A response.

Posted: September 2010

A town up the road from me has been cited by a Sunday Times journalist as a pretty good litmus-test for racism.  If you scratch the surface of Lewes (a few miles north east of Brighton) it will ooze with racism – or so claims David James Smith who moved there from London in 2005 with his wife and four ‘mixed-race’ children.  Since it was published in The Sunday Times on August 8^th,  ‘England’s Green and Prejudiced Land’ has caused an outcry amongst Lewes residents and many, many others.  The magazine received so many letters that it commissioned a second article ‘Is the countryside a hotbed of racism?’.

To anyone interested in the content of my site, ‘England’s Green and Prejudiced Land’ and its reactions are worth a read thru.  The article perfectly illustrates the mindset of the modern-day, illiberal, intolerant anti-racist.  David James Smith’s account of the racist townsfolk of Lewes offers a crash course in how to view a strange new world (in this case a genteel country town) through that special all-seeing lens that only enlightened liberals possess (“It’s like going back to the 1950s” comments Smith).  And it’s a lens ready to magnify the slightest trace of racism or indeed anything that looks suspicious.  For Smith these are all unmistakable fragments of evidence which, when added together, simply affirm what he already knows to be true – ie that British society is racist to the core, especially in the white heartlands of a leafy country town.

Reminiscent of a movie screenplay that has cosmopolitan New Yorkers moving into a hickey small-minded town, Smith and his family somehow manage to move slap-bang next door to a ‘neo-Nazi’ (a BNP member, one of four living amidst Lewes’s population of 92 thousand).  In the screenplay this plot-point would no doubt take us quickly to a caucus of townsfolk, perhaps including the mayor or the chief of Police, with whom the neo-nazi is in cahoots.   But Smith has only reality with which to spin his tale of small-town racism.  Admittedly Lewes’s annual bonfire festivities throw him an easy ingredient that makes the place seem a bit spooky.  After pausing to note the tradition of anti-catholic bigotry, townsfolk dressing as pirates, soldiers, Zulus and shouting “burn him”, Smith propels us seamlessly onto his ‘bag it and tag it’ detective tour of racist experiences – the “microaggressions” - those little racist things that happen. 

His examples include one woman reassuring his wife that “there is no racism in Lewes” and another using the term “coloured” to describe black people.  But, as Smith puts it “events took a turn for the worse” when his youngest child Mackenzie complained that a friend had said he’d got “big nostrils”.  Another example followed when Mackenzie came home from primary school with news that a parent had confronted him for hurting her child.  Smith goes on to accuse teachers at the school – one had appeared to make fun of his daughter for her Afro hair-style.  Smith then accuses the headteacher for failing to explain to this teacher why this is racism.   We hear of “nigger” jokes in the playground of the towns “moribund” secondary school.  We hear that another of Smiths daughters has a friend who wants to nickname her “chocolate brown bear” and that words like “chinks”, “Pakis” and “Pikeys” are regularly used in the playground.  And there ends Smiths tour.  Drawn from five years of living in Lewes, this is his evidence.  Trouble is, if you’re singularly underwhelmed by this (as most readers appear to have been) then according to the enlightened anti-racist you just don’t get it, the inference being you too are infected by the racism of white dominated society.  

Smith’s evidence would be laughable, had it not been so contemptuous of the individuals he cites – especially of his children’s schools and teachers, all too easy to identify and who, professionally, are restricted from putting their version of events forward.   I think the most ironic aspect of England’s Green and Prejudiced Land is how blatantly prejudiced David James Smith has been.  Like a judge who already knows the accused is guilty, the only task has been to identify a series of ‘smoking-guns’ and, it would seem, bob’s your racist uncle (and he lives in Lewes!).   In this respect Smith runs up his colours when he unveils himself as a recent convert to Critical Race Theory (CRT) and its notion of racial “micro-aggression” endemic to white dominated societies.

Smiths encounter with Professor David Gillborn (a leading exponent of CRT) has influenced his whole interpretation of life in Lewes.  “Gillborn told me that our son was walking around with a bull’s-eye on his chest” reports Smith.  In short, a crash course in CRT has lent Smith’s  racialised hypersensitivity an academic seal of approval. Now he can scrutinise every social interaction his wife and children have with those hicky townsfolk for traces of racial “microagression”.   And he can now be absolutely certain that the educational attainment of black and mixed-race boys is stifled by white teachers who view black boys as troublesome and less able.  (see my review of Gillborn’s work here).    

I sympathise with Smith –if I had to hear a leading academic tell me my son was a walking target for an inherently racist system I’d be feeling, well, a little edgy to say the least.  Maybe I’d be scanning for microaggressions too?  After all, working class kids are constantly up against this sort of stereotyping.  But here’s the thing – in Britain, black pupils are dissproportionately working class and poor. And so its this category of boys, regardless of ethnicity, that do badly in school when compared to kids from higher income families.  In other words, racism may play a part but it should not be a default explanation.  For example, CRT pays no attention to what it must be like for black kids to learn that a ‘racist’ system will ensure their life-chances are limited.  Today, these demoralising messages emanate as much from anti-racism as they do from any direct encounter with racism itself. 

The black educationalist Tony Sewell works with African Caribbean boys and is all too aware of the consequences of the idea that racism (and, therefore, race) should limit life-chances.  He notes “the new force oppressing young black people is the notion of ‘blackness’ itself [ ] It’s a kind of badge of victimhood”.  For Sewell its not that racism has completely vanished – and black boys do get stereotyped - but these factors alone are not defeating black children.  This blow, argues Sewell, comes from a victim mentality that sees working hard as ‘acting white’.  No doubt with Gillborn in mind, Sewell puts it well when he says: “Liberal researchers have positioned black pupils on the spectrum of child abuse, in a world where adults can never be trusted”. 

Mackenszie will probably do fine – he isnt a poor, working class kid.  Lewes’s secondary school, Priory School, is far from “moribund”, its excellent.  If ‘race’ plays a negative hand to Mackenzie it’ll come in the form of a victim mentality inculcated by the erroneous brand of anti-racism so very succinctly served-up as enlightened truth by his father.