As if the London riots haven’t caused enough pain, Tudor historian David Starkey has to come on the BBC and push the knife deeper in the wound!
Starkey was a guest on the BBC’s newscast “Newsnight” recently along with authors Owen Jones and Dedra Say Mitchell to talk about the London riots. Starkey said on the program that the riots were due to “whites [becoming] blacks.”
“What has happened is that the substantial section of chavs that you [Owen Jones] wrote about have become black. The whites have become black,” he said. “A particular sort of violent, destrictive, nihilistic gangster culture has become the fashion. Black and white, boy and girl operate in this language together. This language, which is wholly false, which is this Jamaican patois that has intruded in England. This is whay so many of us have this sense of literally a foreign country.”
Starkey also referred to the Labour MP for Tottenham, David Lammy, who he sad is an “archetypal successful black man” and that “If you turn the screen off, so you were listening to him on the radio, you would think he was white.”
I’m glad Lammy called Starkey out on what he said about him (he said Starkey’s statements were ‘dangerous and divisive). I hate that in this day and age, this type of thinking still exists.
You can watch the video below for yourself, and you can read more about the backlash here at The Guardian.
