“O North is north and South is south
And never the twain shall meet
Which I suppose is just as well
Or mouths would be stuffed with feet...”
From Contortionwalla by Bachchoo

Some years ago I took my friend Darcus Howe, a Trinidadian of African descent, to Delhi on a film shoot. Now D and I had been together in successive political organisations which agitated, pamphleteered and generally caused a nuisance to authority of most sorts on questions of immigrant rights. This “struggle”, as we communists and socialists called it, had been partially hijacked by linguistic revolutionaries.
By this I mean that there were very many around in later years who posed as radicals because they had stopped using “racist” and “sexist” language and were ever ready to object to any hint of such allusion in the speech of others. The terrain had moved from rights to words, states of mind and their expression. As a pastime, like computer games, it was vital!
To tell the truth, my friends and I, while paying lip service to correctness of speech felt a certain contempt for the self-satisfied attitude of the linguistic guerrillas — we thought we had demonstrated, fought police, been arrested, sacked, starved and sent to detention for more than the prohibition of rude forms of address. Nevertheless, even good taste dictates that one doesn’t go around using language that may hurt the disabled or people with a different nationality or skin colour. Gender? Oh well!
Darcus, in the company of myself and other subcontinentals, had learnt a few choice Hindustani words. Our host in Delhi suggested we go one evening as his guests to the Delhi Gymkhana and we did. As we drove around the capital, Darcus seemed quite impressed with the buildings on Rajpath.
“Dondy, who built dis?” he asked “The British,” I said.
“Dey intended to stay, boy!” was his judgment.
We walked into the colonial-Doric of the Delhi Gymkhana and headed for the air-conditioned bar. As Darcus walked into the crowded bar he looked around at the decor and the company and proclaimed for all to hear, “Boy, de ole hubschi has arrived”.
Heads turned. People wanted to know who the black man merrily calling himself a hubschi was. It led to instant popularity. A gentleman who had been India’s high commissioner to Guyana approached Darcus and soon he was knee-high in free drinks.
The linguistic revolutionaries target racism, sexism and demeaning descriptions of people who are “physically or mentally challenged”. This goes with an opposition to any idea of normality. It is wrong to allude to such norms. We must banish any idea of the “normal”. (Coming across more and more specimens of humanity, as one does in my field of work, I sometimes feel that’s right.)
By racism they always mean whites demeaning blacks or seeing them as peculiar, particular or inferior. It rarely works the other way round. Even so, an almighty row broke out this week when Diane Abbot, a Labour member of Parliament who is of black Afro-Caribbean descent, tweeted to one of her contacts that “White people love to divide and rule”.
Ms Abbot stood as a candidate for the leadership of her party last time round. She lost, but the winner, Ed Milliband, gave her the sinecure of shadow spokesman (Oops! “Spokesperson”) for health.
Since her appointment I can’t recall anything that Ms Abbot has said about health except for this foray into the unhealthy tendency of the white race to “divide and rule”. There was a minor tsunami of protest and Mr Milliband was challenged to sack her for anti-white “racism”.
To be fair to Ms Abbot, the remark, which she said was taken out of context, probably was, and no one has had the courtesy or pluck to analyse that context. So here goes:
Just before she made the remark the trial of two white men accused of the racist murder of a black teenager 18 years ago came to its conclusion with their convictions. That night the most prestigious national news programme Newsnight devoted time to a discussion of their conviction and why it took 18 years to happen.
The family of the murdered teenager had contended that Scotland Yard had initially acted in a racist manner and that the investigation had been deliberately slanted to avoid finding evidence that would convict the white murderers. A government enquiry was launched at the time and the judge who conducted it concluded that the police were “institutionally racist”.
Successive governments set out to do something to remedy this. One of the obvious strategies to overcome this institutional racism was to recruit more black policemen and this has duly happened, albeit at a slow pace. Black citizens of some responsibility or eminence have been recruited as magistrates and members of overseeing committees called “police authorities”.
One such member of an authority was invited onto the programme and she defended the recruitment of black police saying that it would eventually erode the discriminatory attitudes of the force. Also on the programme was a reformed black ex-convict and gang member who was now a community worker trying to get black youths tempted to crime to turn away from it. He was strongly of the opinion that black policemen, in order to demonstrate their impartiality to their colleagues and superiors, were more inclined to be harsh on black youngsters on the street. He was obviously of the opinion that recruiting black policemen would not stop the police force from having a bias towards stopping, searching, harassing and arresting them in disproportionate numbers.
The lady from the police authority took the opposite point of view. Her position gave her a different perspective. As a clash of conceits or views on TV it was fair enough. Ms Abbot was, I think, alluding to this spectacle of blacks arguing on TV when she posted that tweet. Divide and Rule! I don’t think she was alluding to Lord Curzon’s Partition of Bengal.