Yesterday I put up a video which explored Bristol’s Stapleton Road, asking whether it was still Britain’s most dangerous road as it had been dubbed twenty years ago. This had been at time when there had been a very high level of gun crime linked to feuding drug gangs. It concluded that Stapleton Road wasn’t as bad as it had been, but was still dangerous. I got a comment to the video from Lesley Matthews, who lives there, stating that it’s actually a great place to live. When I asked him what made it so, he replied
‘Yes. It’s an excellent community where people look out for each other. A truly multicultural area similar to how Easton used to be before gentrification took over, house prices shot through the roof and white middle classes moved in. (Still bitter, we were priced out by landlord raising the rent so we would move and he could sell)
There are a few groups of lads hanging about but they are very polite to the elderly and are pretty well behaved. (Mostly Somalian so they’ve been well brought up).
The shops are fabulous with lots of food from all over the world.
There is a problem with rubbish but this is down to Bristol being constantly underfunded and the waste disposal teams cut to the bone.’
This is very interesting, as it presents a very different and contrasting picture to the image of this part of Bristol. I was very interested to read that it has a great community spirit and that the groups of mostly Somali youths are actually polite to the elderly and well-brought up. Again, this contradicts some of the perceived ideas about Black criminality, not just in Bristol but also in other British cities. As for the problems of gentrification and Bristol’s rubbish disposal services being cut to the bone, the latter unfortunately is true right across the board in Bristol following massive cuts made by the elected mayors Ferguson and Marvin Reese. And I’ve no doubt that Easton is also suffering from gentrification. It’s happening to many working class and diverse communities across Britain and America, as the affluent White middle classes move into areas of traditionally cheaper housing, raising rents and house prices beyond the ability of local people to afford them. It’s causing a lot of resentment.
I’m very happy to present this alternative, positive view of the area and hope that the community spirit Lesley describes goes on to make it a great place to live.
Trev, another commenter on this blog, also remarked that Stapleton Road looked like Manningham in Bradford, another community that has acquired a nasty reputation with outsiders, but was also a great community for the people who lived there.
‘Looks a bit like Manningham in Bradford, classed as “no go zone” by those who never go there but a thriving multicultural community that I was a part of for 18 years! I think Jawa motorbikes were eastern european, either Czek or German. Still make them today.’
Again, another comment I’m pleased to put up as it contradicts the received ideas about these communities, showing that local people consider them very differently to the negative views of outsiders.
I’ve put a few videos in the past about the infamous Asian grooming gangs, who terrorised and raped White girls in places like Rotherham and Telford. The abuse wasn’t confined just to Whites, however. They also used to prey on Asian Women and girls, and so I feel that I absolutely have to put this video up as well. It was put up nine days ago by Black British YouTuber Shady Shae, who seems to have put up a number of videos about the grooming gangs and other racial issues. Some people may understandably find this difficult to watch, and I don’t blame them if they do.
The video simply consists of Shae watching a report from WION, which I believe is an Indian news agency, reporting on the grooming gangs preying on British Asian girls. The report says that they’re mainly Pakistani Muslims, and interviews one of their victims. She was in what first appeared to be a loving relationship with the man who became her abuser after accidentally literally bumping into him in the street. Then he started to abuse her, pimping her out as a prostitute to others like himself. The report states that the victims are mostly Sikhs, and because virginity is highly valued in Asian culture there is immense pressure on these women not to come forward with their accounts of their rape and exploitation. The anonymous lady was able to come forward with hers after hearing Mohan Singh of the Sikh Awareness Society speak at her local gurdwara (temple). Singh is an activist campaigning against the gangs and their exploitation of the women of his faith. The victim was thus able to come forward, to to the police and have the men arrested and jailed. However, they received lenient sentences and have since been released. She states that they still torment her by ringing her up to abuse and laugh at her. Her only solution to this has been to change her phone number. Like many victims of trauma, particularly women, she has self-harmed and talks about the scars left on her stomach and arms, though she hasn’t done this for quite some months now.
The video also talks to a man, who is described as a defender of Islam. He states that the abuse does not come from the religion of Islam, because Islam is against rape and child abuse. This is true. Iran certainly has a legal age of consent for marriage and so on. As far as I know, this is 16, but they were considering lowering it to 14 because of the problem of randy teenagers. Rape is punishable by death. A few years ago they executed a monster, a taxi driver dubbed ‘the vampire’ for his crimes against women and girls. He had raped and murder seven women. The man was flogged by the fathers of the murdered girls. The number of lashes were limited, but one dad had to be held back from giving this creature a few more stripes. The rapist was then publicly hanged with a crane. British rapists and child abusers should be glad they’re in Britain, where they only get sent to Britain, rather than an Islamic country. However, back to the Muslim talking about what he believes is behind the gangs. He states that there are issues present in the other south Asian religions, like Hinduism and Sikhism, and not just Islam. These include forced marriages and honour killings. In the case of the Pakistani grooming gangs, it was the culture. There was an attitude in Pakistani Islam that the women of other religions were worthless, and so could be abused and exploited.
I’ve come across allegations that Sikhs were also being abused by the grooming gangs before, and the report, and Shae’s video, make it clear that there is a problem here. A problem that doesn’t seem to be reported in the mainstream media. Mind you, there was particular reluctance by the media to report the abuse of White girls, and the police and local authorities really didn’t want to act against them, fearing riots and allegations of racism. But these Asian girls are British, and as we are a multicultural society, their suffering and abuse needs to be told and combated as well. It occurs to me that some of this reluctance to cover the story in the lamestream British media may come from Diane Abbott’s demand that inter-ethnic racism and abuse should not be made an issue otherwise ‘they will use it to divide and rule’. Well, we’ve got Rishi Sunak, an Asian, as our Prime Minister here, Hamza Yousaf as First Minister in Scotland, and other people of colour like Kemi Badenoch, Priti Patel and Suella Braverman in government, not to mention Sajid Javid and David Cleverly still popping up from time to time, so that argument won’t wash.
As for the composition of the grooming gangs themselves, they were mainly Pakistani Muslim men, but they also included people of other religions and ethnicities, like Whites and Sikhs. The Muslim spokesman strikes me as correct. These men weren’t Muslims, as they drank and did drugs, which is definitely haram. I doubt that they had ever put their face inside a mosque for years. But yes, it does seem that there is this attitude in parts of Pakistani Muslim culture. One of the Labour councillors, who helped expose the gangs and have them prosecuted, was a Muslim woman and she stated very clearly, against the denials of the police, that racism was involved.
One of the allegations from the Islamophobes is that the Pakistani grooming gangs were simply following the medieval Muslim laws that allowed sex slavery. There’s a very good book on slavery in Islam by a White American Muslim academic, that makes it very clear they aren’t doing it because of Islam. These are just like rapists and child abusers everywhere. They’re simply evil men preying on vulnerable women and girls.
It’s an interesting and chilling video, and one which shows very clearly that these gangs aren’t just racist against Whites. I do have a problem with it in that Shae seems to be impressed with Tommy Robinson for his long pursuit and campaigning on this issue. I’m not. The grooming gangs were exposed by a number of people, many of them Labour MPs and councillors. Robinson has come late to the party. He’s struck me and some of the commentators on this blog as exploiting the issue as part of his hatred of Islam. He has lied and smeared his opponents, and has had no qualms about appealing to his fans for donations. There are plenty of better people talking about this issue.
Rape and sexual abuse is repugnant and needs to be exposed and fought no matter who the abuser and the victims are. Every women needs to protected from exploitation regardless of whether they’re White, Black, Asian or whatever. And everyone fighting against it needs the fullest support from all Brits, regardless of creed and colour.
