Minister Olukemi Olufunto Badenoch fighting pseudo ‘culture war’

Lessons from Don Quixote

The 17th century classic novel of Don Quixote written by Miguel de Cervantes, widely regarded as one of the greatest writers in the Spanish language is now a standard text in schools and considered one of the great founding works of modern Western literature.

The novel revolves around the adventures of a bold and chivalrous Knight seeking to maintain and uphold honour and integrity in a dramatically changing world.

In one of the most quoted passages of the book, the brave knight and his earnest and witty sidekick Sancho Panza, come across a field of windmills. Don Quixote, having never seen windmills before, determines they are giants and declares that he will fight them and take their riches. Sancho implores him not to do so for they are only windmills. Ignoring the wise advice Don Quixote charges, the windmills only to be roundly knocked off his horse and injured by the spinning turbines.

Wednesday's debate

Yesterday saw Tory equalities Minister Olukemi Olufunto Badenoch ( Kemi as she likes to be known), just like the fabled Knight Don Quixote, metaphorically "tilting at windmills".

Badenoch was engaged in an interesting parliamentary debate with Dawn Butler MP. Butler had raised the critical issue of ensuring history in the national curriculum, as taught in schools was inclusive of the past of all the people of Brexit Britain. Her point was that the teaching of history in schools should reflect the rich, diverse and increasingly multicultural history of these islands.

Nothing controversial about that. In this post-Black Lives Matter era there discussions taking place all over the world about the need for a paradigm shift in how we view racism and the need for genuinely inclusive democracies that respect human rights and tackle anti-black racism. Everywhere across the world that is, except Britain.

Here we see Brexit Britain and Tory politicians engaged in a melancholy and reactionary reflection on the glories of the Empire in a desperate attempt to establish a new national vision.

As the debate unfolded in Parliament, Badenoch sallied forth declaring unprovoked:

"the government does not want children being taught about white privilege and their inherited racial guilt".

She continued:

"Any school which teaches these elements of political race theory as fact, or which promote partisan political views such as defunding the police, without offering a balanced treatment of opposing views, is breaking the law,"

It mattered not that most in the chamber did not know what critical race theory or that the issue of it being taught in our schools had ever caused alarm by worried constituents. Just to be sure I checked Hansard for any references and found not a single mention of it anywhere in the Parliamentary record, ever, which is a long time.

However, these are desperate times for some and many of those as we’ve seen return to default settings and sing “rule Britannia” and raise the Union Jack.

The late Stuart Hall before his passing in 2014.

The late great Prof Stuart Hall, one of our greatest intellectual minds offers a more elegant analysis in his seminal book written in 1979 in "Policing the crisis; Mugging, the State and Law and Order". Prof Hall deconstructs the then Thatcher governments political strategy of creating a racialised and primarily manufactured "moral panics". A political process designed to demonise black communities, justifying repressive law and order legislation using racialised tropes and stereotypes to ram home an insidious message.

Olukemi Olufunto Badenoch MP channelling Margaret Thatcher revisited that strategy yesterday by rounding on Dawn Butler MP and attacking a "crisis" that does not exist in any real or meaningful way.

Firstly, she attacks a body of academic work that is "critical race theory" and determines that it's teaching in our schools is "illegal". Since when has the teaching of a variety of non-violent academic perspectives become an illegal act? Others have rightly argued this type can only be seen as “Racist censorship by the a Minister that is supposed to stand up against racism”.

The very nature of racism requires the distribution of power and quality accompanied by an in-depth discussion within Western societies about the need to look again at national mythologies and top-down imposed histories. Antiracism, at its core, requires critical analysis of the implicit nature of racialised power (white privilege) that informs the real reality of systemic racism and racial discrimination (black disadvantage).

And one wouldn't have to go too far back in history to illustrate the need for a new national narrative; the discriminatory use of "stop and search" described as a burning injustice by the former Prime Minister Theresa May informs the growing alienation of the African and Caribbean British community from a sense of citizenship.

Anthony Bryan and Paulette Wilson, were both detained twice. Just two of the Windrush who were "unlawfully and inappropriately" despite their right to be in the UK.

The introduction of this government "hostile environment" racist immigration policy culminating in the disgraceful treatment of the Windrush victims, could provide useful contemporary homework for both Badenoch and school-age British children about the nature of power relations and racism.

The reality is that most in the African and Caribbean community, except for a few, often feel excluded and alienated from the concept of British citizenship as a consequence of their lived experience of racism.

It is a feature of the nature of injustice, that when serious allegations of institutionalised discrimination are made in Britain, they're uniformly and consistently denied.

Such claims are like essential truths in that they all always start their lives as essential blasphemies.

For any modern, multicultural democracy inclusivity in the national narrative is an essential feature of stable societies.

Fighting imagined 'cultural wars' should not be a preferred terrain for any government, particularly at this time when Covid -19 is having devastating impact on Black communities, past and present.

Minister Olukemi Olufunto Badenoch plays a dangerous game that does much more than charge at the ‘windmills’ to fight an imagined ‘culture war’.

Some would see her real goal is to cause racial division that pits white people against Black people, instead of doing what an Equality Minister should be doing, for example dealing with the socio-economic factors of Covid -19 that has had and is still having a devastating impact on Black communities.

Lee Jasper