Black, British & Brainwashed
Black British Lives Matter was published last year but it was in the news again recently with Black History Month and a mention by Simon Webb on his YouTube channel. Subtitled A Clarion Call For Equality it is edited by Lenny Henry and Marcus Ryder.
It would take up too much space to detail everything that is wrong with it, but here are a few of the loonier points.
For those not familiar with him, Lenny Henry is a so-called comedian, but no performance of his on any stage is half as funny as this book. Marcus Ryder is a journalist and a “diversity champion”. Yeah, right.
Henry dedicates the book to his mother and the Windrush Generation. In the INTRODUCTION, the reader is told “the racism we face is shocking”, and you know exactly what is coming next, a veritable shower of statistics all of which are supposed to prove how hard done by are all blacks who reside in these islands. Well, almost all blacks, because both Henry and his co-author have letters after their names while Henry’s net worth is estimated at $9 million! Nice oppression if you can get it. Thus we are told that Black British women are four times more likely to die in pregnancy than their white counterparts. Are they being murdered by doctors? No! Life expectancy varies by all manner of criteria. The country with the highest life expectancy is Japan at 85.3 years. In the predominantly black Zimbabwe it is a mere 61.89 years. Would any black woman in Britain prefer to give birth there? Black Caribbean kids are twice as likely to be excluded from school as whites. And?
The unemployment rate is double.
If one acknowledges the existence of something called unemployment, that may be true, but then again, so what?
Blacks are four times more likely to be detained under the Mental Health Act. And this is whose fault?
They earn 20% less than whites – except those who are worth $9 million.
Black men have 9.2 less year life expectancy and women have 7.1 times less. In other words, black women are less likely to be stabbed or shot than black men.
An essay is contributed by Nadine White, who writes for The Independent. She tells us
“Racism is the biggest threat to our health”.
Seriously?
She says she has suffered countless microaggressions and macroaggressions from British doctors. The word aggression implies consciousness; one cannot be aggressive towards another person accidentally. Microaggressions are one of the many pathetic grievances of the race lobby, and what does she mean by macroaggressions, has she ever been punched in the face by a doctor?
A third of coronavirus patients are black or Asian. So the coronavirus is racist? Take it up with Xi Jinping.
She blames the poor black diet on the legacy of slavery, seriously. Apparently this was because slaves were fed scraps from Mass’r’s table and this has somehow been incorporated into black culture. Does that include curried goat, Jamaica patties, fried chicken and watermelon?
Blacks have poor quality of sleep and mental health.
That’s hardly surprising if they are living in fear of being jumped by white men wearing MAGA hats on the way home from Subway.
She claims there is only one race, the human race.
Heck, the only people who really believe this claim are liberal whites; that’s why no one riots when white men are beaten up or worse by the police.
This is followed by a conversation between Lenny Henry and David Olusoga – two comedians sharing gags.
Olusoga says Black Lives Matter has been dismissed as political.
No, David, it’s a scam, its initials actually stand for Buy Large Mansions; it has been exposed especially by Candace Owens.
Then we have a contribution from Doreen Lawrence who compares her son with George Floyd. Hmm, Stephen Lawrence was an 18 year old straight A student who wanted to become an architect. He was the victim, not of so-called racism, but of a toxic knife culture that infected many British youths in 1993 (when he was murdered) and still does, but only because guns are illegal here. George Floyd was a forty something drug addict with a lengthy rap sheet including a stretch for an armed home invasion robbery. Sure you don’t want to rethink that, Doreen?
Breonna Taylor gets a mention.
AK Nation had made a series of videos about the life and death of trap queen Breonna.
There follows a list of black who died allegedly in the custody of the British police together with the years they died. None of their names are capitalised, but they will be here:
Cherry Groce 1985
Cynthia Jarrett 1985
Joy Gardner 1993
Roger Sylvester 1999
Sean Rigg 2008
Jimmy Mubenga 2010
Smiley Culture 2011
Mark Duggan 2011
Sarah Reed 2016
Mzee Mohammed-Daley 2016
Dalian Atkinson 2016
Trevor Smith 2019
This list is said to be lifted from a Vice article by Paula Akpan: Say Their Names: 12 Victims of Police and State Brutality in the UK. Let’s see if it survives a fact check. 1985 was a bad year for the Metropolitan Police. On September 26, armed police arrived at the home of Cherry Groce looking for her son who was wanted in connection with an armed robbery on a jeweller. Although only 19 he had amassed 42 convictions from 14 separate court appearances (according to a report in the Times, October 1, 1985). Although the British police are nowhere near as trigger happy as their American brethren, Mrs Groce was shot in the raid and was left paralysed for life. She died in 2011! The Groce shooting led to rioting in Brixton with many shops set on fire. Perhaps Mr Henry and his chums can explain the nexus between the shooting and the fires.
In March 1986, Michael Groce was given a slap on the wrist for two firearms offences and walked free from Southwark Crown Court. In view of his previous convictions, he would normally have received a heavy sentence but the court was clearly sympathetic to him. He was said to have blamed himself for his mother’s predicament. He turned over a new leaf, about the only good thing to come out of this incident. It goes without saying that the police officer who shot Mrs Groce was cleared, of malicious wounding in his case. The jury at the Central Criminal Court accepted that the revolver discharge had been accidental.