Doug Stokes, Against Decolonisation: Campus Culture Wars and the Decline of the West (Cambridge: Polity Press 2023)
The murder of George Floyd by a White police officer three years ago sparked a wave of protests across America and then Britain under the banner of the Black Lives Matter organisation. It was loudly trumpeted that western civilisation is institutionally racist and that it was based on ‘Whiteness’, the underlying racist ideology by which Whites maintained the social, economic and educational advantages against Blacks and people of colour. This ‘White privilege’ extended to all Whites, even if they were not personally racist. There have since been demands to dismantle this perceived systemic racism. This has entered the university, where, according to Stokes, it has set off a moral panic. There is supposed to be a gap between the number of Whites and ethnic minorities enrolling at university and the numbers of Whites achieving top grades and Blacks and other people of colour. This is ascribed to personal racism on campus and the content of the university curriculum. This is held to be Eurocentric and too White. Blacks and other ethnic minorities, it is argued, do not enrol in uni because they are marginalised and put off by the overwhelmingly White content and the personal racism they experience, including microaggressions. At the same time, modern science and Enlightenment rationality are attacked as merely western forms of knowledge that are alien to people of colour from outside Europe. This needs to be removed from the centre of European teaching so that proper space can be made for non-White cultures and their ways of knowing.
Decolonisation and the Advancement of Privileged Members of Ethnic Minorities
Stokes is, according to the brief personal bio on the back cover, a director of the Strategy and Security Institute at the University of Exeter, a fellow of the Legatum Institute and a member of the advisory council for the Free Speech Union. He’s also written for a number of right-wing journals like the Times, Torygraph, Spectator and The Critic. Most of the attacks on ‘wokeness’ come from the right, but elements of the left are also turning against it. A few weeks ago the Free Speech Union put up a panel of left-wing writers and academics, who were also very much against it and its malign cancel culture. And there are certainly important points people on the left can take away from this book. Stokes argues that the determination to appoint people to prominent positions in the university and elsewhere is very much a class issue. It allows rich and privileged people of colour like Priyamvada Gopal, a history professor at Cambridge, to present themselves as somehow more marginalised than the Whites underneath. For example, Gopal declared that she was less advantaged because of her colour than the porters at Cambridge. The Beeb’s senior journo is an Asian woman, who declared that she wouldn’t have got her position without the Corporation’s diversity scheme. This is questionable, as her father is billionaire owning one of Britain’s football clubs, and her mother is millionaire in her own right.
The Professional Managerial Class and the Neglect of the Working Class
Stokes also argues that the decolonisation movement is strongly linked with the emergence of the Professional Managerial Class. This is a class of mostly White technocrats, who appeared after the dismantling of the Post-War consensus. As the trade unions were neutered and the welfare state and NHS cut and privatised, the functions of the nation state were increasingly subordinated to the authority of multinational bodies, staffed by ‘anywheres’ – officials with no particular connection to any country, who looked down on the ‘somewheres’ who still retained their loyalty to their particular location or country. And this highly privileged elite particularly despised the White working class. Stokes presents statistics that show, contrary to the image promoted by the intersectional left, it’s the White working class, and particularly boys, who are now marginalised and excluded from the academy, but this is ignored by the university sector. Bristol university set up a bursary worth millions to support 30 more Black students. By contrast, there were only two bursaries set up for people from a generally disadvantaged background. These were only worth £2 million each, compared to the tens given out under the Black bursary scheme. But even one of these two was reserved solely for Blacks. Such schemes proliferate, but only a tiny minority of universities have schemes to support people from a working class background. But Stokes goes through the statistics to show that there are a number of complex factors preventing people from going to uni which have nothing to do with class. The most important is class. Another factor is education. Most Blacks go to state comprehensive schools, which are far less successful at sending their pupils to university than the elite private schools.
Ethnic Racial Oppression Challenged by Statistics
As for the supposed gap between the number of BME pupils going on to university and Whites, the opposite of what is claimed is true: Blacks and ethnic minorities comprise 18 per cent of the population, but 30 per cent of the students enrolling at university. Many ethnic minorities are as successful and some more so than the White population. Indians and other ethnic minorities are as successful as Whites, but people of Chinese origin 30 per cent more. White working class pupils on free school meals are the least successful apart from Travellers.
Stokes cites statistics to show again and again that the Black Lives Matter narrative of racial oppression is wrong, drawn from EU and EHRC reports that claim the opposite. In America, more cops are shot by Blacks than Blacks are shot by Whites. Where there is a statically higher chance of Blacks being shot by the cops than the general population, it’s because Blacks are statistically more likely to commit violent crimes. As for racial offences, while most of these are committed by Whites, 24 per cent of them are so are also committed by Blacks, despite the fact that they only constitute around 13 per cent of the American population.
The stats also show that Britain is a far less racist country than others. 89 per cent of people are comfortable with someone of a different colour being prime minister. Other stats show that most people have no objections with their children marrying people of another colour and with working with people of different ethnicities. The incidence of racist crime is much lower than claimed. Most people from ethnic backgrounds are proud to be British at 65 per cent, slightly higher than Whites, and the police is actually more trusted by Blacks and ethnic minorities than by Whites. As for the university sector, while there are fewer ethnic minority professors than Whites, this is not true of certain subjects. 53 per cent of the students and staff in chemical and electrical engineering departments are Black or Asian. Similarly, the degree attainment gap is closing and for some groups it’s statistically insignificant.
There’s also a gender aspect to this. Increasingly more women are entering university than men. 53 per cent of university students are women, and this proportion is increasing so that it has been predicted that in a few decades’ time women will comprise 73 per cent of all students. They are enrolling in all the professional subjects except the mathematical sciences. This implies that in the coming decades the professions, and particularly medicine, will be female dominated.
Needless to say, these stats attacking the narrative that Britain is racist are not what the intersectional left wants to hear. The book quotes the automatic denunciations of a government report published a year or so ago, which concluded that Britain was not a racist society, by prominent members of the Labour party like Jeremy Corbyn, Keir Starmer and Bell Ribeiro-Addy.
Intellectual Origins
As well as attacking it at the level of statistics, Stokes dissects the history of the movement. It emerged in the early 20th century in the thinking of the Marxist Frankfurt school and the Italian Communist, Antonio Gramsci. They felt that in order to radicalise the working class it would be necessary to change the culture. This effectively stands Marx on its head, as Marx claimed that the economic substructure created and influenced ideology. This was then taken up in its turn by the American Marxist Herbert Marcuse. Marcuse was concerned by the failure of the western working class to adopt revolutionary socialism. Instead, he and other radical decided to appeal to the new marginalised groups, such as gays and the ‘people of the ghetto’ – Blacks. This occurred roughly at the same time that similarly disappointed western radicals adopted the ideology of ‘Third Worldism’. They looked to the new national liberation movements of the colonised peoples around the world as an attack on western capitalism which would eventually result in its destruction. These radicals took over as their texts works like Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. And their attitudes show a mixture of White self-hatred and sheer bloodlust. Sartre, in his introduction to Fanon’s book, declared that if you shot a European, you killed two people: the European and the man he oppressed. Michel Foucault, despite being an openly gay man, was an enthusiastic supporter of the Islamic Revolution in Iran because it was a revolt against ‘western rationalism’. This included the mass purges, including that of homosexuals, by the revolutionary regime.
