There is a Jamaican nugget of wisdom: “If yu cyaan ’ear, yu mus’ feel.” It translates to “those that don’t hear must feel”: in other words, if you fail to learn from caution you end up learning from consequence.
Had Britain “heard” the screams of caution from Black people about the racism and, therefore, unsuitability for office of Boris Johnson, there is a good chance Britain would not be “feeling” the pain and shame of demise we are right now.
In the story of race in Britain, Johnson may be as deserving of his own special chapter as Enoch Powell. And a fascinatingly complex chapter it would be. It is hard to conceive of anyone who has seemingly done more to decimate antiracism movements and relegitimise racism in Britain (for his own political gain) but simultaneously just as hard to name anyone who did more for high-level political diversity – once seen as a vital measure of racial progress. Powell gave a speech; Johnson gave power and the respectability of diversity to racism.
As a shock-jock scribe, Johnson played to the nativist gallery with attempts at humour that only a drink-sodden toadying upper-middle-class dinner party (or a fawning media class) would laugh at.
There was his reference to “watermelon smiles” and “flag-waving piccaninnies” in an infamous 2002 Telegraph column about a trip by Tony Blair to west Africa.
But there were myriad others. “The problem is not that we were once in charge [of Africa], but that we are not in charge any more … If left to their own devices, the natives would rely on nothing but the instant carbohydrate gratification of the plantain,” scribbled Johnson in the Spectator.
Indeed, a cursory study of his time as editor of the Spectator suggests an apparent disdain for, obsession with and envy or fear of Black people in particular. He did not write but he published at least one patently, eye-wateringly racist pseudoscientific article suggesting Black people had low IQs. Another piece published under his editorship described Jamaican immigrants (ie descendants of Africans enslaved by Britain) as “ludicrously self-satisfied, macho, lupine-gaited, gold-chained-and-front-toothed predators of the slums, with the bodies of giants and the mind of a pea”. Another dismissed the idea of disaffected Black youth as politically correct cover for “black thugs, sons of black thugs and grandsons of black thugs”. The piece contained the bigotry bat-signal “boy, oh boy, was Enoch – God rest his soul – ever right!”
Far from making him a pariah, his early catalogue of racist waffle, written by or apparently sanctioned by him, helped to propel Johnson to success.
Whether it was Brexit (during the campaign he labelled President Obama a “part-Kenyan president” with an “ancestral dislike” of Britain), his refusal to condemn England fans who booed their own players for making an antiracism gesture, his visit to Myanmar as foreign secretary (during which the UK ambassador to Myanmar had to stop him reciting a colonial-era poem) or writing in a column that Muslim women wearing burqas “look like letter boxes” (which some critics blamed, at least in part, for a 375% rise in reports of Islamophobic incidents) – time and again over the course of his career Johnson would return to his reliable ace, the racism card. Often the offence was camouflaged. The burqa article, for example, argued against a ban in Britain. Which is classic Johnson – playing the liberal and the crowd-pleasing, devil-may-care reactionary at once. And we would complain and no one would listen and no one would do anything.
Here’s a funny thing: no one has appointed more people from ethnic minorities to senior political positions than Boris Johnson. His cabinet was unthinkably diverse – the statistics speak for themselves. But as the business professor and economist Aaron Levenstein once cautioned about statistics: “What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital.” What the statistics concealed is the fact that Johnsonian diversity represented a giant leap forward for racism.
If you were an ethnic minority “anti-woke culture war warrior”, the Johnson years were a land of milk of honey. Your anti-woke provocation was your qualification. A couple of viral anti-woke tweets or YouTube clips could propel you into the Johnsonian stratosphere or into a prestigious national institution.
Thanks to Johnsonian diversity, Britain now has more ethnic minorities in positions of power than ever. But arguably he used it to undermine antiracism or racial progress in society at large. His willingness to brazenly do so was part of his nativist appeal.
That was disreputable, but then he is disreputable and we knew that. We did find the emergency glass: we did break it. And now you know what we knew about that willingness to offend, the readiness to trash rules and norms for cheap gain and self-advantage. In that respect, today, he has brought us closer together: that’s a silver lining of sorts.
Nels Abbey is a writer, broadcaster and former banker, and the author of Think Like a White Man
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