[Peace-discuss] Class becomes race - because it can't, really, you see, be class...

[C. G. Estabrook]

[Historian - particularly English historians - are behaving particularly badly. 
--CGE]

August 13, 2011, 2:05 PM
English Historian Blames Black Culture for Riots
By ROBERT MACKEY

BBC video, via The Guardian, of controversial remarks by an English historian.

During a televised discussion of the past week’s riots in England on Friday 
night, a prominent English historian sparked outrage by insisting that black, 
Afro-Caribbean culture was to blame for the mayhem and looting, even when the 
rioters were white.

David Starkey, who has presented several documentaries on the Tudor period, said 
during a BBC debate: “the problem is that the whites have become black — a 
particular sort of violent, destructive, nihilistic gangster culture has become 
the fashion — and black and white, boy and girl, operate in this language 
together; this language, which is wholly false, which is a Jamaican patois, 
that’s been intruded in England, and this is why so many of us have this sense 
of literally a foreign country.”

Asked if he was saying that the prophecy of Enoch Powell — an English politician 
who claimed in a speech in 1968 that immigration would eventually mean, “the 
black man will have the whip hand over the white man” in Britain — had come 
true, Mr. Starkey replied: “That’s not true.” He added, “it’s not skin color, 
it’s cultural.”

The historian then sought to illustrate his point by referring to the way one of 
London’s leading black politicians, David Lammy, speaks. “Listen to David 
Lammy,” Mr. Starkey said, “an archetypical, successful black man: if you turned 
the screen off, so that you were listening to him on radio, you’d think he was 
white.”

The other participants in the debate quickly objected to Mr. Starkey’s remarks. 
Owen Jones, the author of a book about working class culture in Britain, told 
the historian: “It’s utterly outrageous, obviously, what you’re saying. What 
you’re doing is you’re equating black culture with criminality.”

A short time later, Emily Maitlis, the BBC journalist who was moderating the 
discussion, told Mr. Starkey that he was using the terms black culture and white 
culture as synonyms for bad and good...

[Complete article at 
<http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/08/13/english-historian-blames-black-culture-for-riots/>.