Foucault and similar thinkers were also responsible for the attack on science and rationality. According to Foucault and the structural and post-structural linguists that preceded him, no objective knowledge about the world is possible due to the all pervasive influence of language. Language structures people’s thinking in binaries – man/woman, Black/White and so on, one of which is always in inferior. Thus language ensures that men enjoy a more privileged position than women, and Blacks and other ethnic minorities are inferior to Whites. At the same time, knowledge is not objective but serves the interest of those in power. It does not advance. Instead, there is merely a change in viewpoint between one historical epoch and another.
Capitalism, Not Science and Rationality, Responsible for Rise of the West
Similarly, the role of the rise of science and the industrial revolution in producing Britain and the West’s global supremacy is also denied. Instead it is argued that a crisis in feudalism in the late Middle Ages led to the rise of capitalism and its institution which created the conditions for European dominance and the enslavement and destruction of indigenous peoples.
Readers of this blog will now that I am particularly concerned about the focus on British and European involvement in the transatlantic slave trade and the way this obscures the existence of slavery across cultures from antiquity onwards. Stokes tackles this issue, exposing its existence in China. Arab merchants to China took with them Black African slaves as their personal servants. This started a craze for African slaves amongst the Chinese, but this has been erased from history. Chinese children are not taught about it in schools, nor is it discussed either officially or in popular culture. At the same time, the slave trade within Africa was very firmly in African hands. The largest collection of documents on the slave trade comes from the Dutch East India Company comprising 100,000 volumes. But these documents hardly anywhere mention the Dutch doing the actual business of capturing slaves. It was done instead by Black Africans, who then sold them on to Europeans. And some Black slavers did extremely well, such as Tippoo Tipp, who enslaved Black Africans to provide labour for his plantations on Zanzibar.
As for the supposed role the slave trade played in enriching Britain, historians have said that in fact it played the same role in stimulating the economy as sugar. The real driver of the industrial revolution and Britain’s wealth was textiles. In fact, it may even have been a disadvantage. One historian has estimated that the country would have been £500,000 better off if we didn’t have the West Indies.
Working Class Whites Did Not Benefit from Slave Trade
He also rebuts the assertion that all Whites somehow benefited from the slave trade. This is again untrue on several levels. Imperialism and colonialism were policies devised by the upper classes. Democracy was only established in 1928 when the vote was granted to all adult men and women without property qualifications. Before then, in the 18th and early 19th century, the franchise was severely restricted to only a tiny percentage of the electorate. And most White people’s lives in 19th century Britain was one of desperate poverty and misery. The average life expectancy in the early 19th century was forty. Child labour was the norm, with small children working down the mines. He gives examples of the long hours one seven or eight year old child worked in total darkness operating the ventilation shutters in the pits, and of a mine disaster where flooding killed both adults and children. But the anti-slavery movement was strong amongst the British people as a whole and particularly among the working class. He also points out that almost all civilisations accepted the existence of slavery, and that the anomaly isn’t British and European slavery, but how the British and the West abolished it.
Geopolitical Dangers
He also argues that the decolonisation movement is dangerous on a geopolitical level. The book presents statistics that show that 47 per cent of Africans believe that colonialism benefited their countries, a higher percentage than westerners. However, slavery and colonialism are used by extremely corrupt African politicians to explain their countries poor performance rather than in the massive greed of the kleptocrats running them. One of these was James Ibori, the governor of one of the Nigerian states, who stole over $100 million but was lauded by his admirers as a great patriot. But other states, such as Russia and China, are weaponising Western guilt as part of their own foreign policies against the West. China has particularly attacked the West as racist and White supremacist for opposing the Great Chinese Dream. This includes further commercial penetration into Africa, which has alarmed some observers as a new form of colonialism.
Nations are bound together by their common histories, and the attack on the West’s history as one of shameful exploitation is designed to stop America and its allies exercising any kind of global dominance. But this retreat from a unipolar world will make international politics much more cut-throat. The state of international relations before the rise of America following the Second World War was one of competing empires which attacked and preyed on the weak. Following the Second World War, America set up a number of international bodies to protect and extend the liberal international order. This included western Europe against the Soviet bloc and Japan in Asia. The result has been that the percentage of the world’s population in desperate poverty has declined from 40 per cent to 10 per cent. He recognises that America’s position as the world’s policeman hasn’t been free from terrible mistakes, but argues that without the security afforded by America international affairs will revert to what they were before as nations compete ruthlessly for resources. He also criticises the various anti-colonialist intellectuals who were all too ready to attack the west, but said nothing about rival empires that were just as brutal or even worse. Like Edward Said, who didn’t criticise Russia, China or the Ottoman Empire, whose Barbary pirates also enslaved White Europeans. Said claimed he didn’t have to. As a Palestinian he was quite comfortable in an eastern milieu, which means that there is a shocking bias and one-sidedness in his critique of imperialism.
Decolonisation Mandatory University Policy
Despite these objections, decolonisation has become a mandatory policy across the university sector. It is demanded and enforced by the Equalities and Human Rights Commission, Universities UK and the Race Equality Charter as well as the Universities and Colleges Union. And it’s extremely authoritarian. Students in some universities are required to attend compulsory courses on anti-racism. This is not the kind of anti-racism which most people grew up with in the 1970s, when Dr Luther King called on us to judge men by their character, not their colour. If a student responds to the questions presented to him or her on questionnaires devised by the activists with slogans like ‘I believe in one race – the human race’, she or he will get a lecture on how this is itself racist and people of different races need to be treated differently according to their culture and background. Ditto if you’re a believer in meritocracy, in which the best people for a job should get it regardless of their colour. In fact Thomas Sowell has shown that sheer commercial necessity has frequently acted against institutional racism. Despite legislation in apartheid South Africa banning Blacks from certain jobs, some employers nevertheless sought to circumvent it to employ Black workers, simply because it made commercial sense. The activists are also vindictive and highly authoritarian. These course will also ask their White students how guilty they are and openly encourage such feelings as part of an indoctrination campaign to turn them into ‘allies’ concerned to make a fairer Britain for Blacks and other ethnic minorities. Microaggressions are a part of this programme in some universities. These are gestures or body language that suggest hostility on someone’s part, even if no such hostility is openly expressed. Not sharing a lift with a personal of colour is one such microaggression, as is lifting your eyebrows if a Black person enters the room. These gestures are deemed racist if they are perceived as such by another, regardless of what was meant by whoever performed them. One university department set up a group of seven young spies to monitor and report on students and staff committing such microaggressions. It’s been said before, but this is totalitarian with a distinctly Maoist tinge. You are under authoritarian surveillance with people spying on you, and you must confess your guilt, just as Mao forced ordinary Chinese to do during his wretched struggle sessions.
Stokes has no time for racism, but sees the decolonisation movement as dangerous, not least because it attacks the principles of equality, rationality and the rule of law that have been at the heart of Western society and its success since the Enlightenment. These are values that need to be defended, especially given the global threat of Russia and China. The movement is also causing social division in the West. Polls show that the upper middle classes in America are far more optimistic about the values of diversity than most Blacks, and have an increasing contempt for the White working class. These last are especially the people who voted for Trump in the US and Brexit in Britain, which Stokes denies was primarily racist. They are the people one American politico called ‘semi-fascists’. This attack on the working class also affects Stokes himself, as he states that he grew up in urban poverty in London after his father’s suicide in Canada. But Stokes doubts that the decolonisation movement will get very far outside circles like the BBC and the universities.
