Is anyone seriously going to try to make the case that this isn’t black culture in excelsis? Or does anyone, perhaps, want to persuade me that this is but one tiny and much-exaggerated facet of a broader black culture dominated by opera and madrigal singing and crochet and sonnet-construction and lawn bowls and Shakespeare and new translations of Ovid? If they are capable of doing so then maybe, just maybe, I might accept that there was something demeaning or reductive in Starkey’s comments on black culture. Problem is, I don’t think anyone can. (And I speak, by the way, as someone who quite likes his hop hop and who is very much into the new Kanye West/Jay Z album. But who, listening to it, can’t help noticing that it’s rather more a celebration of gats, hos, casual sex and easy money, than it is an invocation for study, hard work and social conformity.)
To pillory a man for pointing out such a glaringly obvious cultural fact just because he’s white and Right-wing would have been quite wrong even before the riots. Post riots it is positively obscene.
– James Delingpole, declining to join the lynch mob baying for David Starkey’s blood.
As I wrote on my facebook page today…
David Starkey may be a respected historian, but as far as social commentary goes Ben Folds makes the point much better…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v”‹=dSJxvi767kQ
That should be
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSJxvi767kQ
Another thing you aren’t allowed to say but everyone knows.
Starkey’s comment was stupid and unnecessary, and Dellingpole is making the same mistake here.
The essential aspect of the “culture” on display during the rioting was the willfull disregard of morality, laws and consequences. To call that “black” rather than “nihilist” and to focus on rap songs and crap clothes, rather than entitlement psychology and economic distortion is like planning to storm a fortress by throwing pots of paint against the wind, rather than with catapults and longbows with the wind behind you.
Mike has a point but how I understand it, is that Starkey was making a point on how an element of “black” or “ghetto” culture – the language, the music, the celebration of the young, strutting, aggressive male, etc (very anti-woman) – cannot be criticised because to do so means you are a “racist”.
There is enough genuine bigotry out there – and Lord knows I have no tolerance for that – for us not to get het up by looking for the fake sort. Starkey said nothing that implied unreasoning hatred of a group of people simply on the grounds of skin colour. He was attacking a way of behaving, and as such, his point has universal applicability.
Please correct me if I’m mistaken, but looking from the outside, the rioters seem to be a mix of all possible colors. And even if they weren’t, it still sounds like Mike is making a perfectly good point.
I’m pretty much in agreement with Mike.
What I think Starkey is groping towards, but is crashing and burning for failure to get across, is that there is a subculture associated with street gangs and defiance of ordinary authority that its own practitioners assert to be the only authentic way to be ‘black’. It is one that because of its antinomianism attracts teenagers of all sorts into imitation, and in the lower depths even to emulation. It is not a “black culture”. It is not a culture of black people in general, nor even from a specific place with a black population, Its a subculture – partly an imported American (US) urban cult of street layabouts and neerdowells, overlaying and overlapping with the similarly nasty yardie subculture of specifically Jamaican origin… both entirely contingently deriving from *some* black people.
‘Urban’ is indeed the label that’s often applied to it and nearby cultural phenomena, some of them blameless and harmless. You see the people who trade in it have already overcome the problem of racial identification. Even so, you might have problems escaping that identification being thrust on you if you were a black kid living in some poor bits of London or other big cities, coping with multiculturalist expectations that this represents something essential about you.
Blaming black gangster culture is to blame the window dressing. It’s not that this culture does not inform the looters’ criminality, but it is no more than the surface backdrop to it.
But Starkey’s gravest error was that he could not resist provoking with the “Enoch was right” statement and doing so in a way that was tactically maladroit in the circumstances. If he really wanted to cite the rivers of blood speech he should have started by saying why he thought Powell was wrong rather than finishing with why he thought Powell was wrong. But he did it the other way round, predictably in the circumstances placing himself on the back foot, losing control of his own narrative and reducing himself to increasingly shrill attempts to recover ground he had no need to lose in the first place.
For such a clever man, his inability to suppress the inner schoolboy on this occasion was remarkably stupid.
