Jack Montgomery, Breitbart
BBC Newsnight has given a self-styled ‘black radical’ free rein to insist that the West is “built on racism” and black people should unite to secure reparations and stage a “revolution”.
Kehinde Andrews, who was appointed Britain’s first ever professor of ‘black studies’ at the publicly-funded Birmingham City University, was invited to the publicly-funded broadcaster’s flagship news programme to speak to Emily Maitlis about his new book, Back to Black: Retelling Black Radicalism for the 21st Century.
The academic appears to be a favourite of the media giant, having also been filmed for a BBC 3 segment in which he argued the English flag should be scrapped — in part because he believes the English were “flying this flag during the Crusades, and going around through Muslim countries trying to convert them” — just last month, and for another Newsnight segment in which he argued British sports stars should “take a knee or clench a fist” during the British national anthem” because the country’s flag represents “oppression” last October.
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“Well, it’s two things,” the academic replied. “One, is the unity of all people of African descent, both in the African continent and across the diaspora, and the second one is understanding that racism is in the DNA of this system and no reform or no legislation can change that, and nothing short of revolution can bring freedom to black people.”
Andrews was clear that, in his view, “white supremacy” is “still with us today” — and is, in fact, the basis of the global economy.
Maitlis opted not to challenge any of Andrews’s claims — by pointing out their fundamentally ethno-nationalist basis or the fact he is able to live from a well-remunerated sinecure at a publicly-funded university in a Western country despite the West’s alleged racism, for example — and moved on to ask him about the revolutionary experience in Haiti, which features prominently in his book.
Andrews claimed it was the revolution there that precipitated the end of the slave trade, “not the morality of Britain” — despite the country investing massive sums outfitting Royal Navy squadrons to clamp down on European slavers in the Atlantic, taking military action against Islamic slavers on the Barbary Coast of North Africa, and forcing the Zanzibar Sultanate to end its participation in the ancient East African slave trade after crushing its rulers in a war which lasted under an hour in 1896.
Andrews also neglected to mention that the Haitian revolution concluded with leader Jean-Jacques Dessalines ordering the massacre of every white man, woman, and child on the island with only a handful of exceptions.
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The BBC charter requires the corporation and its staff to show due impartiality as the price of its license fee money, but critics of the broadcaster suggest this is weakly enforced.