Woke Capitalism
As for woke capitalism, the book argues that this is an attempt to prevent criticisms that a corporation is racist or otherwise exploitative, and so a form of virtue signalling and political Danegeld. Even when that corporation is otherwise so, as in the case of those multinational companies that have been accused of using slave labour in China. There is also a political aspect to it. Woke capitalism does not challenge the class structure of society or the nature of capitalism itself. It merely wants better representation of Blacks and people of colour through affirmative action, but does not want to challenge more concrete factors that are holding people from working class backgrounds back. And affirmative action may be a real danger in promoting people because of their colour rather than their ability. If this is done, then it could mean a loss of efficiency and performance in industry, and is actually dangerous in medicine. This aspect of woke capitalism, as something that seems left but actually isn’t, sounds correct. It certainly seems like the reason Starmer has loudly embraced a new set of policies that will supposedly attack British institutional racism and make sure Blacks and Asians get high positions. While not doing anything for the working class as such.
Criticisms
The book’s certainly thorough in its attack on the academic decolonisation movements and its allied campaigns in industry and geopolitics. It’s also going to be controversial. Some may take issue with the reliability of the statistics used, such as the Labour politicos who howled loudly at the last government report. It also has a rosy-eyed view of America as the world’s policeman. America was responsible for some horrific atrocities through supporting genuinely fascist regimes in countries like South America. And the regimes it overthrew as part of its campaign to promote international capitalism were often just left-wing, not Marxist. President Benitez of Guatemala was a democratic socialist, not a commie as he was painted, when he was overthrown in the 1950s. Similarly, the president of Guyana who was also overthrown in an American led coup was a liberal. The Iraq invasion wasn’t launched primarily to give the Iraqi people their freedom from Saddam Hussein’s tyranny, but to loot their oil and state industries, as Greg Palast shows in his book Armed Madhouse. And Henry Kissinger, who died a few days ago, was a monster responsible for death, torture and suffering on a global scale.
And while it has to be admitted that capitalism has been successful in raising the world’s people out of poverty, globalisation and neoliberalism have had the opposite effect. Ordinary working people across the world have become poorer as elites have become richer, resulting in social unrest and a destabilisation of international relations.
Conclusion
But this doesn’t alter the fact that Critical Race Theory, the ideology at the heart of the Black Lives Matter and decolonisation movements is a malign, racist, anti-White ideology which ignores the material reasons for poverty and inequality in its pursuit of systemic White racism and has a very skewed, bias view of history. If we are to build a genuinely fair and non-racist society, then it needs to be tackled at every level. Including the universities, where it is actively preventing White working class students from having access to a mechanism that has historically allowed the poor social and economic advancement.
I don’t know if you’ve seen the news either on the TV or on the internet, but the hooligan element have kicked off against the police at the Cenotaph. These are the ‘patriot’s the New Culture Forum were defending against the terrible smears of GB News and the lamestream press of fascists. It seems they tried to break through the gate in the railing surrounding the monument. London’s finest tried to stop them, and so they started attacking the cops waving England flags and chanting ‘England till I die.’ What a revoltin’ development, as the Fantastic Four’s Benjamin J. Grimm, your ever-lovin’ Thing, used to say.
Remember: in this instance it ain’t the pro-Palestine peeps causing trouble.
Our favourite internet non-historian has put up a video about two conspiracy theories that have started circulating. He acknowledges that one of the pro-Palestine marches isn’t going anywhere near the Cenotaph, but apparently the Friends of al-Aqsa Mosque have said that they will be marching from the South Bank to Downing Street. That route will take them past the Cenotaph. After the Cenotaph in Rochdale was vandalised with pro-Palestinian graffiti and posters, it seems there’s a rumour going round the Fascists that White people going to the Cenotaph will be attacked by Muslims. The Non-Historian suggests that someone is trying to cause trouble, probably as the step towards a race war, and that some Muslims want to play up to it.
Certainly the rhetoric from the right-wing media channels seem set on inflaming racial tension. The protests for Palestine are being presented very much as British Islam flexing its muscles against mainstream Britain and its secular values.
We must not allow such mischief-makers to divide us. People of all races and religions have come together to protest against the Israeli atrocities in Gaza – Muslims, Jews, Christians, people of no religion, socialists and other anti-war types. Like they did nearly two decades ago against Blair’s invasion of Iraq.
I’ve also come across a video about the reasons Muslims shouldn’t celebrate Armistice Day. Because it celebrates the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and the creation of the British Mandate in Palestine which eventually led to the foundation of the state of Israel. Except it isn’t a celebration of those events. It’s a commemoration of those who fell during the two World Wars for the motherland, and the hope that such carnage may never happen again.
And the British imperial forces included something like two and a half-million Indians, including Muslims.
The former Empire and Commonwealth Museum in Bristol one season put up a display honouring the non-White Commonwealth squaddies who served in the First World War. One of the exhibits on display was the diary of a Muslim trooper. And there was a banner which included lines from it where he described the carnage as like the Muslim version of Armageddon: a scene of apocalyptic mass death.
Remembrance Sunday commemorates all the dead of these and other wars, including those of our forces’ Muslim dead.
Let us remember their heroism and sacrifice as well, away from those who would divide Whites from Muslims.
Mary Lefkowitz, Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became An Excuse to Teach Myth as History (New York: Basic Books 1996)
Afrocentrism is the pseudo-academic discipline that claims that ancient Egypt was Black and the ultimate source of the cultures of Europe and Africa. One of its doctrines is that major figures in the ancient world, such as Cleopatra and Socrates, were Black and that the ancient Greeks stole Egypt’s advanced culture and civilisation and passed it off as their own. According to Afrocentrists such as Yosef A.A. Ben Yochannan, Aristotle accompanied Alexander the Great on his invasion of Egypt, where he plundered the great library of Alexandria before it was destroyed by Alexander. Lefkowitz is a professor of Classics and teaches Greek at Wellesley College in America. In this book she destroys these claims, and traces the Afrocentrist ideas of ancient Egyptian civilisation back to Black Freemasonry and the 18th century novel Sethos by the French writer, the Abbe Terrasson and their influence on George G.G. James’ 1950’s book, The Stolen Legacy.
Lefkowitz Not Motivated By Racism
Lefkowitz states very clearly in her book that she is not motivated by racism. She believes that Egypt was a Black civilisation, and in her epilogue suggests ways in which Egypt may have influenced ancient Greek culture that could be properly explored and researched by historians. Her objection to Afrocentrism comes from the fact that it is simply wrong. She also points out its dangers to history and society, as it posits different races can write their own history without concern for objective truth, provided that what they are taught serves an ideological function. In this instance, it’s the promotion of Black pride and achievement. But she points out that the same utilitarian approach to history can be used by other people, whose aims the Afrocentrists would definitely not approve of. And teaching such false doctrines also isolates its students in a ghetto of false knowledge away from the mainstream. Needless to say, her critics claimed she was acting out of some kind of racist motive. Despite being Jewish, she was an Aryan supremacist and even part of a ‘Jewish onslaught’.
Lefkowitz states she had no idea of the existence of Afrocentrism until one of its leading academics came to speak at her college. He was billed as an Egyptologist despite having done no proper Egyptological research. When it came to questions, she challenged one of his assertions by asking him how Aristotle could possible have looted the great library of Alexandria, when Aristotle didn’t accompany Alexander on his expeditions outside Greece and the library was built several years after Aristotle’s death.
