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‘No black person ever went broke telling white Daily Mail types exactly what they want to hear,” writes Nels Abbey
THE DAILY Mail has heralded Trevor Phillips as “a man who dares to tell the truth about race” in an article trailing his upcoming Channel 4 documentary Things We Won't Say About Race That Are True (March 19).
In the comment piece (and similar articles elsewhere), Phillips dons his cape and flies to the rescue of that most oppressed victim of our society: the hater of political correctness (i.e. those least likely to be victims of any form of bigotry).
He argues that political correctness has stifled debate; fuelled hatred, disadvantage and the Far Right by forcing people to privately harbour notions they feel they cannot vocalise about different ethnic and religious groups. In short: not talking about race has fuelled racism.
Phillips had rather nice and warm stereotypes to throw around about every community (Indian women are eight times more likely to be pharmacists, for example) with the exception of his own.
No, for us, he went for the lowest common denominator – our dear old friend, the now largely discredited ‘black on black crime’ narrative.
“Most black murder victims are killed by blacks” was Phillips’ groundbreaking previously unspeakable insight. Yet he found no room to mention who the killers of most white murder victims are.
Given that it is now widely accepted that the ‘black on black crime’ tag exists principally to subvert and stifle discussions on the wider discrimination and racism black people have to face – the very thing he supposedly opposes in principle – you’d have thought Phillips would have been able to come up with a better example.
Most bizarrely, Phillips said that he “bears some personal responsibility” for the London terror attacks on July 7, 2005. Apparently, as the then race tsar, he should have “seen it coming”.
Tony Blair, the Prime Minister at the time, to this day doesn’t accept any culpability even though his own foreign policy in Iraq is cited by the terrorists in their martyrdom videos as their reason for carrying out their atrocities. Blair stands firm yet ‘Comical Trev’ has accepted culpability?
His words on multiculturalism cut deep and ring very hollow intellectually.
In the same week it was revealed that black youth unemployment has increased by 49 per cent since the coalition came to power, Phillips argued that multiculturalism has become a ‘racket’ for ‘self-styled community leaders to control local authority budgets’. The Mail described multiculturalism as “the left-wing doctrine, which encouraged migrants to keep their own culture rather than integrate into British ways”.
TREVOR'S TRUTHS: A screengrab taken from Phillips' Daily Mail article
Phillips knows very well that the black community has integrated in to the “British way of life” more than any other visible immigrant group.
We marry into the dominant sector of society more than anyone else.
We have adopted the religious beliefs and prop-up the establishment church.
We love the institutions of Britain, even ones that once enslaved and dehumanised us via colonisation and have refused to help repair the damage done till this day. We even voluntarily give our children names that make them sound as British as possible. How many Asians do you know with English names?
Yet no other group has been more roundly punished for assimilating.
The black community experiences extreme discrimination. We experience the harshest policing available. We are more likely to be excluded from school or attain a poor education than anyone else. We have completely unjustly become the face of criminality – something further reinforced by Phillips’ article. Our voices are completely ignored unless we speak on issues considered “ours” (race and, in particular, racism in football). We have the highest levels of unemployment for any settled immigrant group. And compounding all of the above, perhaps as a direct result of the above, we are more likely to have mental health problems.
Yet this experience has become totally normal for the black community - an emergency that is treated like a picnic.
People often argue that race is no longer the deterrent to progress that it used to be. Class, they say, is now the issue. They are partially right. It is hard to think that Phillips’ latest mind-farts are the thoughts of a black man in Britain. They’re clearly not. They are the thoughts of a rather well-off, comfortable and connected man who happens to be black in Britain.
In conclusion, since Phillips is interested in things we won't say about race that are true, here is one for him to ponder: no black person ever went broke telling white Daily Mail types exactly what they want to hear. And no black person ever got rich telling them what they need to hear: the truth.
Trevor, Jurassic Park misses you and needs you. Modern Britain doesn’t.
Follow Nels Abbey on Twitter @NelsAbbey