The death of Cynthia Jarrett was a few days after the shooting of Cherry Groce. As with Mrs Groce, the police raided her home looking for her son. She was said to have been pushed by a police officer. Whether or not she was, the 49 year old literally dropped dead from a heart attack. According to her daughter quoted in the Times on November 28, 1985, Cynthia Jarrett weighed 24 stone. A woman so grossly overweight can drop dead at any time, so was it really so surprising she did? What Paula Akpan doesn’t mention is that there was an actual murder that day. Cynthia Jarrett lived on the Broadwater Farm Estate, and PC Keith Blakelock died there in the resulting riot, his head was nearly hacked off. Police brutality indeed.
We need not waste too much time on the other names on this list, but we will.
Joy Gardner died during the course of violently resisting a lawful arrest. She suffered a brain injury. It remains to be seen if this injury was partially or wholly self-inflicted.
Roger Sylvester was deemed by an inquest to have been unlawfully killed; he was clearly mentally disturbed when arrested naked banging on his own front door.
Sean Rigg was another mental case who was arrested after a struggle.
The death of Jimmy Mubenga had nothing to do with the police. He was being kicked out of Britain after serving a prison sentence. He was resisting three hired security guards as he was forced onto a plane. If he hadn’t resisted, he wouldn’t have died, whatever the failings of the guards.
Smiley Culture was a sad case. He had a brief, successful career as a singer-songwriter in the 1980s but later turned to crime, in particular importing cocaine. Although technically in police custody he stabbed himself in the chest during a raid on his home.
The death of Mark Duggan was certainly suspicious, though once again it was used as a pretext by mischief makers and plain criminals as a pretext for large scale rioting and looting, the so-called English riots.
Sarah Reed had indeed been the victim of a violent arrest in 2012, but her death four years later had absolutely nothing to do with the police. Another mental case, she was on remand in Holloway Prison charged with grievous bodily harm with intent – an extremely serious offence. She strangled herself.
Mzee Mohammed-Daley was a teenager, and yet another mental case. His death was very public but he was ruled to have died from natural causes. Having said that, he deserves some sympathy; in January 2014 he was the victim of a brutal knife attack which left him paranoid.
Dalian Atkinson had been a professional footballer but in later life his health had deteriorated and he was on dialysis. He had heart as well as kidney problems. On August 15, 2016, the police were called by his brother Ernest who said Dalian had “lost it”. He had assaulted and threatened to kill his father. When the police arrived, he was tasered three times; he was also kicked in the head. Two police officers were charged in connection with his death, one with murder, which does seem a tad excessive. Eventually, the female officer was cleared but PC Monk was convicted of manslaughter, an almost unique conviction (see below). Paula Akpan gets half a point for this one.
The final name on this list is Trevor Smith, who was yet another mental case. He had threatened a former love interest and had sent her a WhatsApp message showing a gun on his sofa. The gun turned out to be an imitation, but the police didn’t know that. Smith was shot during a stand-off. This list is truly amazing but even more amazing is that arguably the two most outrageous such cases have been omitted from the list and almost certainly not even researched.
In 1998, Christopher Alder was assaulted outside a Hull nightclub which left him with a head injury. He was taken to hospital but began acting in what was called an extremely troublesome manner. Somewhat surprisingly, the staff appear to have dismissed him as drunk; a head injury can make someone behave in all manner of strange ways. Alder was arrested, taken to the police station, and left to die on the floor of the custody suite.
Bad as the Christopher Alder case was, it pales into insignificance with the treatment meted out to Uggy Oluwale. Oluwale was a Nigerian national who arrived in Britain as a stowaway in 1949. Somehow he ended up as a tramp on the streets of Leeds until his body was fished out of the River Aire in May 1969. He spent time in both prisons and psychiatrist hospitals. For some reason, in 1968 he became the victim of a sustained campaign of abuse by two police officers - not mere constables but Inspector Geoffrey Ellerker and Sergeant Kenneth Kitching. Their prosecution was covered in depth by the Daily Mirror. There was no suggestion that Oluwale was murdered, but he was quite likely driven to suicide. They stood trial at Leeds Assizes (now Leeds Crown Court) for manslaughter, grievous bodily harm and perjury in November 1971. According to the Daily Mirror, Kitching said “I tickled him with my boot” but admitted he was ashamed of how he had behaved.
On November 25, 1971, the paper reported that Ellerker had been sentenced to three years and Kitching to 27 months on four charges of assault. They were cleared of all the other charges, including manslaughter.
This was by far the worst such case of police brutality in English policing, certainly in the modern era, but although most pundits put a racial spin on it, people who know how the police operate, know better. There are plenty of videos on YouTube and other websites that show white police officers abusing whites – including women; black police officers abusing blacks and whites; Chinese police officers abusing...und so weiter.
That was long and depressing, so let’s end on an up note. Last month, a black woman named Jessika Inaba qualified as a barrister, nothing unusual about that, you say. Except that she is blind. She is believed to be the first blind black female barrister in Britain.
When Nadine White in particular has finished whining about how badly she is treated, she might like to reflect on this. She is one of the most privileged women ever to have lived thanks to the genius of mostly long dead white men, including a gent named Louis Braille.
[The above article was first published in two parts on November 6, 2022. One word has been altered. Originally, I wrote that Sarah Reed hanged herself. She actually strangled herself.]