This shows just how extreme ideologies of diversity and affirmative can be taken so that they end up looking very much like the old racist institutions of apartheid and segregation they were supposed to combat. A few days ago I caught some of the Conservative sites on YouTube talking about the opening of a cafe for Whites only at the University Michigan. Amazingly, this seems to have been done by their Centre for Social Inclusion, which at least speaks the language of diversity, rather than old style White racial supremacists. The hosts of the American Conservatives YouTube news channel, Timscast, have put up a piece about it, in which they blame White liberal writers on race and racism for this development. Specifically Robin Di Angelo. Di Angelo’s the author of a bestselling book, White Fragility, and has said that she feels uncomfortable in the presence of Blacks. I think her book is supposed to be an expose of White racism and is a piece of polemic aimed at combating anti-Black racism. But the presenters of Timscast decided that she was a racist herself, who really wants Whites and Blacks to be segregated and the creation of such Whites only spaces.

This came just after Donald Trump passed a law banning the teaching of critical race theory in the police and other federal departments. They haven’t been proscribed at right. They can still be taught privately elsewhere. They just can’t be taught in the various organs of the federal state. Sargon of Gasbag, the Sage of Swindon, has put out his video hailing it as a true anti-racist measure. From what I gather, Critical Race Theory teaches that all Whites are racist, and that the American state and its institutions are therefore also racist.

Kimberle Crenshaw

In his video, the man who broke UKIP reads out excerpts from the introduction of Kimberle Crenshaw’s Critical Race Theory, published in 1996. This is an anthology of texts about the theory. It states that it had its origins in the 1970s amongst a group of White Marxist legal scholars, New Left and Counterculture activists in a Conference for Critical Law Studies. This brought together law professors, students and practicing lawyers, who were subsequently called ‘the Crits’. This led to the foundation of Critical Legal Studies. The focus on race and racism emerged following the departure of Derek Bell, a Black law professor, left Harvard. Bell’s students demanded he be replaced by another Black tutor. When the university refused to grant this, they set up an alternative course continuing Bell’s teaching. This was the first institutional use of Critical Race Theory. These Black activists also attacked Critical Legal Studies itself, most of whose members were White, as a site of hierarchy and power. These were the Critical Race Crits, who split from the Marxists on the issue of racism. They were dissatisfied with the Marxists’ explanation of racism as a function or creation of capitalism.

No, this is a Crite from the movie Critters. Not a Crit.

Critical Race Theory and its supporters reject the ideas of colour blindness, integration and assimilation and the mainstream Civil Rights movement, which they believe has been appropriated by liberal ideologies. This includes Martin Luther King’s dictum that a man should be judged on his character, rather than his colour. As part of this, they have also attacked the Supreme Court’s support for a colour-blind attitude to race. They instead turned to radical Black movements like the Black Panthers, advocating the development of Black racial consciousness to attack and undermine the existing racial order.

There’s a clip on YouTube, which has been used by a number of Conservative vloggers like Sargon’s Romanian friend, Vee, which clearly demonstrates the Critical Race Theorists’ own racism towards Whites. This is of a young Black American woman, Ashleigh Shackleford, telling a roomful of Whites that, as White people, they are all racist and nothing they can do will change it. She doesn’t mean to offend them, but they are all demons to her. This attitude isn’t just confined to her. My mother encountered a similar attitude amongst a group of anti-racism activists brought into her school to teach anti-racism following the race riots of 1981/2. They also made unwarranted assumptions based on class and Whiteness. One of them told Mum that she had to be racist, because she was White and middle class. Mum was naturally not impressed, not least because she grew up on a council estate in Bristol. She told the woman that she didn’t know her.

Sargon attacked the Critical Race Theorists’ advocacy of Black racial consciousness by arguing that it also legitimates White supremacy. White racists can use it to argue that, if Black racial consciousness is legitimate, then it must also be for Whites. In fact, the Critical Race Theorists strongly reject and attack any comparison between their attitude and White racism. But Sargon has a point, and it does seem supported by the opening of the Whites only café by Michigan University as a socially inclusive gesture.

