Damon Conlan's Soapbox

Following the August riots throughout the country, the certain appearance of Historian David Starkey caused what you might ironically call a riot of words.  The BBC received hundreds of complaints from people calling his views on some of the potential roots of the riots racist and having no place in today’s society.
Now whatever you may think, you’re an idiot if you call for views negative to your own being disallowed from being heard; you pour petrol on the free speech Guy Fawkes.

The BBC has received nearly 700 complaints about the historian and broadcaster David Starkey.

People seem to suggest he was singling out a race for the cause of the riots and I don’t think this was the case at all.  He was instead singling out the culture of one community of people, the fact they were black was unimportant; it was just a coincidence. He wasn’t being racist. He was talking about a culture, negative culture. Unfortunately, it involved black people, so he must be racist. The other Newsnight panellists immediately switched off and weren’t listening to him from then on and wouldn’t let him finish his sentences.
Why can’t the culture of one community or society be a negative influence on another? He wasn’t saying anything about skin colour; nothing whatsoever.

Having an opinion about culture is different to saying the cause of the negativity is skin colour. He wasn’t saying it was because they were black. And I don’t think he was targeting the entirety of black culture either, he specifically cited black gang culture (which branches off from other things, obviously). Although even if he was, that can certainly not be about racism. I happen to consider Islam a negative influence on society, same with any other religion, same too of consumerism and hundreds of other things, all of which feature skin colour being coincidental.  Sharia Law would be a negative influence in England, so too Nazi culture, BNP culture, a caste system that segregated a community, a tradition that wouldn’t allow a working class person to marry someone upper-class, all would have a negative influence. Some culture just happens to be bad. Now, if you were an idiot, you might mistake something I said as racist if you only heard me speaking about one of these things, unless you listened; unless you thought.
Non-racists can often get swept into the same category as Nick Griffin by morons. This is particularly the case if you’re negative of Islam, as you may get labelled an Islamophobic.  As an atheist, I hold all religions with equal contempt, so if people assume I was purposefully focusing on Islam because I’ve been swept along by the ring-wing extremists, they are mistaken.
So with regards to Islamophobia (a misnomer), it is very much a term that is extremely unhelpful and confusing. Islam is a religion, and while it has predominantly one ethnicity (largely because of its non-inclusive nature), to disagree with those religious tenants and other Islamic cultural aspects cannot be considered racist. The EDL and the BNP hold a negative view based on mindlessness and skin colour, not logic or reason. The term Islamophobia is used to discredit non-racists just as it is racists, and as you can’t be racist against something that isn’t about race, it is an unhelpful term.

I think that no one stopped to listen to David Starkey fully. Perhaps people should ask what he means by what he said, rather than shut off and stop him from expanding and clarifying; he was cut up constantly.  Take for example, Starkey’s point about gun crime that was completely unacknowledged.
If, say, gun crime in England was carried out mainly by the people of my town, say 81%, I’d fully expect the authorities to be more suspicious of me and be fine with it. The facts are the facts, denying them won’t change them, only dealing with them will. Then the facts can be reassessed, and perhaps foxes or badgers will be stopped at airports more frequently than humans.
If 81% of gun crime happens to be committed by black people (I believe that to be the statistic Starkey quoted, but even if it isn’t, take this as a hypothetical situation), then wouldn’t you feel a requirement to explore why that happened to be the case? Might there not be a problem or issue in that community? And wouldn’t you feel apprehensive about asking the question in fear of being lumped into the same category as Nick Griffin?
Even if he meant the entirety of black culture was largely a negative influence, that’s only racist if he thinks they’re behaving badly because of their skin colour. And if he happens to have concluded wrongly, then that’s all he’s done. Not been racist, just been wrong. If someone says ‘Western Culture’ is degrading the world, I’d examine why, rather than assume it was because a person thought it was because Westerners are White.

So consider how a negative view of Islam might be made by a non-racist, in the same way (and this is the example he gave) as plenty of popular Black rap glorifies guns, violence and treats women as objects. Rap, after all, is black. Starkey got specific. If they’d listened, or let him expound.
He was talking about aspects contained in culture that happens to have black participants and black origins. He needed to label it somehow, so I disagree that skin colour was his focus, and instead suggest it was just an unavoidable label of many aspects of a culture that happened to be black.

To conclude, what I am trying to say is simply this: David Starkey was merely speaking about culture, and skin colour was coincidental. He did not say skin colour was the cause, but culture.

Assume for a moment that he isn’t racist, and listen again, bearing in mind that he was constantly interrupted and halted from expanding his initial statements.  What developed was not a dialogue, but a horrific tennis match when one side was trying to explain themselves and the other was hurling assumptions and abuse, instead of engaging and asking questions.

Assumption, as I believe Oscar Wilde put it, makes an ass out of u and me.