On a previous posting of mine about the BNP, one Chris made this comment:

After the brouhaha of the BNP Question Time this interview https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00nh6w4 with Kwame Kwei-Armah went unnoticed on Radio 7 (as most things do) and yet (some 26 minutes in) we hear strikingly similar concerns voiced about multiculturalism and miscegenation.

Kwei-Armah laments the fact that 6 out of 10 Afro-Carribean men are in a mixed relationship, he describes this as "assimilation" not integration, responsible for "the death of my tribe" the "disappearance" of my community.

When Griffin says this he sounds ridiculous and dangerous, and when Kwei-Armah says it he is authentic and intellectual.

I was interested to listen to this (Note: the link has now vanished under BBC iPlayer rules). And yes, there after some 26 minutes this actor and award-winning playwright bemoans the fact that the cultural community from Grenada and other parts of the Caribbean is being ‘assimilated’ because people from it are having relationships with Others.

This, he says, is bad – something precious is being lost.

Is it?

Check out this interesting article on ‘language death’ which suggests that the spread of variations of English is bound to continue as (crucially) English is relatively easy to learn. Just as languages fade away, so will many current cultural distinctions (and associated prejudices and discrimination) based on them.

Is not that a huge gain for civilisation?

The strange fact of the matter is that the Afrikaners who set up apartheid were cruel and unfair, but they were intellectually honest. Rigid separation of different cultures is a powerful way to keep minority cultures alive and distinct. 

They realised that if you want to do it properly you have no choice but (i) to set up rigid legal classifications of people in each culture concerned, and (ii) have some concept in law of ‘group rights’ to allow geographical clusters of one culture to keep others out as far as possible.

And it worked:

A senior anti-apartheid intellectual/activist once told me that one of the best-kept secrets of the anti-apartheid struggle was the fact that apartheid had – through its massive policies of enforced ‘separate development’ – kept alive lots of African traditions and attitudes which otherwise would have been lost to pell-mell modernity. A precious legacy.

Hence in UK today it is minority community leaders who insist on all the dreary bureaucracy that goes with explicitly apartheid-style ‘racial’ or ‘ethnic’ classification when one applies for jobs (and Parliamentary seats…), as a messy way of somehow trying at least to keep tabs on how each supposed ‘minority’ community is faring. 

But let’s face it.

Some cultures are authentic and vibrant and richly deserving of some sort of protection against ‘assimiliation’, however vilely they treat eg women and gays.

But others (working-class ‘white’ males, middle-class rural huntsfolk) are deemed in progressive circles to be per se pernicious and backward-looking. 

That’s just the way it is.