Brit(ish)

White supremacy is ever-present in British society. I’m not talking about hooded hillbillies in the Deep South burning crosses, or skinheads with Nazi tattoos – although they do exist – but the underlying ideology for a system where generations of people were conditioned to believe in the inferiority of non-white, non-Christian, non-Europeans. An empire was built on this idea; the enduring concept of ‘Western civilisation’ is an expression of this idea. It is not something that disappears overnight, especially when it has never actually been defeated or overthrown. You cannot get over a wrong without the wrong having been named, owned and acknowledged. You cannot change without articulating what needs changing.

As well as being wrong, the idea that there were no immigrants in the nostalgic Britain of old is also irrelevant, because while it claims to be about foreigners coming to the UK, it’s really about something else. The true purpose of modern claims about immigration is to create a scapegoat for society’s deeper, more intractable problems. Jewish refugees fleeing the Nazis were interned not when they first arrived in the 1930s, but in the summer of 1940, as France and the Low Countries fell to the Nazis and the prospect of invasion became real. ‘Civilization has shrunk,’ wrote Virginia Woolf on the eve of the war, capturing the fears about the decline of the British Empire and the nation’s sense of existential threat.¹⁴ In times of fear and suffering, people look for visible others to blame. So even though Enoch Powell was sacked from the Cabinet after his infamous ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, his language was echoed by Margaret Thatcher in 1978, when she told Granada Television’s World in Action that ‘this country might be rather swamped by people with a different culture’,¹⁵ and again by David Cameron in 2015, when he warned that Britain had to protect its borders amid the Syrian refugee crisis because ‘you have got a swarm of people coming across the Mediterranean’.

Whiteness has a history – it’s an identity that was invented in order to provide the superior identity to blackness’s inferior one. It’s an identity that continues to operate on a political and economic level in the UK, only without anyone acknowledging it.

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Whiteness has set white children up to believe in a complex web of interconnecting myths, the most pernicious of which is that a free market naturally results in white people taking their rightful place at the top. A world without this myth is a place where everyone knows they must compete with others on a meritocratic footing. This should be straightforward for anyone who believes in capitalism to understand. Ever since whiteness was invented, we have not had a free market. What we have had is a massive intervention in the market in favour of white people.

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White history is seen as ‘history’, black history is seen as ‘black history’ – a specialist subject for those who wish to opt out of the mainstream. It’s a subcategory, added to the syllabus in the interests of political correctness.