Cleopatra, Socrates and North African Peoples Not Black
The book also tackles the similar ahistorical claims that Socrates and Cleopatra were Black, as were the inhabitants of North Africa including the Carthaginian general Hannibal, that the Greek city states were founded by the ancient Egyptians, who had invaded the country c. 750. No author actually describes Socrates as Black, and the only times he had travelled outside Athens was when he was part of the army in its wars with other Greek city states. The only evidence that he had Black ancestry were jokes by his students and opponents that he had satyr’s ears, a snub nose, big nostrils and a wide mouth. Yes, the Greeks did depict Black Africans as having snub noses, big nostrils and wide mouths, but so did the paint many Greeks.
Cleopatra was a Ptolemy, descended from one of Alexander’s generals, who seized the Egyptian throne. They took up the Egyptian custom of marrying their sisters. When they didn’t do this, they married other Greeks. Cleopatra’s lineage is thus reasonably well-known, except for the identity of her grandmother. She may well have been Black, except no-one mentions that she was. This contrasts with Didyme, a Nubian woman, who was taken as a concubine by one of her ancestors, but whose child, if she had one, did not inherit the throne. The Greeks were keenly sensitive to difference, and it Cleopatra’s gran had been Black, it would have been remarked upon.
As for the inhabitants of North Africa, the Berbers, they are lighter skinned than sub-Saharan Africans and the Libyans, as they were called by the Egyptians, were portrayed as such in ancient Egyptian art. Carthage was a Phoenician colony. The Phoenicians were a Semitic people from what is now Syria and Lebanon. They were not Black, and neither was Hannibal. One of the founders of one of the Greek city states, Cadmus, was also a Phoenician and so also not Black as claimed by the Afrocentrists. The legendary founders of many of the Greek states did come from Egypt, and were described as dark-skinned, as claimed by the Afrocentrists, but they were Greeks who had fled there a generation or so previously. There is no material evidence for an Egyptian invasion of Greece, but there is plenty of evidence for a Greek presence in the Nile delta from pieces of mosaic.
Ancient Greek Beliefs of the Egyptian Basis of Their Culture
The idea that ancient Egypt was a Black civilisation was held by the Black Masonic organisations that emerged in America. But they took their idea of the civilisation from very dated and outmoded accounts by European writers before Napoleon’s invasion and archaeological expedition started proper, scientific research. Their ideas of ancient Egypt were based on the description of the country by the pioneering Greek historians, Herodotus and Diodorus of Sicily. She states that Herodotus is generally accurate in what he says about Egypt, but there are instances where he is profoundly mistaken, particularly in matters of religion. The Greeks believed the Egyptians had secret mystery cults, whose members had to be initiated, like theirs. But there were no such cults. The confusion came from the ancient Egyptian priests having to be initiated, but the cults themselves were public. The Greeks also associated their gods with those of Egypt on superficial similarities. The Greek goddess Demeter was identified with Isis partly because the worship of both goddesses included processions of women bearing model phalluses.
Both Herodotus and Diodorus took care to question the Egyptian priests themselves. However, this must have been through interpreters as neither could speak or write Egyptian, and so could and did not consult the civilisation’s ancient documents and literature. The Greeks immensely respected Egypt because of its antiquity, and were keen to associate themselves with the older culture. And the Egyptians on their side were willing to confirm this belief. This may partly have been a strategy for maintaining national pride, particularly after their conquest by the Greeks. A similar tactic was used by the Alexandrian Jewish writers Artapanus and Aristobulos, who also claimed that the Jews were the ultimate source of Greek civilisation, so that it was said that Plato’s Republic was simply Moses in Attic Greek. They were wrong, and are now almost forgotten. Why should the similar claims made by the Egyptians be any different?
Black Freemasonry and 18th Century Fiction
Black Freemasonry’s idea of the sophistication of Egyptian civilisation was shared with that of the White Freemasons. During the 18th century it was heavily influenced by the Abbe Terrasson’s novel. This describes how its hero, Sethos, was initiated into the worship of Osiris, Isis and Horus in a huge pyramid, and led to the underground city in which the religion’s priests dwelt. The description of the temple above ground is that of an idealised French university, with lecture halls, an art gallery, a music gallery, research laboratories and a zoo. The initiation ceremony described in the book was adapted and taken over by Masonic lodges in Austria and elsewhere, and influenced the plot and setting of Mozart’s opera, the Magic Flute. The difference between the White and Black Freemasons was that the Whites believed, despite Herodotus, that the Egyptians were White.
Lefkowitz deals with the claim that Europeans rejected the idea of Egypt as the foundation of their culture through ancient Greece because of growing racial prejudice in the 19th century. In fact, European enthusiasm for ancient Egypt remained strong, as shown in the massive popularity of operas set there, such as Verdi’s Aida. One of these, Thamos, was about the love affair between the Pharaoh and a Nubian woman, showing how little fears of racial intermixing affected the popularity of these works. What caused Europeans to become sceptical of Egypt as the foundation of their own culture was the findings of Egyptologists and linguists that showed how different Greek and Egyptian cultures really were.
George G.G. James and The Stolen Legacy
The rising Black liberation of movements of the 19th and 20th century nevertheless held onto the claim that Egypt was the source of White culture, leading to the emergence of the claim that the Greeks had stolen it from the Egyptians. Marcus Garvey, the founder and head of the United Negro Improvement Association, claimed this had happened, but didn’t explain how. It was George G.G. James, a professor of Greek at one of the Black colleges, who supplied the details in his influential book, the Stolen Legacy, of 1954. Apart from claiming that Aristotle and Alexander had looted and destroyed the great library of Alexander, with Aristotle passing off the books he had stolen as his own, James made a number of other claims that are also simply wrong. For example, he claimed that Aristotle’s On The Soul was based on the Egyptian Book of the Dead. But On The Soul is a rational examination of the concept of the soul. The Book of the Dead, or to give it it’s Egyptian title, The Book of Going Forth by Day, is a collection of spells for the deceased to use in order to overcome that obstacles they will find in their journey to the Field of Reeds, the Egyptian paradise, in the afterlife. The two have precious little in common. Many of the supposed similarities between ancient Greek texts and that of Egypt can be explained as simply explorations of similar themes, or based on earlier accounts of Egypt so that the authors of the later works need never have been to the country, let alone been Egyptians themselves. James’ book was rediscovered and republished in the 1980s by Ben Yochannan, and it is suggested that there are 500,000 copies circulating by the time Lefkowitz wrote her book.
In her epilogue Lefkowitz also describes the criticism she faced when the book was published, and answers it, often pointing to an earlier book she co-writer that attacked Bernal’s Black Athena. Bernal took over some of the mistakes of the earlier Afrocentrists while adding a few of his own. He claims that some Greek terms were loan words from ancient Egyptian. Thus, the Greek word bia, meaning force, is supposedly taken from the Egyptian word for soul, ba. Except that scholars of ancient Egyptian state it isn’t, and that there are very few Egyptian loanwords in ancient Greek.
Lefkowitz and Stephen Howe’s Attacks on Afrocentrism
The book predates Stephen Howe’s Afrocentrism, which was published by Verso in 1998. Howe’s book deals with the origins of Afrocentrism more widely in Ethiopianism and pan-Africanism and its similarly mistaken views of the origins of Black African culture in ancient Egypt, as well as the idea that Blacks were the first people in Britain, Europe, China, Japan, Vietnam and the New World, as well as its connections to Black radicalism and nationalism in the 60s and 70s. Lefkowitz deals exclusively with the origin of its claim that ancient Greece was founded on stolen Egyptian culture. In her epilogue, Lefkowitz states that there may well be instances where Egypt influenced ancient Greece, as in its early art, but such influences do not mean that the Greeks stole or appropriated from the neighbours across the Med.
