When I moved to Britain from the US 30 years ago, I had an amusing conversation with an impeccable English gentleman.
I don’t recall how we got on that subject, but I mentioned in passing that American blacks tended to be left-wing. “They are left-wing because they are black,” opined my interlocutor. “No, it’s the other way around,” I replied. “They are black because they are left-wing.”
It was one of those flippant paradoxes in which I like to indulge from time to time. But there was also a kernel of truth there, for traditional markers of identity are these days superseded by politics.
In fact, everything is. Our politics used to be defined by the votes we cast and the views we expressed. Now everything is politicised, including the clothes we wear and the food we eat. A chap wearing a legible T-shirt and lunching on a tofu burger with bean sprouts on the side doesn’t even have to open his mouth for us to guess his politics, does he?
The same goes for race and sex (and of course language: anyone using ‘gender’ as anything other than a grammatical category has to be left-wing).
Institutional race discrimination in America and Britain no longer exists. In fact, the races discriminated against in the past tend to enjoy preferential treatment at present. Implicit or explicit quotas that used to apply to the maximum number of minority members in the workplace, now apply to the minimum number.
This is called affirmative action in the US and reverse discrimination in the UK. In both places the hope (forlorn, in my view) is that the emollient balm of present mollycoddling will ease the residual pain of past suffering.
Everyday racism does exist even in Britain, not to mention Texas, where I lived for 10 years. This no doubt stokes up the rankling resentment over things of yesteryear like slavery and riding in the back of the bus (my black friend in Houston had to do that when a teenager).
But resentment isn’t cancer. It can be self-controlled, which some people are more prepared to do than some others.
That’s where political convictions come in, for left-wing politics is weaned on resentment or even, at its extreme, hatred. Political conservatism, on the other hand, rises above such incidentals.
By way of illustration, look up on YouTube the old issue of the US show The Firing Line. Its host, the influential conservative writer William F. Buckley, interviews Thomas Sowell, arguably the greatest social and economic philosopher of his time.
Dr Sowell happens to be black, and he grew up in a dirt-poor North Carolina family, when Jim Crow was in force. His contacts with white people were so limited that, as he writes in his autobiography The Personal Odyssey, he didn’t even know that blond was a hair colour.
No doubt he remembered all that even after he made his way to Cornell, the Chicago School of Economics and Stanford. It’s even possible that he still feels some residual resentment – he wouldn’t be human if he didn’t.
But because he is a conservative Dr Sowell clearly doesn’t define himself as black first and foremost. His race is just a fact of his biography, one of many and not the most important one. His attitude probably runs along the lines of “Yes, I’m black. So what?”
“So what?!?” exclaim politicised blacks. “So you aren’t black at all. If you don’t let your negritude define your whole life, you’re a traitor to your race.”
Real, which is to say politicised, American blacks call people like Dr Sowell ‘Uncle Tom’ or else ‘coconut’ (black on the outside, white on the inside). Our equivalents use Bounty in the same meaning.
In the process, they weirdly apply the philosophy of Jim Crow racists (“a drop of tar, all black”). A man like Barack Obama, whose mother was white, is routinely described as black, not half-black – an image that he himself cultivated as a way of getting to the White House. Mr Obama would have done exactly the same even if he were an octoroon. Blackness is now more political than racial.
This was emphasised by the American woman Rachel Dolezal, who lied about being black to become a prominent activist in the NAACP.
Exposed in 2015, Miss Dolezal defends herself by insisting she’s indeed black – by convictions if not by ancestry. I applaud her: she’s one of the few public figures who have dared to elucidate the true nature of race in today’s world.
The same goes for sex. A conservative woman, especially one in a prominent political position, is seen by the Left as not quite womanly.
When I lived in the US, feminists insisted that no woman could occupy a high post in government. “What about Jean Kirkpatrick, Ambassador to the UN?” “Oh well, we’re talking about women…” was the typical reply.
Mrs Kirkpatrick wasn’t really a woman because she wasn’t a left-wing feminist – not just because she eschewed the allure of femininity to advance her career. Margaret Thatcher, for example, suffered the same fate even though she was an extremely feminine and flirtatious woman.
Neither the chromosomes nor the looks nor the behaviour had anything to do with it. For womanhood, like race, has become a political statement – at least among today’s trend-setters.
Thus, say, Diane Abbott is a woman, and Margaret Thatcher or Baroness Cox isn’t. And if you disagree, you’re a stick-in-the-mud retrograde (just like me).
Just the left doing what the left does, I’m afraid.
It constantly tries to manufacture social and political cohesion around artificial ‘collectives’. They have tried and failed with class (Communism), race (Nazism), nationalism (Fascism) so its latest thing is ‘identity’.
You are quite correct in saying that they do this because they have a burning ‘resentment’, if not ‘hatred’ for the natural drivers of social cohesion – such as Family, culture, history, patriotism and institutions.
The left cannot see that all human beings essentially want the same things – health, wealth, happiness and for succeeding generations to have a better life – we merely disagree on the methods of achieving this. To the left, a conservative is ‘scum’, or ‘evil’.
It is indeed the politics of hate – which makes all the more ironic that they have promulgated ‘hate speech’ laws.
We live in dystopian times.
This is correct. One of the three characteristic signatures of the left. The left does have a reciprocity of good-will as directed toward the conservative. The conservative is EVIL!
1. “This was emphasised by the American woman Rachel Dolezal, who lied about being black to become a prominent activist in the NAACP.”
Correct. Rachel got her position because she claimed she was black woman when she was not. She lied to gain advantage.
2. “A man like Barack Obama, whose mother was white, is routinely described as black, not half-black – ”
And culturally white. Lived among blacks [barely] as an adult but not one of them.
3. “They are black because they are left-wing.”
Blacks in American tend to be economically Left but culturally Right. A complex subject.
Fin, I think you are referring to what used to be called ‘the infantile left’. Lenin used that term because they were an irritant to him as well as to most of the political spectrum to his right. They ranged from anarchists who blew things up in the hope of causing anarchy to lofty academics who thought that their irritating waffle would achieve the same thing. None of them gave us much of an idea as to what could happen if anarchy actually prevailed. In Britain, most of the first group were rounded up in 1914 and those who later came within Lenin’s reach did not last long. With the coming of the pseudo- universities and the pseudo-fication of formerly real universities, the writers of irritating waffle have thrived and established their own special subject areas and their own debased vocabulary. In Britain, their more excitable students, whose attention deficits exceeded their ignorance have infested the Labour Party that formerly banned infantile leftists (as well as trot-comms) and have brought about chaos verging on anarchy. The Labour Party is about to transform from one governing with huge majorities to political irrelevance, just as the Liberals (for different reasons) did about a hundred years earlier. Look to Ireland if you want an example of a ruling conservative party with another conservative party in opposition.
I was introduced to Dr Sowell’s work about 12 years ago. He does fall into the trap of repeating himself but nobody can deny the clarity of his overall message.
I think Nietzsche had leftists down pat with his riff on “resentiment” – the psychological drivers of which are most unsavoury