DESPITE SERIOUS questions about his private life, Boris Johnson is still on course to succeed Theresa May as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.
You cannot imagine that if he was a black man and there was even a question mark of a suggestion that he was a baby father or a ‘bedroom bully’ that he would get anywhere near Number 10. We don’t get those kind of blys. But, hey, mama said life wasn’t fair, didn’t she?
Not only that, the French philosopher Joseph de Maistre said ‘Toute nation a le gouvernement qu’elle mérite’, didn’t he? You can’t argue against that. Every nation gets the government it deserves. Which translates as ‘Britain does not deserve a black prime minister’.
I wish it was different, but Britain just doesn’t deserve a bruvva, or a sista for that matter, as prime minister, otherwise it would get one.
CONCLUSION
In terms of the current Tory leadership contest, we can only assume that de Maistre’s conclusion would be that Britain deserves an upper class toff who, according to his girlfriend, has no sense of the value of money and who has previously described us as piccaninnies with ‘watermelon smiles’. If Britain deserves Boris, therefore, where does that leave black Britons?
Well, we can huff and puff and blow Number 10 down, but it won’t do us any good. As African Americans have found out, it has not made a blind bit of difference that the current incumbent of the White House is notorious for his racist discrimination of housing tenants in New York, among other racial issues that he has expressed himself on.
You would have to argue, would you not, that the United States today deserves Donald Trump, because it is still predicated on racialism.
Despite the pretence in the eight years prior to Trump that heralded a new America, today it is as far from the post-racial nirvana that naive commentators suggested it had arrived at when Americans voted in their first African American president. Barack who, I hear you ask. Yes, exactly.
Clarence Thomas, of course, made history as the first African American Supreme Court judge. The lifetime appointment has seen him sit on the nine man/woman board of the highest court in America for the last 28 years, but what difference has it made?
Well, we know that it hasn’t make a blind bit of difference to African Americans, don’t we? If anything he has exacerbated the black condition stateside because Clarence Thomas was never about us, you only have to ask Professor Anita Hill about that.
Sure, Thomas is black and sure (although he would probably deny it), he was selected to the Supreme Court because after more than 200 years it was getting embarrassing that there had never been an African American justice.
Is there a single person reading this who doesn’t know that that is the way the game is played? And yet, so many times when a ‘representative’ of our race is unveiled like four and 20 blackbirds baked in a pie, they end up being the wrong kind of black.
They end up being the black we don’t deserve. I don’t blame white folks for this, they don’t know any better.
But even they were horrified when Clarence Thomas last week, was the most vocal of the Supreme Court judges in rejecting a petition by the lawyers of a black man who had been the target of a racist Mississippi prosecutor’s crusade to have him executed.
The prosecutor in question had ensured that every black person considered for the jury was rejected. Forty-one black jurors in total were rejected by this one prosecutor to ensure that the black defendant was judged solely by white jurors. If that isn’t a prima facie case of racism then nothing is. And yet the only African American Supreme Court judge argued the case on behalf of the prosecutor against the defendant.
The defendant, Curtis Flowers, had to rely on the support of the white Conservatives on the Supreme Court for his petition to be granted, otherwise he’d be back on death row. Clearly we may as well not have a black person on the US Supreme Court. It’s not that we expect a black judge to side with us. Not at all.
But we expect them to ‘get’ us. Otherwise what is the point of having a black person there if they do not understand the black experience?
We expect a black judge to be as enlightened as the white judges, to the extent they conclude clude when a prosecutor rejects 41 jurors who are all black, that the prosecutor has an agenda: to see one of us ‘fry’, to use a euphemism.
But we have what we have in Clarence Thomas and all the other ‘black representatives’ who may as well be white for all the purpose they serve.
DEMANDING
Is it not time that we start demanding that when these black reps are co-opted, that the person’s ‘blackness’ credentials should be vetted?
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