The Rise of the Black Baroness

Colin Liddell
Occidental Observer
April 18, 2014

 

Given that Baroness Doreen Lawrence, the mother of murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence, is now being touted as Labour’s candidate to fight the London mayoral elections in 2016, it is time to reconsider the complexities of British multiculturalism and how the Black population and Britain relate to each other.

The central problem is that because of real average differences in traits like IQ, Blacks simply don’t fit into White societies, like Britain, that prize “equality.” Most people, of course, know this at a gut level, but on the conscious level there is still a lot of brainwashing, denial, and disinformation, backed up by extremely fuzzy thinking.

People in these societies have been taught that “equality” is a sacred and moral value, so they are naturally reluctant to face up to the awkward fact of continuing Black inequality. It simply does not square with their declared values and actual equality of opportunity that other non-White groups like Asians have no trouble taking advantage of.

The only way out of this paradox is for the society to generate the idea of “racism” and create the myth that Blacks are held back by “evil, racist” White people.

The problem with this, however, is that because these societies are dominated by egalitarian values and the idea that anything “bad” from the past should and can be reformed, they constantly undermine any objective basis for actual racial discrimination with the result that ever more abstruse and chimerical forms of it have to be found or conceptualized.

Unlike parts of America, which once had a system of apartheid, with some laws that could be described as “race laws,” the UK has never had any racial element in its laws, so, when Blacks from the Caribbean started to colonize the British Isles from the 1940s onwards, there was no legal basis for explaining Black inequality as the result of “racism.”

Instead two other ideas were invoked, namely the ideas of (1) assimilative lag and (2) unofficial racism said to stem from the attitudes of certain members of the majority population.

The idea of assimilative lag was compatible with the dominant egalitarian ethos because it hypothesized that any immigrant group would simply be unequal until it assimilated. In Britain in the 1950s and 1960s it was still possible to view Blacks in this way, especially as the first generation of Black immigrants were ostensibly keen to fit in and “become British.” Even today, ludicrously British-sounding names such as “Winston” (from British PM Churchill’s first name) are common among Afro-Caribbeans in the UK.

However, because it is a false hypothesis and because it has a built-in time-obsolesence, the idea of assimilative lag soon had to be abandoned on both sides. The second generation of Blacks, instead of redoubling their efforts to be accepted by the general population, went in what can be called a more alienated and identitarian direction, typified by the unemployable weed-smoking Rastafarian or the gangster Yardie.

Because of this, British society with its stubbornly egalitarian ethos had to fall back on the idea of “unofficial racism,” that Blacks were being held back — literally forced into crime, poverty, and familial dysfunction — by unofficial racism, despite the much greater opportunities offered to them by British society as opposed to their countries of origin.

Unfortunately, even the basis for believing in unofficial racism had been severely undermined by the Race Relations Acts of 1965 and 1968, which greatly constrained the ways in which individuals who wished to dissociate with Blacks could express their preference, by making it illegal to not serve a person at a restaurant or to refuse housing, employment, or public services “on the grounds of colour, race, ethnic or national origins.”

Rather than reforming a racist system, these laws merely served to shrilly emphasize the non-racial character of pre-existing British society. But they also emphasized the growing mismatch between natural Black inequality and Britain’s egalitarian ethos. This paradox presented fertile political ground for any party that chose to exploit it, so that even the National Front with its crude sloganeering (“If they’re Black send them back,” etc.), thuggish image, and rambunctious street politics was able to make considerable progress.

To avoid exploitation of the paradox in this way, the British establishment responded with a variety of tactical measures, including media propaganda, demonization, infiltration of nationalist groups, etc., but its deeper strategic response can be divided into two main strands: (1) “prejudice mining” and (2) “bundling” — two terms which I have had to coin because they don’t already exist in a political context.