Afrocentrism’s Influence on Black Historiography
Apart from its specific concentration on Afrocentrism, Lefkowitz and Howe are also important for showing the possible source of other false historical claims made by Black writers. These are that various scientific and technological inventions and discoveries were made by Blacks when they weren’t; that various British historical figures were also Black, when they were definitely White, and that Stonehenge was really built by Blacks. The claims that the ancient Britons were Black and that Stonehenge was built by Blacks ultimately derive from Afrocentrism, and based on discredited 19th century White European authors, although given some support from the dark colouring of Cheddar Man.
Afrocentrism seems to have passed on to Black History the attitude that Blacks were responsible for many of the technological advances of the West, including smart phone and helicopters, when they were not, and that they have been robbed of their due credit. It is also responsible for the disregard for the accepted rules of historical research, in that racial pride and social utility is put before historical truth, and that various historical figures may be claimed for Black identity on the flimsiest of evidence.
This is a danger to historical research as a whole, and also to Black History itself. Properly researched Black History has produced some surprising and inspiring figures, such as genuine Black and Asian politicians, medical men and women and lawyers, for example, that predate the wave of new Black British politicos like Diane Abbott in the 1980s. There is a danger that the false claims made by Black Historians and Afrocentrists will lead to unwarranted scepticism towards Black History’s findings and its status as a proper academic discipline as a whole.
Afrocentrism’s Similarity to Fascist Attitudes to History
The situation has become worse through the expansion of identity politics, or IdPol as some of its sceptics are calling it and the pernicious influence of Postmodernism. Based on Foucault, this rejects notions of progress and scientific and historical truth for social utility, the influence of language and power and oppression narratives. The result can include the call for western science to be removed from its place at the centre of scientific discussion and research, in order to include and incorporate the prescientific knowledges of indigenous peoples. The problem with this, as Lefkowitz hints, is that the Nazis and the Fascists also believed in racial science. Einstein’s Theory of Relativity was rejected because Einstein was Jewish. And they believed that members of the Volk or the nation would automatically and instinctively recognise the truth of their doctrines simply through their shared membership of the race or nation. This is different from saying, as the Afrocentrists claimed, that Lefkowitz was comparing their doctrines to Holocaust denial. But the racial assumptions regarding history and its uses are the same between postmodern Afrocentrists and Nazis.
Conclusion
Lefkowitz is keen to promote the proper investigation of ancient Greece and Egypt by the public, and Egypt is a fascinating civilisation regardless of what one believes the colour of their skin was. But Afrocentrism is an obstacle to gaining such knowledge and needs to be rejected. As does its influence on Black History, so we can gain a proper knowledge of Black heritage and achievement.
This is a short posted on YouTube by M0hammedadwash3re16. It’s a clip of a speech by Israel’s Chief Rabbi saying that a negro needs to have two White parents and an apparent comparison to monkeys. I don’t know if it’s quite what the reverend gentleman quite said or intended, as it’s clearly been extracted from a longer speech. I can, unfortunately, quite believe that the Chief Rabbi said it and meant it just as it appears. Tony Greenstein on his blog and broadcasters like Abbie Martin on Tele Sur have described the vicious racism in sections of Israeli society. The Mizrahim, the Arabicised Jews of the Middle East, were sneered at by the Israelis as ‘human dust’ and racial inferiors, and only allowed to immigrate because the state needed their labour. The Egyptian comedian Bassem Yousuf in an interview described the Israeli state’s sterilisation of Jewish Ethiopian women. And there have been TV reports of attacks on Black Israelis and the vilification of Black migrants as ‘infiltrators’. A few years ago, the Sephardic rabbi, Ovadia Yusuf, got into the pages of Private Eye. He had claimed that the Holocaust was the Ashkenazi getting their just desserts for their sins under the law of karma. Judaism has no such concept, and this was just an expression of vile bigotry. More recently, Yusuf denounced Christianity. This is the side of Israel that is not covered by mainstream news outlets, and some of the very worst racists are, unsurprisingly, in Likud and its coalition parties. Very many Jews view these racists as a disgrace, especially as American Jews strongly supported the Black civil rights struggle. But discussion of Israeli racism is naturally banned by those pro-Israel organisations that smear even the mildest criticism of the country as ‘anti-Semitism’, and wish to promote the image that the Israel-Palestinian conflict is one of a good, ,democratic, western-style state against evil Arab Muslims.
Oh, how terrible for her to make such a horrendous comparison, even though it’s basically correct. As Tony Greenstein has shown again and again, the policy of the Israeli state towards the Palestinians is like that of Hitler’s infernal bunch towards the Jews before the Final Solution of 1942.
GB News, the broadcaster with only two biases – right and far right, put up a video a couple of days ago in which one of their anchors talked to their ‘investigative journalist’. He had found that a councillor in one of the northern towns, Hadram Bahram, had put up a piece on social media comparing Israel to the Nazis. This included a section where she put Nazi policies parallel to Israeli policies. Thus
NazisIsrael
Founded on Aryan supremacy Founded on Jewish Supremacy
Put racial undesirables in ghettoes Put racial undesirables in ghettoes
They then stated that Councillor Bahram’s comparison violated the definition of anti-Semitism the Labour party had signed up to. This is the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition, which states in its examples of anti-Semitism that it may be anti-Semitic to compare Jews with Nazis in certain circumstances. The definition was foisted on the party by a panicked Jewish establishment and the political right, because Jeremy Corbyn was a critic of Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. The definition has widely been attacked, including by senior British judges and lawyers, who incidentally include Jews, as dangerously threatening free speech. One of those,, who has made this criticism, is the author of the definition, Mr. Stern. The only definition of anti-Semitism which, in my opinion, has any value, is that of the Bund Antisemiten, the 19th century German League of Anti-Semites. They declared it was hatred of Jews as Jews, regardless of religion or biology.
And yes, the Israeli state has acted like the Nazis. It began with the Nakba in which Palestinians in towns and villages across the country were shot and massacred, including women bring gifts of rice and people in mosques. It bulldozes Arab settlements and relocates their people in order for Jewish settlements to be built on their sites. Jewish settlers will raid and physically assault Palestinians. It is an apartheid state where Palestinians must live apart from Jews, take different roads to work in Israel and are paid less. And the White, European Israeli settlers brought with them similar ideas of White racial supremacy. The indigenous Arabic-speaking Jewish peoples of the Middle East, the Mizrahim, were sneered at as ‘human dust’ and given the very worst jobs and educated in separate schools to the dominant Ashkenazy Jews. There is a short video on YouTube by the Egyptian comedian Bassem Yousef, in which he discusses the Israeli state’s sterilisation of Ethiopian women, who had emigrated to Israel. Mass sterilisation of racial undesirables? Now I wonder which regime ruling Germany between 1932 and 1945 did that? Yousef compares this to the extermination of the Amerindians in America and Aboriginal Australians in Oz. He states that the Arabs just want to be treated as human beings.
Quite so. And the Israeli state isn’t.
And let’s not forget, one of Israel’s most senior generals said after one war, ‘Why should it only be Jews who have Holocausts?’
The Israeli state is not forcing Arabs into gas chambers, but in very many respects they are very much like the Nazis, right down to objecting to racial intermarriage. In this case it’s between Jews and Arabs, rather than between Aryans and Jews. Or for that matter, between Blacks and Whites.
This is all part of the ongoing campaign to smear pro-Palestine protesters as Muslim terrorists and anti-Semites.And also present Israel as a humane, western civilisation against Muslim barbarism.
