We need a reckoning with ‘anti-racism’

We have for years been told by the advocates of hyper-liberalism, and by their flaky enablers on the mainstream left, that being ‘anti-racist’ is simply about fairness and justice. They and their naive apologists have assured us that being anti-racist, or being woke, is just a matter of ‘being kind’ or being ‘on the right side of history’.

Ever since the dogmatic and belligerent side of wokery began to make itself evident, we have heard less of that argument. Not least because the full horror of hyper-liberalism’s consequences have become difficult to ignore or justify: the censoriousness, the intolerance, the misogyny, the rampant anti-Semitism. Above all, the fallout from wokery’s most sickly obsession – namely, that of race and its determination to separate people according to the colour of their skin – has been devastating.

There’s been a collective realisation over the past seven days in Britain that a doctrine that divides individuals into passive ethnic-minority victims and privileged white oppressors has now become both a seemingly legitimate mode of thinking and a tacit state policy. The events surrounding the death of Henry Nowak in Southampton last December were not only distressing on a human level, but alarming because it made clear how a diseased ideology had become a grim reality. A man was left to die, assumed guilty because he was white, while the man who was last week found guilty of his murder was presumed innocent because he wasn’t.

We’ve had intimations of how an approach derived from this Manichean thinking on race, and treating people differently according to this criterion, has enabled the spilling of blood. The cases of Southport murderer Axel Rudakubana, Nottingham killer Valdo Calocane and Manchester Arena terrorist Salman Abedi will be familiar to those who have been following this development. Fears about Rudakubana’s behaviour were dismissed by a mental-health caseworker as prejudiced. Calocane was not sectioned because of fears that young black men are overrepresented in custody. Abedi wasn’t stopped by a security guard who feared accusations of racial profiling. Nowak’s death was the dreadful but logical next step.

Society is becoming fully re-racialised. The first step to that becoming a reality was set in motion by self-flagellating ultra-progressives in America who spread the idea that ‘whiteness’ was a pathology and that white people are always at fault. This gave us DEI policies and mandatory anti-racist awareness courses throughout the British public sector. The wholly predictable upshot has been the rise of ethno-nationalism among people who, for 30 years, have been told they are bad people because of their skin colour, and for the past 10 years have been denied a job or fair treatment from the police and the courts because of this accident of biology.

Our post-Macpherson police forces, which have overcompensated for accusations of ‘institutional racism’, have been further compromised in their capture by this ideology. Last year, the National Police Chief’s Council issued its Police Anti-Racism Commitment. It states, ‘Our commitment to racial equity… does not mean treating everyone “the same” or being “colour blind”’ and ‘Anti-racism demands that we are proactive’. Such words are indistinguishable from anything written by American critical race theorist Ibram X Kendi.

Henry Nowak’s father said he didn’t want his son’s ‘death to be used to create further division’. But we can’t simply ignore what has been happening. Those who created this division in the first place need to be held to account, because this neo-racism promoted by progressives and abetted by the left in general must stop.

Doomscrolling to death

Now that we’re all agreed that there’s a problem with children being over-attached to their smartphones, and how this overuse is rendering them incapable of concentrating, communicating, forming relationships and managing stress, can we now do something about the adults?

According to a report this week, the average Briton will spend nearly five years of their life doomscrolling, with this habit being thoroughly intergenerational. Daily mobile phone use has more than doubled in the past 10 years.

From my experience, this transformation is most striking when you visit a big city like London. To go to the capital these days is to enter into a dystopian science-fiction movie come true, in which everybody, especially on the Underground, is glued to their mobile phones.

Teenagers can be forgiven for their phone overuse. They are insecure creatures who crave constant validation. Youngsters also have far less awareness of their own mortality, less consciousness that they’re wasting their precious time on this Earth with their pointless, endless scrolling.

Adults should know better. Yet, as this report confirms, they are just as likely to be slaves to their screens. Consequently, many no longer read books or take a daily newspaper. Unlike teenagers who have known nothing but the digital world, they have surrendered their free will and sleepwalked into this vacuous virtual realm. I have lost count of the conversations I’ve had on the train back to the Kent coast with people my age and older who, on seeing my reading material, comment, ‘Oh I used to love reading newspapers’, as if the printed word were now forbidden, as if we were now living in the world of Fahrenheit 451.

The other day, as a concerned uncle, I remarked to my brother whether people on their deathbeds would regret having frittered away so much of their lives this way. ‘They probably won’t think about it’, he answered. ‘They’ll probably still be scrolling even then.’

What woke and corporate jargon have in common

Research published in Personality and Individual Differences has shown that people who use corporate jargon are not only more irritating than the rest of us but also more stupid. A study devised by Shane Littrell, a cognitive psychologist at Cornell University, has demonstrated that those who rank higher for ‘corporate bullshit receptivity’, who employ such phrases as ‘activate stakeholder engagement’ or ‘socialise the learning’, are also less likely to show signs of strong analytical thinking and are more susceptible to other forms of verbiage.

This correlation is not at all surprising. It has been a conspicuous feature of hyper-liberalism. The woke use bewildering language to signal their allegiance to a superior elite, to try to impress their peers and to intimidate those outside the tribe. Yet in doing so, they expose their own lack of critical, independent thinking. Neologisms like ‘intersectionality’ and ‘systemic [insert nasty abstract noun here]’ are devised to confuse and exclude, and to demonstrate affinity to an elect. But they can’t help but reveal a comical dependence on second-hand thinking, jargon and clichés. That’s why they venerate and pretend to have read Judith Butler, because her words make no sense.