“he could not resist provoking with the “Enoch was right” statement”
Provoking whom exactly? Various right-on types who want to control the context in which we discuss social issues I presume, I don’t care if they are “provoked”.
Furthermore whenever I hear commentators on the BBC suggesting that Lenin/Castro/Chavez/ were right I feel only disagreement or disgust. The notion that I would feel provoked feels, well, slightly strange.
Interesting that Ali-G should (without more reference) provide the pic for Dellingpole’s blog.
Baron-Cohen’s character several years ago provided the warning how untouchable this subject was, when he had strenuously to deny that he was satirising any actual black people who affected such absurd ‘street’ mannerisms and pig-ignorance. No; Baron Cohen was merely mocking suburban white kids who did. The catchphrase “Is it because I’s black?” was actually without any point or sting. It seems it was politically correct at that point (ca.2002) to believe the essentialist idea that poor black kids are supposed to be like that, that it is ‘their culture’. Indeed we were being told it was racist to mock it.
Yes, right-on types. If a pundit of Starkey’s kidney steps into the dragon’s den that is the BBC he should be smart enough to tailor his delivery (but not the burden of his song) to avoid giving hostages to fortune.
As to being provoked, you have a point. One of the right-on types confronting starkey in fact made it for you with the predictable, nauseating and evasive trope that “many people would be offended” by what he said.
The better move, IMHO, is not to have anything at all to do with the BBC because the weight of default prejudice is invariably too great. Let the organisation diminish it’s stock of credibility by making clear to even the meanest intelligence that it exists only as a talking shop for the right-on classes.
Nobodies mentioned Ali G yet then?
Cohen has made a bloody good living taking the piss out of the very same wannabe Black syndrome, echoing the cultural confusion that seems to be at the heart of the problem of modern youth.
Is there a subset of black youths who celebrate a culture of contrarianism? Sure. Have other races adopted it as chic? Yes. Were a portion of these people involved in the riots? Looks to be that way.
But contrarianism isn’t just a “black” thing. Look at the white “Outlaw” country music movement of the 70’s through today – Johnny Cash, Kris Kristofferson et al. Cash singing at Folsom County Prison. Cash, in the last few years of his life, was adopted by contriarians and became chic again. The biker gang culture going back decades as well.
So contrarianism that might lead to gangsterism, isn’t a color thing, it is a culture thing, and an economic thing, and an educational thing. So if Starkey wasn’t as exacting as to what he meant to say, then perhaps some criticism is warranted and he should be given an opportunity to clarify. If he means to concentrate on black gangsterism as the spark to the riots, fine.
In abstraction from the Enoch Powell thing… it’s tactically important more generally, in my view, not to make linguistic-conceptual concessions to the Left.
For instance, it appalls me that U.S. conservatives still continue in their debased, misuse of the term “Liberal” in applying it to the likes of the current President – this is a disgrace and I challenge it every time I encounter it. And you ought never to assume that they will let you get away with a charitable reading of what you have said if you make an inarticulate mess of yourself.
Perry, you started the quote at a point that makes one think — made me think anyway — that the “black culture in excelsis” is looting and arson and larceny. Actually, when I read the source, Delingpole meant only such things as low-riding jeans, etc.
Same as Brad said, I took Starkey’s comments to show that “black culture” isn’t about being “black” because the riots show the “culture” being adopted by whites as well, therefore reinforcing the view that one should not stereotype “racial culture”, it is just “bad culture” that is all, in essence he was being as anti-racist as you can get, by eliminating race out of the equation.
The reaction to Starkey’s observations is as telling and as much the problem as the gangs themselves.
There have always been gangs operating in urban areas. The makeup of the gangs today is different from past generations due to immigration but they are still the same thugs sticking two fingers up at the law and attracting feeble minded sheep.
The difference with recent iterations of gang culture is that there has been an army of hand wringers acting to prevent the police from dealing with it and distracting the police from law and order onto race relations, human rights and all the rest.
It was initially based on painting the police as racist but as gang appeal has spread into other communities and populations are mixing that avenue for the awkward squad has closed down – not because they have been effective or the police have been reformed (they didn’t need it) but because the communities that give birth to these gangs are becoming mixed.