Councillor Bahram is substantially correct, and should not be punished for saying so. But perhaps she’ll be purged by Starmer in order to appease his Likudnik backers and groups within the party like Labour Friends of Israel and the Jewish Labour movement.
Providing she has said nothing genuinely anti-Semitic, I stand in solidarity with her and urge her not to be cowed. Jews, Muslims and ordinary Brits are standing together for the Palestinians, and we must not be divided by right-wing imperialist and Likudnik lies.
I’ve posted up a number of pieces attacking Afrocentrism and its whacky and ahistorical ideas. Afrocentrism has its roots in 19th century Black American authors, who believed that ancient Egypt was a Black civilisation. I don’t think at the time this was an unreasonable claim. Watching some of the videos by Afrocentrists on YouTube, it appears they got some of their ideas from contemporary scholarly writings. One such video began by asserting that Champollion, the French linguist who finally cracked Egyptian hieroglyphics, believed they were a Black civilisation. The ancient Egyptians in their art clearly portrayed themselves as darker than Europeans, but not as dark as the Nubians, whom they depicted as really Black. Where it becomes unreasonable is when it asserts that ancient Egypt was the fount and source of Greek, and hence western civilisation, and claims that Black people were the original inhabitants of Britain, America, Vietnam, China, Japan and elsewhere.
There’s also a very strong belief in the Black community that Jesus must have been Black. At one level it’s kind of natural, as White Europeans have seen him in the terms of their own race, and portrayed him as White. He wasn’t either, of course. The Jews were a Semitic people, related to the Arabs and other related peoples in the Middle East, such as the Assyrians and Aramaeans. Hebrew is very closely related to Ugaritic, the ancient language of Byblos now in Syria. Christ would have had an olive complexion like these people, rather than that of a sub-Saharan Black African.
But there are rumours that a Black director is planning a film about Christ, in which not only Our Lord but everyone in Jerusalem will be Black. I don’t know if this will include Pontius Pilate, who was a White Roman. This seems to follow Black racial doctrine rather than historical reality.
But the desire to promote all the Biblical figures as Black Africans seems to have gone a step further. I found a video yesterday of a group of Black people discussing a video they had found claiming that the various locations in the Bible were really in sub-Saharan Africa. More specifically, the video they were discussing claimed it was on the border with Namibia.
This is bonkers, but no more bonkers than Ahmed Osman, who claimed that the Bible had really been set in Saudi Arabia, or the 19th century British author E. Cummings Beaumont. Beaumont had decided that the various states and civilisations in the Bible couldn’t possibly be those of the modern countries of Egypt, Palestine and Greece. No! Those ancient nations could only have been located in modern Britain. I found a copy of his book once in one of the secondhand bookshops in Cheltenham, and haven’t been able to find it since. It’s a classic of barmy literature.
Behind these claims are ethno-nationalism and the idea that only one’s own people are sufficiently great and noble enough to have been these great nations. In the case of Afrocentrism, it’s partly a backlash against the extremely low view of Black people as a race and their civilisations and cultures up to the middle of the 20th century. The Black American founders of Afrocentrism wrote their books in order to show that Blacks were also capable of creating great civilisations like ancient Egypt, and were therefore the equal of Whites. It’s an entirely noble motive, but has led to the appropriation of the history and achievements of other cultures. Early this week I found a video by Black American conservative Amala Ekponobi in which she put right a video by a smug American Black girls claiming that the Amerindians were wrong and Blacks were the first people in America.
There is a problem in that in America, Afrocentrism has entered the academy with universities teaching courses on it. And it seems to be influencing Black history over here, as when a book on Black British history claimed that Black people had built Stonehenge.
This needs to be stopped, and genuine history taught instead of racial, and racist myths.
The spectre of Cheddar’s oldest known inhabitant rose again last week in piece of controversy over the Beeb’s Horrible Histories children’s programme. This had included him as part of a segment claiming that Black people had always been part of British history. This has been widely attacked, particularly by one YouTuber who put up an entire video rebutting the programme on his ‘Survive the Jive’ channel. He then appeared with another historian on the New Culture Forum’s ‘Deprogrammed’ series on their channel.
Cheddar man was a late Palaeolithic skeleton found in the Somerset village of that name in 1903. The Concise Encyclopaedia of Archaeology, edited by Leonard Cottrell, and published in 1960, says this in its entry about him:
‘The complete skeleton of Cheddar Man is to be seen in the Cheddar Gorge in England. It is mounted to stand upright in a small museum at the entrance to Gough’s Cave.
The cave has been known since 1877. In 1903 the skeleton was found, together with flint implements and an antler baton-de-commandement, a tool now thought to be a shaft-straightener. Further excavations in 1927 produced some hundreds more flint tools, another shaft-straightener, bone awls, part of an ivory rod, and perforated shells and teeth that could have been threaded as necklaces. Some other human remains also came to light.
The caves in the sides of the Cheddar Gorge were hollowed out in the soft limestone by water. Several of them were inhabited by bands of humans towards the end of the Palaeolithic period. The population of Britain at the time was Homo Sapiens, and tools found with skeletons show that there was close cultural contact with France. The English Channel was not then formed, and once the British ice that corresponded to the Wurm glaciataion had retreated, it was possible for Upper Palaeolithic cultures to develop in Britain.
In Gough’s Cave, the flint tools were of the types associated with the Creswellian culture, as is shown by the small battered-back blades used as knives. This is a pale reflection of the splendid French Aurignacian of the Upper Palaeolithic.
Magdalenian influence is shown by the presence of the shaft-straighteners.
The bones of Cheddar Man were found near the entrance of the cave, for, with little means of artificial light at his disposal, Palaeolithic man was forced to live within the range of daylight. The spot where they were dug up is to be seen on the left-hand side in a grotto below the present ground level.’ (p. 130).
A few years ago a group of three scientists used DNA sequencing and forensic anthropology to reconstruct Cheddar Man’s face and complexion. This was a major advance at the time showing that surviving DNA from such ancient remains could be used to reconstruct the person’s original appearance. This caused astonishment, as from this it appeared that Cheddar Man was dark skinned, albeit with blue eyes. Scientists were amazed that Britons had retained a dark complexion at this late stage of human prehistory. Various anti-racist commenters stated that it gave a space for a Black presence in Britishness. And this is where it becomes controversial.
Firstly, one of the scientists involved retracted the reconstruction and claimed it was impossible to know from the DNA what the skeleton’s original complexion was. This was printed in New Scientist. The panel on ‘Deprogrammed’ did not mention this, but stated that the reconstruction was also matched and influenced by similar reconstructions from the Netherlands and elsewhere. also pointed out that the absence of White DNA does not automatically mean that Cheddar Man had dark skin. East Asians don’t have the same genes for pale skin as Europeans, but nevertheless the peoples of many of these countries have them because they have a different set of genes that do this. And the depth of Cheddar Man’s dark colouring seems to have been influenced by one of the scientists’ own pro-EU and anti-racist beliefs. It seems that there was a range of possibilities how dark this individual was. But this scientist, according to the Forum and its guests, deliberately made him as dark as possible, saying something about attacking Brexit and ‘white supremacy’. And when the reconstruction was photographed, it was deliberately made even darker.