Way back in the 1990s, the Financial Times discussed the development of what it called liberal apartheid in a review of a book on the British Empire. The FT complained, if I remember aright, that while the book covered migration and the movement of peoples across the world during the Empire, it said nothing about the reverse colonisation that occurred afterwards. It used this term to mean the immigration to Britain of non-Whites from former colonies. And it used liberal apartheid to describe the various services that are available only to Blacks and other ethnic minorities. It considered these as one of the forces responsible for the increased separation of Whites and Blacks into different communities.

I’ve no doubt that pro-Black anti-racists would angrily reject terms like ‘reverse colonisation’ and ‘liberal apartheid’ because of the comparison they make between non-White immigration and affirmative action and White imperialism and colonisation. But liberal apartheid is a suitable description for some of these policies. For example, New York University has started building Blacks only student accommodation at the request of its Black students, who don’t want to room with Whites. One university somewhere also opened a student centre, that was exclusively for the use of non-Whites, including Blacks, Asians, Hispanics and indigenous Americans. There’s another clip on YouTube of a Black woman telling the Whites that were in there to leave. In Britain there are also Black only housing blocks, at least in London. I’ve no doubt these separate spaces and policies supporting ethnic minorities were set up in response to a genuine need. The Black housing blocks in London were set up because Blacks had trouble getting accommodation. But it is also itself a form of segregation.

And when this policy of creating separate spaces for ethnic groups, who feel marginalised and at risk, is applied to Whites, as now seems to have happened at the University of Michigan, the liberal apartheid of affirmative action looks very much like its old version designed to exclude and marginalise Blacks and people of colour.

And it also shows how bizarre extreme ideologies by Black anti-racists are, that Donald Trump, a racist himself, many of whose supporters are real racists and White supremacists, suddenly appears to be an anti-racist by banning them.

I’m not going to link to them, but here are the titles of the videos I’ve cited if you want to google them on YouTube.

Sargon’s video has the title ‘Major Win for Patriots: Trump Bans Critical Race Theory’.

Vee’s video is ‘What Is Critical Race Theory and Why Did Trump Ban It?’

The Timscast video is ‘Segregation Resurfaces as WHITES-ONLY Cafe Is Opened At a College in the Name of INCLUSION’.

Heaven help me, I can’t believe I’m actually defending something tweeted by the Fuhrage. On Saturday Zelo Street put up an article about a series of tweets by the man 2000 AD’s ‘Judge Dredd’ satirised as the anti-immigrant politician, Bilious Barrage. These revealed just how racist Farage is.

The tweets themselves were the standard right-wing stuff going around at the moment. Attacks on the BBC and the Finnish conductor for not singing ‘Rule, Britannia’ because they’re all unpatriotic, woke leftists. Asylum seekers being put up in hotels and defended by lefty activist lawyers, Brexit and the demand that we should be able to control our borders and a rant hyping his piece for the Telegraph about ‘cultural Marxism’. A phrase which has very definite anti-Semitic overtones, coming as it does from the Nazis’ idea of Kulturbolschevismus – cultural Bolshevism – and their conviction that traditional European culture was under attack from within by Commie Jews, as part of the worldwide Jewish conspiracy for world domination.

I agree with Zelo Street’s general point. I think Nige is a racist, and at times his carefully crafted image of being an ordinary bloke fighting to preserve traditional British culture does slip to reveal real Fascism beneath. But in one of the tweets cited by Zelo Street, Nige does have a point.

This tweet linked to a report about New York University now building segregated student housing for Blacks only. Zelo Street followed this up with a quote from Gore Vidal about the leader of American Conservatism, William S. Buckley and his support for racial segregation: To borrow the words of Gore Vidal, Farage, like William F Buckley, would have been over at the Wallace headquarters stitching hoods.

I think this is a misreading and Farage is condemning it. And he’s right to do so.

If this is the same story I’m thinking of, then it’s been around for several months now. It started with a video that was widely shared by Conservative YouTubers of Black students at the uni making statements before the university authorities that they did not feel safe rooming with Whites, and demanding segregated accommodation reserved only for Blacks. This is segregation, even if it is coming from Blacks and is demanded for their benefit. The kids making these statements are clearly genuinely scared, but it is also an expression of anti-White prejudice. The Black students made these representations, I gather, after a series of threatening, anti-Black racist posters were put up around campus.