• Prejudice Mining

In the same way that data mining extracts new information from pre-existing data, “prejudice mining” enables states to “extract” new forms of prejudice from behaviour that in previous years would not be considered prejudice by anybody. But whereas data mining uses a variety of techniques such “cluster analysis,” “anomaly detection,” and “association rule mining” to get objectively verifiable results, prejudice mining is much more subjective and politically driven.

The typical modus operandi involves “political spotlighting,” namely the selection of a specific area for analysis, based purely on political considerations and amenability to media exploitation, and then measuring any inequality of outcome against an assumption of absolute natural equality.

Where no unfair discrimination exists by a standard of common sense, “prejudice mining” can then postulate such explanations as “institutional racism,” “a hostile environment or culture,” “micro-aggressions,” or “a legacy of racism,” which can then be backdated as much is required. On the basis of this, it can then prescribe various forms of “reverse” prejudice, such as “diversity training” and job quotas.

An obvious analogy exists with the methods of the Witchfinders in the late medieval and early modern periods, with the earlier assumption that the Devil must exist being analogous to the assumption that natural equality must exist and must be uncovered at all costs.

The initiation of this system can be dated to the 1976 Race Relations Act, which established the Commission for Racial Equality and thus the racial grievance industry.

• Bundling

The weaknesses of the Race Relations Acts were twofold:

Firstly, they were founded on a pretence of hostile discrimination based on mistaken notions of group equality, when the objective evidence correlated with a wide range of other examples of immigration suggests that Britain was unnaturally welcoming and indulgent to the incomers, and certainly more so than they deserved on their merits.

Secondly, the Race Relations Acts brought the Black-White divide into sharp focus, leading to clear race consciousness on both sides and a tendency towards objectivism about the underlying natural group inequalities.

The Race Relations Acts of 1965, 1968, and 1976 had two unforeseen outcomes. They bolstered Black paranoia and feelings of being persecuted, but also created antipathy among Whites, especially working-class Whites, who instinctively realized that far from Blacks being protected against an unfair system they were simply being singled out for preferential treatment.

The rise of so-called “Far Right” parties in the UK can partially be interpreted as a response to these Race Relations Acts. The history of the National Front seems to fit this trajectory rather neatly, with the party being founded in 1967 and enjoying its greatest popularity in the late 1970s.

To offset the polarizing effects of focusing on Black inequality, the British establishment developed a strategy of obfuscation with the issues surrounding Black inequality increasingly being bundled together with other “equality” issues, involving such things as gender, religion, sexual orientation, and disabilities.

It is telling that the 1976 Act was the last Race Relations Act, or, more accurately, the last piece of racial legislation to openly declare itself as racial in its title. Increasingly race issues were linked to other issues in such a way as to disingenuously broaden the base of support.

In a similar way the Commission for Racial Equality, which was actually serving to remind Working Class Whites of how they were discriminated against, also underwent a crafty name change. In 2004 it was decided to “merge” it into a new single equalities body, the Equality and Human Rights Commission.

The Baroness

The central paradox of British multiculturalism demanded resolution at a higher level of truth, but by these processes of “prejudice mining” and “bundling” the British establishment was able to avoid the inevitable contradictions that arise from endemic racial inequality in a non-discriminatory country with a strong egalitarian culture.

This leads us back to the case of Doreen Lawrence, the Jamaican immigrant mother of Stephen Lawrence, an eighteen-year old man who was stabbed to death in 1993 in what would have been a quickly forgotten incident, had it not suited the precise purposes of the political establishment to turn it into a cause célèbre.

Many people claim to be surprised by the degree to which Doreen Lawrence is feted and fawned on by the UK establishment and its media, but the process, such as it is, actually makes perfect sense.

In 1998 the Turner Prize-winning elephant dung artist Chris Ofili created an “artwork” called “No Woman No Cry,” which is said to be a portrait of Lawrence crying.

In 2003 she was awarded an OBE, and in 2013 she became a life peer, as Baroness Lawrence of Clarendon, taking her peerage name from the place in Jamaica where the Lawrence family chose to bury their son.

