hard to talk about the personal in a public setting at the best of times.’ Hirsch says disingenuously (all she does is talk about the personal) ‘when the content relates to the experience – since childhood – of white people delegitimising your voice, then having to defend that before a group of white people who attempt to delegitimise your voice, is doubly painful and draining.’ So, why bother talking? One may reasonably ask. The answer is that which is always the case with these racial parvenus. Personal glory (or wealth, her book is £16.99), dubious motives (more domestic reformer than race leader) and racial confusion (no need for an insert at this stage).

‘At the same time,’ Hirsch says while positioning herself as Britain’s foremost speaker on race, ‘I don’t want to feed into the idea that I am the black voice. If there’s an issue of race, you have to come to me: I’m the black police.” Hirsch sounds as fraudulent as Tiberius, refusing Augustus’ crown on the Senate floor, while all Rome knew that there was nothing he desired more. The Senate did not have to ask many more times before an unequivocal no became a foreboding yes. And the tyrannical blundering began. Perhaps Hirsch, like so many others from the repugnant black left who are culpable, will look back, as did Napoleon, and say: ‘had true people of colour properly advised me, had black people chastised me at times, Negrodom would have ruled supreme.’

Matters little, it shall be too late, blundering generals do not win wars.

(Amazon, n.d.) https://www.amazon.co.uk/Brit-ish-Race-Identity-Belonging/dp/1911214284

(Rose, 2018) https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/feb/03/marvel-black-panther-chadwick-boseman-michael-b-jordan

(Anyangwe, 2018) https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/feb/01/black-panther-africa-colour-daniel-kaluuya-lupita-nyongo

(Hirsch, 2018) https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jan/24/white-people-tv-racism-afua-hirsch

(Beckett, 2017) https://www.theguardian.com/education/2017/feb/23/ppe-oxford-university-degree-that-rules-britain

(Amazon, n.d.) https://www.amazon.co.uk/Brit-ish-Race-Identity-Belonging/dp/1911214284quote from David Olusoga

(Statistics, 2015) https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/culturalidentity/ethnicity/articles/2011censusanalysisethnicityandreligionofthenonukbornpopulationinenglandandwales/2015-06-18

(The Guardian , 2018 ) https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/feb/04/leila-slimani-afua-hirsch-lullaby-british-interview

(Goodhart, 2018) https://www.standard.co.uk/lifestyle/books/british-on-race-identity-and-belonging-by-afua-hirsch-review-a3737946.html

(The Guardian , 2018 ) https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/feb/04/leila-slimani-afua-hirsch-lullaby-british-interview

(Goodhart, 2018) https://www.standard.co.uk/lifestyle/books/british-on-race-identity-and-belonging-by-afua-hirsch-review-a3737946.html