The one bit that has everyone in a stir comes from the guy in the suit, Historian David Starkey. About a minute & a quarter in he poetically describes why the rioters were of such a broad range of skin tones. “What’s happened is that the substantial segment of the ‘chavs’ that you [Owen Jones] wrote about have become black,” he explains. “The whites have become black.”
Yea. It’s racist as fuck. But, as a manner of speaking, he’s not saying something much different than what lots of people - black, white, Indian, whatever - say in their daily lives.
About two minutes into the conversation he talks about David Lammy, a Member of Parliament (MP) who is black. Starkey says that if you listened to Lammy on the radio, you’d think he was white. As someone regularly called “a well-spoken black man” by many a surprised black woman & an “oreo” by black peers throughout my adolescence, I can vouch that many of the same ideas behind Starkey’s point about Lammy & the ‘chavs’ are perpetuated among black people themselves. In fact, all Starkey is doing is calling Lammy an oreo.
Google the phrase “Real black man” & you get over 2 million results. I’m currently looking at a .pdf file titled ‘Obama and the Arithmetic of Racial Authenticity’ whose contents are as convoluted & misguided as the tittle suggests. All of these ideas have the same ingredients as Starkey’s statements. When you talk about a “real black man,” you’re talking about some conceptual “blackness” (a culture, which Starkey clarifies is what he means by ‘black’) that you want him to have on top of his literal “blackness” or skin color. To put it another way, Starkey could have just as coherently said “the blacks have become black,” where “blacks” & “black” refer to two separate things.
As the debate unfolds, Deda Say Mitchell, another panelist, says it’s inappropriate to talk about “black culture” as some monolithic set of norms. Blacks are so diverse & have so many different cultural behaviors that we should shift the dialogue to talking about “black cultures.” Great. She’s one pluralization less wrong. The problem here is actually one that’s frustrated me in discussions about culture, race, & ethnicity since high school. It’s not that we don’t have enough groupings of black people, it’s that we have those groupings at all.
The flaw is simple to expose: take two black people who come from different environments and have conflicting understandings of what it means to “really” be black, your entire paradigm is thrown off. It’s impossible to say that one’s definition of ‘black culture’ is more correct than the other. But rather than debating which one of them is really “black” (which anyone who says Starkey mischaracterizes ‘black culture(s)’ tacitly does), it’s simpler to realize the inanity of that entire way of speaking. As well-intentioned & uplifting as your ideas of ‘black culture(s)’ are, they’re never any less stereotypical or more “authentically” black than whatever it is Starkey meant. In truth, what you’re really talking about a set of environmental pressures that, as these riots made very clear, “whites” can react to in the same way that “blacks” do. The response isn’t “black” - it’s human.
So yes, Starkey’s statement was condescending & racist - but no more so than yours are when you talk about the qualities you want in a boyfriend or that one kid with the kinky hair & salmon colored polo that loves Phish. The definitions might be different, but the sentiment is the same.
Astaghfiru limomo. [MdG]
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