The BBC reports with great excitement that the award for best British independent film at the British Independent Film Awards has been won by ‘Rocks’, a film that cast unknown East London schoolgirls with no acting experience in its main roles and featured improvised dialogue – perhaps the players were unable to learn any of their lines.
Producer Ameenah Ayub Allen said that Rocks was a celebration of female film-making: ‘We were making this film that really had a truly independent spirit. It had a truly independent methodology.’ And one of its stars, Kosar Ali, 17, said, ‘Before this whole experience I never thought I would be who I am today, winning awards and even pursuing this acting career.’ Bukky Bakray, 17, British Nigerian, added that, ‘The disparity of representation in the industry is revolting.’
One’s immediate reaction, though, is pity. Pity for the kids in East London schools who instead of being educated, initiated into the cultural tradition of this country as previous generations of EastEnders were (immigrants included), are fed a diet of multicultural diversity pap that panders to the cult of coloured victimhood. Their every failure, every shortcoming, every deficiency, instead of being recognised for what it is, will be attributed to institutional racism. And when they do achieve success or recognition, everyone will know (though no one will dare say it) that it was not earned the hard way but bestowed by white liberals on a guilt trip.
Pity for the wretched white teachers in those East London secondaries whose every move will be analysed for signs of unconscious bias and microaggressions. These days it is a brave white teacher who admonishes a black child, or questions their ‘attitude’, or the standard of their work. For to do so is to apply white standards, impose white hegemonic norms, reproduce white cultural ‘habitus’, and propagate ‘colour-blind racism’, thereby further marginalising the identities of oppressed racial minorities.
Pity for those kids of all colours whose parents work long hours to educate their children in private schools, to initiate them into the dominant culture, into ‘the best that has been thought and said’. Their kids will learn that when they fail, they have no one to blame but themselves, and that their achievements and successes, when they come, are hard won. If they want to be an actor, or a musician, or an artist, they will have to do it the hard way (RADA or the RCM if they are very lucky), and still be prepared not to realise their ambition, however hard they try, however talented they are. And toughest of all, when they go for an interview or for promotion, they will have to accept that no matter how qualified or talented or hard working they are, they will always lose out to the candidate who can claim minority victim status, cancelled because of their privilege.
And most of all pity for kids who are white but whose parents cannot afford the benefits of private education. An enforced multicultural diversity curriculum in state schools means they are denied access to their own historic cultural inheritance, which is tainted with white colonial privilege and must therefore be deconstructed. No heroes or role models for them. But at the same time, they receive none of the benefits of designated minority or coloured victim status. They lose on all fronts. Their future has been cancelled before it had even begun.
There are some serious matters that pertain, and it seems to me that too many people prefer to joke than to deal with reality.
Humour is important because it keeps us sane. Making the same comment over and over, on the other hand, can get a trifle tedious. The pompous dinner party boor who must always have the last word, on every subject, on every occasion, in every conversation. Why not let others get a look in?
Humour is useful for relief. But sometimes humour is used to distract people from Reality. It is the serious engagement with Reality, while maintaining the ability to laugh at ourselves when we are serious about the wrong things, and then to re-focus on the important matters, that ensures we survive. If we survive, there is the opportunity then to flourish, and perhaps to chuckle.
An articulate summary of the madness the UK is plagued with, James.
It’s vital for the UK, in order to avoid civil war and mayhem, to get away from skin color and ethnic background (and Green economic suicide) and get back to character content and meritocracy (and credible energy policies).
The UK is currently an asylum with the rules and ethos written by the lunatics.
Totally agree. But those of us who paint it in white versus black terms on this website are not helping the argument. Nigel Farage was careful to avoid this. Or perhaps the intention is to get The Salisbury Review shut down. As you say, fight it on character, meritocracy, even equality, and above all culture.
It would help if we who are free do not refer to the foreign populations in our home as “ethnic minorities”. They would be so only if accepted by us natives. In the absence of our consent to their presence they are colonisers. If the political class will respect us sufficiently to ask what we, as the inviolable constitutional sovereign, desire for our children’s future, and if it is our will that the foreign populations shall remain in our home relentlessly replacing us, THEN those populations would rightly be formal British minorities. But, of course, the political class will never respect us, never ask us what we want. For one thing, they know full well what our answer would be. For another, they are, under pressure from other quarters, learning to withdraw from us all human value. In Biden’s America anyone who isn’t [actively] anti-white is a hair’s breadth away from being defined as a “white supremacist” and “domestic terrorist”. That will come here in time. We are living in an age of the relentless self-radicalisation of our ruling class.
I taught Black and Asian girls in Waltham Forest. Among them was the gifted Sharon White who has deservedly been made a Dame. Generally the Black girls and even more so the boys were not especially bright, and were much more boisterous than White and even more so Asian pupils. Sikhs did not like sitting next to Muslims, and one girl complained that I should not be teaching her because I was a man.
The woke rot, however, and now the “blackness” rebellion, started many years ago. One example from my own experience occurred when two left-wing whites said it was racist for me to arrange for shy recent immigrants to learn “survival English” (as government guidance then required) e.g. “come in, open your books, please, look at the ‘chalk’board”,etc. This was reversed during half-term as soon as I told their local community leader, Councillor Bangladesh (sic), producing a furious reaction that was politically disadvantageous to the Labour (SWP in disguise) crowd on the LEA education committee. Much more on this, and on the suicidal “National” Curriculum Committee”, for another time and place.
Shades of Ray Honeyford of past Salisbury Review fame, I think. I suspect David you are retired now from teaching but if not, do you think you could get us some publicity by writing an outrageous article documenting your experiences? Your sacking will quickly follow and then we can all help to make you a cause célèbre. All to the common good.
Seriously, I would very much like to hear more of your Stalinist sounding National Curriculum Committee.
@ James Monteith
I will do this as soon as I can find time. Too many irons in the fire at present. My only “fear” is violence against my Quaker wife, also a retired and indeed gifted teacher. Meanwhile, see if you can get a back copy or photocoy of “The Whole Curriculum” published years ago by the Campaign for Real Education. A key problem has been the infiltration of the civil service by leftism; hence e.g. their twisting of Thatcher’s suggestion of regular primary school pencil & paper checks on the 3 Rs into the burdensome SATS.