BBC COVERAGE OF BLACK HISTORY MONTH
Background and Origins
Black History Month is another of those US imports which doesn’t quite fit. It’s discriminatory and paints a false picture of history. It’s irrelevant to Black people with no Caribbean background – that’s now more than 50% of black people in Britain. All this attention paid to a misleading account of slavery is only relevant to 2.5% of the population.
The BBC writes “The month was originally founded to recognise the contributions that people of African and Caribbean backgrounds have made to the UK over many generations”. Yes, that’s its function, but that is not ‘why’ it was created, and it’s not “many generations” either. Black History Month was introduced into this country by an American, Ansel Wong, because he considered that the UK “was the fountainhead of colonialism, imperialism and racism” and because “it was also a defiant gesture against Thatcher’s abolition of the GLC”. In short, he didn’t like Britain or the British government.
Ansel Wong worked for the GLC, and was the head of the Ethnic Minorities Unit. He persuaded his successors to continue the project after his unit’s disbandment by Thatcher. In the beginning Black History Month included an African component, much less so now however.
Bad History
The Black history being taught, if the BBC’s contribution is any guide, emphasises the UK’s role in slavery and often portrays the UK as the only bad guy in any of this. One UK teacher and academic recently wrote of “Britain’s monopoly of the transatlantic slave trade.” That’s a total fabrication, and he must know that. There was no such monopoly, but it brings me on to the next reason I don’t like it. It isn’t about Black history. It’s written up to portray just Europeans, particularly the British, in a singularly bad light. It just becomes a history of white racism.
It’s bad history too, embarrassingly so. Examples of influential blacks in British history, as listed on the BBC website in educational support of Black History Month, include Cheddar Man, a Muslim woman from Morocco and another woman whose father was in fact Scottish. If nothing else, this should inform you that this is entirely about skin tone. It’s not ethnic. It’s not cultural and it’s not racial in the sense that it’s not about black people. It’s about people who don’t have white skin, or a criticism of those who do. Let’s look at those examples of influential black people:
Cheddar Man
Cheddar Man was from the Western Hunter Gatherers, with whom we Europeans share about 10% of our DNA. He lived about 10,000 years ago in Somerset. Researchers found about 20 people locally who were descended from him. Western Hunter Gatherer is the name given to a distinct ancestral component that represents descent from Mesolithic hunter-gatherers of Western, Southern and Central Europe. The term is often abbreviated as WHG. During the Mesolithic, the WHGs inhabited an area stretching from the British Isles in the west to the Carpathians in the east. Now we’re told he’s an important figure in black history.
Are Moroccans Black?
If we are to include Berbers in our definition, did we first ask them whether they self-identify as black? And if Berbers are to be included, then we must also include those who built the pyramids. Egypt is after all a full member of the African Union. The ancient language of the Egyptians is not Arabic but an ancient form of Coptic and is classified as an Afro-Asian language. It’s well known that some Egyptian rulers were Nubians in any case, and if we are to include Egyptians, then we must also include their neighbours, the Jews, since their languages were so similar anyway. (Israel also has observer status at the African Union). The British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli should therefore be acknowledged as our first black prime minister
Mixed Race and Self-identification
It seems logical that if you have one white parent and one black parent, you’re free to take up whatever identity you want. Where the BBC takes liberties is that it automatically defines anyone of mixed race as black, especially in the case of historical figures. That smacks of racism to me.
Diane Abbott – Legend in her own Lifetime
One of the “great women” we should know about is Diane Abbott, a Labour backbench MP, who has never chaired a select committee and who has never held ministerial rank in the 30-odd years of her parliamentary career. Famous for celebrating IRA terror attacks on the UK government, she is also on record as saying she doesn’t regard herself as British. In 1996, Abbott was criticised after she claimed that at her local hospital “blonde, blue-eyed Finnish girls” were unsuitable as nurses because they had “never met a black person before”. In 2012, Abbott tweeted that: “White people love playing ‘divide and rule’. We should not play their game”. She repeated the claim in 2020. The BBC describes her as one of the main politicians in the Labour Party.
Mary Seacole
The mixed race Mary Seacole of course gets a mention as the black substitute for Florence Nightingale. Mary is described as not being “allowed” by the War Office to travel to the Crimea to look after wounded soldiers. The article goes on to say that she raised the money herself and went there to treat wounded soldiers. Her biography reads slightly differently. she wrote that she went to Crimea (with her business partner) to set up a hotel for officers and to operate as a sutler – selling supplies to the British. She had applied in UK for employment as a nurse, but was rejected. Army officers convalesced at her hotel and she nursed some officers there too. She was widely praised by the military establishment for having done so. She had a good public reputation, but she didn’t work as a nurse or run a hospital, and she didn’t look after soldiers, just their officers.
International Day for the Abolition of the Slave Trade
Marking International Day for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, CBBC writes “The slave trade refers to a period in history when it used to be completely legal to buy and
sell black people as slaves, bought and sold across routes around the Atlantic Ocean…..Slave ships from Britain left ports like London, Liverpool and Bristol for West Africa, carrying goods such as cloth and guns to be traded……Many people got very rich off this trade and it made Britain lots of money.”
It’s an “international day”, so why is there not mention in the article of any other nation taking part in the slave trade? Such as Portugal or Nigeria for example? It mentions 24 million Africans being sold out of Africa, but it seems we were the only buyers. A recent newspaper article by a man whose great grandfather was a Nigerian slave trader describes how the family were quite proud of him. Slavery in Nigeria continued right up until the 1930s, because Nigerians were reluctant to give up the practice. For what it’s worth, Scotland finally abolished the enslavement of Scottish people in Scotland with the passing of the 1799 Collieries Act. Britain’s Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi populations not only out number the black population by 2:1, but also have a history which involves slavery – 16 million slaves in India under British rule for example.
As a key part of the international slave trade, the kings of Dahomey made an absolute mint enslaving Africans and selling them on to Europeans. So for that matter did the King of Benin (in southern Nigeria). As a key part of the international slave trade they are ignore completely by CBBC. It would probably confuse its audience not have have things explained in black and white
References:
https://www.nationalgeographic.org/encyclopedia/kingdom-benin/
https://www.blackhistorymonth.org.uk/article/section/pre-colonial-history/the-history-of-the-kingdom-of-dahomey/
https://www.crer.scot/post/2017/09/28/how-did-black-history-month-come-to-the-uk
https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/cheddar-man-mesolithic-britain-blue-eyed-boy.html
https://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/49883230 – Cheddar man was black
https://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/48786804 – Moroccans are black
https://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/41433196 – mary seacole
https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/black-history-month-colonialism-history-teacher-whitewashing-selective-past-a8025741.html – British monopoly of the slave trade
https://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/41433196 – great women – diane abbott
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/personal-history/my-great-grandfather-the-nigerian-slave-trader
https://www.jstor.org/stable/43854480
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/family-link-reaches-back-300-generations-cheddar-cave-1271542.html
https://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/41433197 – no mention of other countries
https://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/49883230 – origin of Black History Month
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diane_Abbott
