Liberal Tokenism

THERE is nothing the liberal-leftists at the Guardian like more than to raise a 'person of colour' onto a literary pedestal, perhaps to remind us that some of them can actually read and write. Being a glutton for punishment, I tend to peruse the media giant's book section on a daily basis and nine out of ten poets and novelists featured in this category are non-European. That's all well and good if such people had got there purely as a result of their own efforts, but the Guardian has always fallen over backwards to accommodate as many 'people of colour' as possible or called for them to receive numerous literary awards in a curious effort to create a non-White middle-class. Gone are the days when the newspaper would defend the workers from the ravages of capitalism, now it will do anything to provide the illusion that modern progress can be measured by the number of Black and Asian poet laureates. Again, if this were conducted in a meritocratic fashion then all well and good, but it happens to be a combination of English self-loathing and non-White racial hatred.

Take Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah (pictured), for example, an Afro-American writer discussed in an August 2019 Guardian article and whose unique contribution to what is fast becoming a very tired and over-baked dystopian genre is to create a world in which one can visit "a theme park for white people to act out brutal fantasies against people of colour." This, he calls Zimmer World, after the fatal shooting of Trayvon Martin in February 2012. Despite the fact that George Zimmer is actually of mixed German and Afro-Peruvian descent, it appears that we are all to blame. Every single one of us. In fact during the course of his interview, Adjei-Brenyah found it necessary to point out how many White people were sitting in the immediate vicinity. The headline for the Guardian's discussion of Adjei-Brenyah's fictional adventure, Friday Black, quotes the writer himself: "Black people being murdered has become palatable. I want it to be less so." Less so? One would have thought that the murder of innocent people, regardless of colour, was something that should be lamented in its entirely? So eager was the Guardian to quote a Black man with the word 'palatable' in his vocabulary, that they completely failed to realise that he isn't actually making any real sense. Nonetheless, this is precisely what the liberal-leftists adore. Not Black people on their own terms, proud and unfettered, but mere pets of the middle-class establishment who can be used to prop up their own literary forays into reverse racism.