Horrible Histories conflated a dark complexion with explicitly African ancestry. They stated that he was Black, which has a very specific definition in British law. It refers to people of specifically African ancestry, and excludes others, who may be similarly dark-skinned, such as the Tamils from southern India. And all the modern Blacks whose images appeared at the end of the Horrible Histories segment were all of West Indian and Black African ancestry. This, the Deprogrammed panel considered, was deliberately misleading, as it gave the impression that people of specifically African ancestry were present that far back in the Stone Age. They also considered it problematic because in trying to show that the peoples of the British Isles were or included Black people originally, it conceded ground to their opponents in viewing historical priority as a crucial, defining factor in Britishness. In fact, they said, there was nothing wrong in later, recent immigrants being regarded as British without projecting that presence far back into history.
There was much more in the discussion, which stated that the dark-skinned Palaeolithic peoples then gave way themselves to an influx of further, light-skinned people from the Ukraine, and 90 per cent of the Palaeolithic population was replaced within a space of two centuries. They found this difficult to imagine without ‘something terrible’ happening. By which they mean some kind of genocide or war of extermination. They commented on the irony that the new, 21st century scientific techniques were bringing back 19th century models. Which meant the Diffusionist ideas of 19th century archaeologists and anthropologists. These considered that human prehistory had seen a series of invasions and colonisations as one group of early settlers came and conquered its predecessors before being supplanted by later arrivals in its turn. This idea was later rejected in the 20th century by the idea that the underlying populations did not change over time, but simply adopted new cultural trends. The ancient Brits who became the Beaker people were still genetically the people they had always been. It’s just that they accepted the package of Beaker culture that had reached Britain from Spain and north Africa. Now it seems this view is being challenged by DNA information showing that mass invasions and population replacement really had taken place.
I realise this came from the right-wing New Culture Forum, but it seems solid science to me. I don’t think there’s much controversy over the assertion that the very first Homo Sapiens colonists of Europe were dark-skinned. This occurred around 50,000 or so years ago, and I can remember reading decades ago that skeletons from this remote epoch were like those of Aboriginal Australians. At this period, European humans were more archaic and robust in their appearance, with pronounced brow ridges, than their fellows in Africa, who were much more gracile. But it does seem, if the NCF and its guests are to be believed, that liberal, anti-racist ideology had played a part in creating a possibly misleading reconstruction of Cheddar Man’s appearance and the Beeb had also been misleading in claiming that Cheddar Man had been Black.
Since the Second World War western archaeologists have been very keen to avoid nationalist ideologies influencing the reconstruction of the past, including the reconstruction of ancient humans from elsewhere in the world with European features. Early reconstructions of the Scythian skeletons from the Pazryk region of Siberia were originally given Caucasian features by the Russian forensic anthropologists who originally reconstructed them. But later examination and reconstruction has shown that they had, as might be expected, east Asian features.
Now it seems that the racial bias has swung the other way so that scientists feel constrained to reconstruct ancient Europeans as dark as possible without considering this ideologically driven or racially biased.
Regardless of the racial issues involved, Cheddar Man is fascinating. Some of the other human remains that were found show signs of cannibalism. And the scientists who reconstructed his DNA also compared it with people in the village to see if he had any modern descendants. It turned out he did: the headmaster of the local school. His mother, however, strongly objected, wondering what people would think. And the people of the Palaeolithic have contributed to the appearance of modern Brits. Supposedly the genes for blue eyes come from them.
This is my response to the furore earlier this week about the claim made in the book, Brilliant Black British History, written by a Nigerian author and published by Bloomsbury, that Britain has always been a Black country, the first Brits were Black, and Stonehenge was built by Black people. A few years ago now archaeologists and DNA specialists provided some support for the assertion that the first Brits were Black when they analysed the DNA from Cheddar Man and concluded that he had black or dark coloured skin. However Cheddar Man dates from the Mesolithic, the period between the Palaeolithic or Old Stone Age and the Neolithic, or New Stone Age. During the Neolithic Europe and Britain were settled by White skinned farmers from Turkey and the Fertile Crescent, who entered the continent via two routes, one which went up through the Balkans and another which went across North Africa then up through Spain to Britain. Stonehenge was built by Bronze Age White farmers. Even the suggestion that Cheddar Man was Black isn’t as secure as it is sometimes claimed to be. One of the team that analysed the DNA later issued a retraction, stating that it was impossible to tell what skin colour he had.
It’s clear why such a pseudo-historical claims should be made by Black authors and appeal to a Black readership. Black Brits identify with Britain and wish to see themselves in its history. But the appropriation of White history like this seems to ignore real Black history and Black achievement. For example, in Africa there were the historic great civilisations of Aksum, Meroe, Nubia and the Swahili, as well as the great Muslim states of the savannah and west Africa. And Black West Indians have also achieved much since the abolition of slavery. In the first generation after abolition there were Black politicians in these countries’ legislatures, elected by Black voters to defend them against the White planters.
Behind the claim that Black people built Stonehenge are various Afrocentric claims that are ultimately based on the theories of two 19th century White Brits, Gerald Massey and David Macritchie. Massey was a campaigner for Spiritualism and Christian Socialism, and was possibly the model for the hero of the novel Felix Holt: The Radical. He believed that Britain had originally been colonised by the Egyptians, who were responsible for the construction of Stonehenge and other monuments.
David Macritchie, on the other hand, believed that the first peoples of the British Isles were what he called ‘melanochroi’, a mixture of White Europeans and a dark-skinned people like Aboriginal Australians. The Black population was reinforced by waves of other dark-skinned invaders, such as Black Huns and Black Danes. It was this Black population that built the dolmens, henges and other Neolithic monuments. Other White writers claimed that the Inuit and the Chinese were originally Black. These theories were further elaborated in 1993 by Ahmed and Ibrahim Ali in their book, The Black Celts. They argued that before the Celts arrived to colonise Britain, the peoples of the British Isles were Blacks descended from the people of Ethiopia, who had moved into Europe via North Africa and Spain. This has been further developed by Indus Khamit Kush, who has claimed that Black Africans were the original Chinese, Japanese, Malays, Vietnamese, Thai, Greeks, Romans, Spanish, British and Americans. This last claim is particular noxious. There was a young Black woman complaining on social media a few months ago that Indigenous Americans were as racist as Whites. She’d been talking to one of them, and was outraged that they didn’t accept that Blacks were the original population of America. I can’t think of anything more likely to cause offence than telling a member of the American First Nations, who have suffered persecution, dispossession and displacement, that they weren’t the first people in America.
Some of the more extreme claims of the Afro-Centrists are extremely similar to those made by White supremacists. Regarding primacy as the first people of a nation or country, there’s more than a little similarity between these claims and a book published in 1978 in Paraguay, then under a quasi-Fascist dictatorship, that the Ache Indian people were descended from the Vikings. In the 19th or early 20th century, a German anthropologist claimed that one of the South African peoples must have been descended from the Vandals, the Germanic people that conquered and colonised part of Roman North Africa. You can go on, and add the way great North American Indian monuments, like the Serpent Mound in Ohio, were attributed to any number of civilisations except the Indians themselves. Or how the fortress at Great Zimbabwe was attributed to the Chinese and Arabs, rather than the local Shona people, who really built it.
And the Afrocentrist claim that Blacks have a unique, spiritual connection with the universe which grants them greater insight and intellectual abilities also seems to me to be very similar to some of the bizarre theories of the Germanic Neo-Pagan cults in late 19th and early 20th century Germany and Austria. One of these claimed that the Aryans had originally possessed ‘radio-telepathic’ organs, but these had been lost through interbreeding with the untermenschen.
Pseudo-historical claims that Blacks really built Stonehenge look harmless and liberal, because they’re advanced in the cause of Black liberation. But behind them there’s a very nasty edifice of racist pseudo-history and scholarship that should not be touched by the mainstream press.
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