Simon Webb Gets Upset About Children’s Book on Black Lesbian Pirate Queen

Well, it’s a Bank Holiday Monday, and so to spoil your fun here’s another post about about History Debunked has put up on the Net. Yesterday or the day before he put up a post urging people to be aware of the anti-racist, pro-gay, ‘woke’ propaganda now being published as children’s literature.

He’s particularly concerned about the colonisation of British history by Blacks and their insertion into historical epics like Bridgerton. He has a point about this TV series. This is the British past remade in the image of the multicultural present as modern liberals would have liked it to have been, rather than as it was. One of the arguments Major Moody used in his Second Report of the 1820s, which argued that Blacks weren’t ready for their emancipation and that Blacks and Whites were fundamentally incompatible is that there were very few marriages in aristocratic society between them. This was despite Moody’s own wife being Black. There were odd members of the nobility, who were Black. One was the son of a Caribbean planter who had a glittering political career in the 1820s, ending up as the Lord Lieutenant of Flintshire in Wales. But most of the Black population in Britain would, I suspect, either have been sailors, servants or other working people.

There are problems with these programmes, although they’re not an issue, provided people realise that they are watching fiction. The problems come if people believe them, as this makes understanding historic British racism and the Black community’s struggle against difficult to understand. If there were so many Blacks, and they were so easily accepted as equals by Whites back then, then why did it take so long to ban the slave trade and slavery itself, quite apart from explaining the rise of vicious racist groups like the National Front and the BNP?

As an example of this attitude now getting into children’s books, he produced a recent one about a Black lesbian girl becoming a pirate chief. Now this does sound unlikely. There were Black pirates, of course, and it’s respectable, mainstream historical fact that they received the same share of the plunder as Whites, and likewise received the same rates of compensation for the loss of limbs. There were also female pirates, like Anne Bonney. One set were discovered when the British navy took a pirate ship. Most of the men gave up, but three pirates fought like devils. On examination, it was found that they were women, and that one of them was pregnant. I think Bonney was one of them. And some of these women were bisexual. When Channel 4 started back in the 1980s, there was a five minute slot in the evening between programmes where somebody could give some kind of talk. One of these, I remember, was by an American woman, who talked about one of these swashbuckling women, who had relations both with men and other women.

And some of the pirates had genuinely revolutionary views about social equality. Years ago, when I was an ickle sprog, I was a member of the Puffin Club, set up for children who read Puffin Books. This had its own magazine, the Puffin Post. In the Puffin annual one year there was a piece about the ‘White Pirates’. This wasn’t because of their skin colour, but because of their extremely progressive political views. They believed in the radical, democratic ideals emerging in the 18th century and so rejected aristocratic rule. They were also internationalists, consisting of people from a number of nations, all of whom were to be treated equally. This was shown by them having their own international language or lingua franca, spoken in their base on Madagascar. And that’s all I can remember about them, I’m afraid. They’re obviously a group it would be great to know more about.

From all this about women and politically revolutionary pirates, it’s not such a stretch to Black lesbian pirate queens, although I doubt there were any. As the subject of a children’s book, it’s no more improbable than one I’ve seen, where the captain’s mother or grandmother takes over the ship, forcing them to do exercises and become a bit more literate and educated, which is clearly a piece of fun fiction. The only bit aspect of the book which would stop me from giving it to a child is the lesbianism. Depending on the age of the children the book is aimed at, I think this might be giving children too much sexual knowledge too early. But as a story about a Black girl becoming a pirate chief, I really don’t see any harm in it at all.

History Debunked Refutes the Myth that James I was Black

More from the whackier end of racial politics. History Debunked has put up a number of videos refuting various assertions and myths promoted as Black history. One of his videos attacked the claim, seen in the Netflix interracial historical romance, Bridgerton, that Queen Caroline was Black. This has arisen from the fact that one of her ancestors was a 13th Spanish Moorish prince. But that was five hundred years before her birth, and so any biological trace of her non-White ancestry would have disappeared way back in her lineage. Apart from which, the Spanish Moors were Berbers and Arabs from North Africa. They were darker than Europeans – the term ‘blue-blooded’ for the aristocracy comes from the Christian Spanish nobility. Under their idea of limpieza de sangre, ‘blood purity’, the racial ideology that distinguished them from the Moors, their skin was supposed to be so pale that you could see the veins in the wrist. But the Moors were nevertheless lighter-skinned than the darker peoples south of the Sahara, in what the Arabs called Bilad as-Sudan and the Berbers Akal Nguiwen, ‘The Land of the Blacks’. Which I think shows that the Arabs and Berbers, dark as they were compared to Europeans, very clearly didn’t think of themselves as Black.