While these can be seen as generous gestures aimed at appeasing an alienated community, there has also been a lot of political overspill.

In 1999 the MacPherson Report, the epitome of “prejudice mining,” was published. In this report various run-of-the-mill policing mistakes were picked on to support a super-theory that the entire Metropolitan Police Force was “institutionally racist.”

The broader implication of this was that other police forces, and in fact other large groups or organizations dominated by White people, especially White males, were also institutionally racist and should therefore be subjected to various forms of “re-education” and “affirmative action.”

The rise and rise of Doreen Lawrence, whose main assets are simply her Blackness and victim status, is thus propelled by the undying need to explain Black inequality in stubbornly egalitarian Britain.

The next step seems to be to put her in a position of political power, with the latest rumours being that the Labour Party wants her to be their candidate for the next London mayoral elections.

The Absent Father

Oddly much less is heard of her husband Neville Lawrence. In 1999 Doreen filed for a divorce, possibly feeling “empowered” by the celebrity status brought to her by her son’s death.

Also, Neville doesn’t quite fit the desired narrative in the same way that Doreen does. As mentioned in a 2012 profile in the Guardian, he is a quarter Jewish and was actually brought up by his Jewish grandmother.

“He was brought up in Jamaica by his paternal grandmother. She was white and Jewish, and he believed she was his mother. ‘My grandmother would come to school and I’d think, why have all the other kids got a black mother and why have I got a white one?’ But Jamaica was a tolerant place, he says — nobody asked questions. ‘Till the day she died I called her mum.”

Because of this heritage, in interviews, such as the one in the Guardian, he has a tendency to conflate two separate victim narratives in an unhelpful way, talking about how he was “unfairly” denied jobs in “racist” 1960s Britain, and then switching to the Holocaust.

In the article, when the journalist asks what kept him going in the face of his tragedy, he is quick to mention an old Jewish woman he met at the BBC. It is almost as if the more intellectually dominant and vociferous part of his ancestry is chiming in:

“She was an old Jewish woman and she introduced herself to me and said she had heard about my son’s death, and she said she’s Esther Burstein and she was in Auschwitz. She said a day or two before the Americans liberated the camp, the Germans started to kill everybody, and she lost all her family in one day, from her mother to her aunt to her little cousins, and the only reason she wasn’t dead was because she was underneath a pile of dead people. I said, ‘How did you survive?’, and she said, ‘I kept quiet for 15 years, and for that 15 years it was hell’, and it was only when she started talking to people that she started to earn release. She said, ‘You’ve got to talk and let it out. If you don’t, you’re going to go mad, because it’s going to eat you up inside.’”

Such crude linkage to the excesses of Nazism would not necessarily serve the desired political agenda, as few people would be inclined to equate the diffidence of employers or the politically incorrect nature of police canteen banter with the worst excesses of the Third Reich.

Also, any attention on Neville might also remind people that Stephen Lawrence was in fact one eighth Jewish, raising questions about why this particular case, among several other ones in which Blacks were victims, received so much attention. For these reasons, Doreen is a much more suitable figurehead of Black victimhood.

While the prominence given to Doreen Lawrence serves a function for the British establishment, it must be careful not to overplay its hand and start believing its own propaganda. Over-promoting ethnics can often have the opposite effect to the one desired. The Black MP Diane Abbot, who clearly owes her position in the Labour Party to box-ticking affirmative action, is a case in point.

Although Doreen Lawrence is able to speak reasonably well to sympathetic TV hosts on the narrow subject of her own son’s death and a few “equality” issues, she has nothing to suggest talents for higher office.

Rather than proving to be a shining example of Black female talent and therefore the “natural equality of the races,” any attempt to elevate Lawrence beyond her talents, would have the opposite effect, reminding people that Black inequality has nothing to do with White racism and that Blacks tend to get ahead by playing the victim card. In this sense, the elevation of Baroness Lawrence to Mayor of London is a thing to be devoutly wished for. And why stop there? Prime Minister Lawrence would be even better.