It isn’t hard to understand their fear, given the history of official racist violence in American culture. Jim Crow and segregations, lynchings and whatever threats these kids and their families may have suffered in their own personal histories. And there does seem a culture of pro-Black racial segregation already on some American campuses. Another video shared by right-wing YouTubers is of an angry Black woman, another student, telling White students to get out of a study area reserved for Blacks and people of colour. It’s more anti-White racism, and what the Financial Times has described as ‘liberal apartheid’. I don’t think we have that culture of liberal racist separatism in British academia here yet, but I’ve no doubt it’s coming. Sargon of Gasbag, the man who broke UKIP, put up a video a few weeks ago reporting that Britain’s first all-Black university has now opened. I don’t doubt that the people behind it are copying the Black American colleges and universities, which began in the 19th and early 20th century by the great founders of the Civil Rights movements to prepare Blacks for taking their rightful place as equal members of society. They appeared during segregation. We didn’t quite have this in Britain and don’t have these colleges. And at a time when academia is under pressure to give more places to Black and Asian students, and open up the profession to more women and ethnic minorities, the founding of such a university looks less anti-racist than simple anti-White racism. It’s segregation with a Black face, and no doubt a lot of verbiage about Black empowerment, diversity and inclusion.

Back to New York University, the demands for racially segregated accommodation would be angrily dismissed and the students making such demands expelled if it came from Whites. It would rightly be seen as racist, and the product of racist views that see Blacks as particularly degraded, animalistic, criminal and a threat to White culture and racial purity. You’d have mass demonstrations and protests by people proclaiming that these views have no place on campus.

But if the construction of such all-Black halls of residence are a response to White racist mischief making, then the White supremacists have won. They’ve played on Black prejudice and racial fears to destroy racial integration and reimpose a kind of apartheid.

If you look at the tweet Farage links to, there’s a piece at the bottom comparing it to the drinking fountains in Black schools during segregation with an ironic line about ‘separate but equal’. This old lie is graphically exposed in the ’80s film, Mississippi Burning, about two White FBI agents breaking up a Klan chapter after the murder of a group of civil rights activists. It’s a great film, but it was also widely criticised itself for racism by having as its heroes White FBI agents, who are shown rescuing powerless Blacks. It was also attacked on the grounds that, while based on a real incident, the FBI at the time under J. Edgar Hoover hated the Civil Rights movement. Hoover believed it was a Communist front, and did everything he could to spy on it and harass its members.

But it opens with a scene showing two children at a water fountain. One’s Black, the others White. The water fountain for Black child is dirty and stained with verdigris and mould. That for the White child is pristine clean. It’s a graphic statement that, whatever else Blacks were under segregation, they were definitely not equal.

Racism needs to be fought, no matter what colour it has or claims to be defending. And Farage, heaven help us! – is right to call it out in this tweet.

Not that it changes what Farage himself is. He’s wretched videos have been widely covered by right-wing radio host Alex Belfield, another one who claims not be racist but the ‘voice of reason’. Belfield has approvingly commented on and defended Farage turning up at hotels putting up asylum seekers. And some how I don’t think it’s an accident – do you? – that the anti-Muslim Fascist outfit Britain First rocked up at one of these hotels to protest.

Belfield claims not be racist. But he and Farage are certainly playing to a racist crowd. Go down the comments section on his videos about immigration, Black Lives Matter and so forth, and you’ll see that while some of them make perfectly reasonable comments and criticism from a mainstream anti-racist viewpoint, there are a sizable number who are bitterly racist, posting venom about immigration and ranting about the Kalergi Plan. This is another conspiracy theory that claims that there’s a secret globalist, proto-EU plan to import Blacks and other non-White immigrants in order to break up the White societies of Europe. And then there’s the related mythology of the ‘Great Replacement’, and its underlying anti-Semitism. This is all being done, according to these poisonous myths, by the Jews. It’s yet another continuation of Nazi ideology.

This is the crowd that Farage and Belfield are playing to. And it’s despicable. But Farage’s own criticism of segregated student housing at New York University is actually anti-racist. It’s just a pity that it comes from him.