In this video Simon Webb debunks a similar myth, that James I of England/ VI of Scotland, was Black. This ahistorical idea apparently began with the Black Hebrew Israelites, a Black Jewish sect who believe that one of the lost tribes of Israel went to sub-Saharan Africa. Webb mentions that a group of them settled in Israel in the Negev. He uses this to try to refute the demand that Israel should open its borders by stating that Israel had taken in people of a number of different racial groups. They are now, for example, taking in people from India. It’s true that Israel has taken in refugees from Africa, but many of the groups they’ve accepted were Jews. In the 1970s they mounted a rescue operation to transport the Falashas, the Black Jews of Ethiopia, away from their oppression in that country to safety in Israel. My guess is that the Indians they’re accepting are also Jewish. There’s an indigenous Jewish community in India, the Bene Israel, and it sounds like some of them may be migrating. There is, however, considerable racism amongst White Israelis. Abby Martin covered this in some of her reports for The Empire Files on TeleSur, in which she interviewed Black Israelis about the abuse, including physical assault, they’d experience. Gentile African refugees, although present, are resented by many Israelis as ‘infiltrators’, the term they also use for Palestinians trying to return to the ancestral lands from which they were evicted during the Nakba, the term they use for foundation of Israel and their massacre and ethnic cleansing in 1947.

But back to the Black Hebrew Israelites and James I. The Black Hebrew Israelites believe that the Spanish Moors were Black, and that they went from Spain to colonise Ireland and Scotland. Which must be news to most Scots and Irish. Mary, Queen of Scots was mixed race, but Lord Darnley, James’ father, was fully Black and so was James. The English, however, were determined to erase any trace of this Black ancestry, and so embarked on a deliberately policy of intermarrying with the Black Scots and Irish in order to make them White, at the same time destroying all the contrary evidence that they were Black. Although this myth began with the Black Hebrew Israelites it has spread out from them into the wider Black community. To support his description of this bizarre myth, Webb on the YouTube page for the video has link to an article in the Zimbabwean newspaper, The Patriot, which proudly promotes this claim.

Was King James I of England black? – YouTube

The belief that the Spanish Moors were Black has formed the basis for an anti-White racist view of history. A few years ago the American left-wing magazine, Counterpunch, carried on its online edition a piece by a Black historian, Garikai Chengu. This claimed that the Moors were ‘obviously Black’, and their colonisation of Spain brought science and reason to a Europe then gripped by ignorance and superstition. There’s some basis for this in that the revival of science in the West began when Christian scholars acquired Arab and Islamic scientific texts from places such as Islamic Spain and Sicily after that was conquered by the Normans. However, it’s grotesquely exaggerated and is really just a piece of racial supremacist propaganda, albeit one by Blacks rather than Whites. I think it’s fair to see such Afrocentric views of history as a form of Fascism, including this myth that the Irish and Scots were also really Black. Some historians have no trouble describing certain Black political movements as forms of Fascism. One recent book by an academic historian not only includes the classic Fascist movements of German Nazism, Italian Fascism and various other White, European far right movements, but also Marcus Garvey’s Negro Improvement Association and the Nation of Islam, as well as Narendra Modi’s BJP in India. The inclusion of Marcus Garvey and his organisation may well offend many Black activists. Garvey is one of the pioneers of Black liberation. A month or so ago there was a Black celebrity writing in the pages of the Radio Times recommending that children should be taught about him in school. I really know very little about Garvey, but the claim that he was Fascistic rings true. When I was working as a volunteer in the Empire and Commonwealth Museum in Bristol one of the jobs I was given was unpacking some of boxes of material given to the Museum by private individuals and institutions. One of these included a document by Garvey’s organisation. I didn’t do more than glance at it, but it appeared to be describing some kind of military parade or armed wing. This included women’s units and mechanised and mounted forces of various kinds. I don’t know if Garvey and his followers were ever able to set up such a paramilitary force or whether it was all a fantasy. But one of the features of Fascism is its militarism. The Nazis and Italian Fascists, not to mention the various other Fascist movements, all started out as paramilitary organisations complete with uniforms and arms.

Alongside the entirely reasonable demands for social and economic improvement and renewed action to combat White racism, the Black Lives Matter movement has also brought out and articulated strains of overt anti-White racism. One example of this was the attempt by Sasha Johnson, of the Oxford branch of the organisation, to set up her own paramilitary Black army in Brixton to protect Blacks from the cops, and her tweet that the White man wouldn’t be Blacks’ equal, but their slave. Which got her banned from the social media platform. I think there is a real need to start studying and publishing material specifically on Black racism and Fascism. At the moment, there appears to be very little, if any, books specifically published on it. If you search for ‘Black racism’ on Google, what comes up is articles and books on the attacks on affirmative action programmes by right-wing Whites. Way back in the ’90s and early parts of this century there was a book published on Black anti-White violence in America. This might be White Girl Bleed A Lot, which is a similar book. However, I’m not sure how academically respectable the latter is, as I think its author may have joined the extreme right. I can see many people on the left resisting any attempt to categorise and study various Black Fascist movements from the belief that, as Blacks have been oppressed in the West, and are still disadvantaged, it is unfair to characterise such movement as they arose in response to White racism and persecution.

But this does not change the nature of these movements and the racism and racist history they promote. Whatever their connections to the broader Black liberation movement, they’re still racist and Fascist themselves, and should be viewed as such. Fascism everywhere needs to be fought, regarded of race.