Is this gang culture an example of integration as opposed to multi-culturalism?
I never knew libertarianism had a problem with gats, casual sex, and easy money. Is there a memo I missed from Libertarian Central Command?
Oh, and social conformity? To paraphrase the bard, hang up conformity!
I agree with Mike. Starkey’s comment has zero additional explanatory power over one that refers to the entitlement culture etc.
Interestingly, Thomas Sowell (respected black American libertarian economist) has argued that what we think of as ‘black’ ‘gangsta’ culture actually has its origin in the culture of poor and uneducated Scots-Irish. These emigrated to the southern US and infected the black slaves with their culture.
I can just hear Starkey now: “Its the Irish culture! Cromwell was right”
Interestingly, Thomas Sowell (respected black American libertarian economist) has argued that what we think of as ‘black’ ‘gangsta’ culture actually has its origin in the culture of poor and uneducated Scots-Irish. These emigrated to the southern US and infected the black slaves with their culture.
Oh for heaven’s sake Peter, how far do you want to scroll this back!? Scots-Irish immigrants may have had something to do with Bluegrass, country and western and the original Blues itself, but Gangsta Culture?
If anyone it was the Italians who came up with Gangsta culture via Prohibition and the Mafia.
Then, of course, we jump to the Civil Rights movement and instead of following Dr King, a lot of American blacks went for Bobby Seale, Malcom X, the Black Panthers and The nation of Islam (about as big a fairy story as Scientology). Then the next I heard of “Burnin and a lootin…” was from Bob Marley, supposedly a peaceful Rasta, but who flirted with dangerous imagery. I shot the Sheriff etc. He almost got offed himself once, Peter Tosh actually was tortured and killed by those who took his rhetoric seriously.
Nope it sure as fuck wasn’t ignorant Scots-Irish immigrants, who were too poor to own even one slave anyway, so how did they influence them?
Well, at least it’s unlikely that people will complain that the Police were too violent in their response to the riots! I wonder if the cops were waiting for new batons or truncheons?
And when will the the-cops-are-too-violent crowd apologize to the rest of us?
Actually the original comments by David Starkey were that “whites” had turned into “blacks”.
I.E. he was accepting the idea that “race” is a cultural construct – NOT a biological one.
Starkey was not saying that people with pinkish gray skins had turned into people with dark brown skins. He was talking about a very P.C. notion of “race” – i.e. race as a cultural construct.
Certain forms of culture have been historically called “black culture” (and by people who are very P.C.), but “white” people have taken up this culture – showing there is nothign biological about it (nothing to do with having a dark brown skin).
But, as is normal, the elite “misunderstood” what was being said.
Sadly I have come to the conclusion that it is better to say nothing about these matters (if one is in public life) as everything one says is torn from its context and twisted 180 degrees.
“But that means letting the cities burn”.
Does it help to allow oneself to be burned (as a heretic) with them?
Just to throw a little more petrol on the fire, ask yourself whether London-style riots would be more likely to erupt in, say, Lagos than in, oh, Salt Lake City.
In Lagos there would be Lagos-style riots, which are rather different… indeed first riot I ever saw was in Lagos as it happens, back when I was a wee lad many moons ago 🙂
It is astonishing that the left do not recognise that Dr Starkey was simply playing an aspect of their own ideolgy back to them.
Dr Starkey was NOT saying that “white” (actually pinkish gray) skinned people developed “black” (actually dark brown) skins – he was not dealing with “race” in a BIOLOGICAL way at all.
On the contrary Dr Starkey was treating “race” as a “social construct” (a matter of culture and customs) as the left (in particuarly the Politically Correct movement – cultural left) insist that “race” is.
Certain forms of culture are celebrated as “black” culture – and people with “black” skins who do not participate in (indeed OPPOSE) this culture, in terms of its music, dress, speech….. (gang culture generally) are denounced as “not black”, “Uncle Toms” (and so on).
Therefore, by the same logic, those people with “white” skins who embrace this culture have become “black” – “race” being a “social construct”.