David Starkey Sees A Jamaican Armada: Henry VIII Was A Black Homicidal Maniac
I’M sorry to see that ‘historian’ Dr David Starkey is in the Twitter stocks for his metaphorisation of black skin for criminality. His problem is that he has never to my knowledge written a history of a black homicidal maniac. If only Elizabeth I or her dad Henry VIII – his favourite book and TV topics – had been black he might now be metaphorising white skin for criminality: strange how chance, circumstance and schooling play a part in our avowed certainties and comforts.
Instead, like many other ‘historians’ before him, he has taken to identify with his lucrative subjects and even to adopt a prose style which could be mistaken for Tudorbethan pastiche. Some intellectual crossdressers go the whole hog and end up on pub stage as Madame Trollette to the joy of many. Others, merely write books and cultivate a persona that requires no wig or nail technician.
Dr Starkey has only to open his mouth and I see the Spanish Armada yonder.
What Starkey said:
What’s happened is that a substantial section of the Chavs that you wrote about have become black. The whites have become black. A particular sort of violent, destructive, nihilistic, gangster culture has become the fashion. And black and white, boy and girl, operate in this language together, this language which is wholly false, which is this Jamaican patois that’s been intruded in England, and this is why so many of us have this sense of literally a foreign country.
Racist?
There is no cultural cachet in being a member of the white working class- maybe they just want to look cool?
PS – Prize to anyone who spots a looter who looks like David Starkey:
Posted: 15th, August 2011 | In: Celebrities, Key Posts Comments (8) | TrackBack | Permalink
