How BLM ideology captured the cops

The public anger in the wake of Henry Nowak’s murder has been a long time coming. The fact that police handcuffed a white student as he bled out on a Southampton street, while they politely deferred to a Sikh thug who had stabbed him, seems only to confirm what many have suspected for years: British justice operates a two-tier strategy, which is hostile to those who happen to be white or part of a ‘non-protected’ group.

We must not jump to conclusions, though. Or so warned the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC), which investigates complaints against the police.

It’s a shame the police watchdog has a habit of making its own snap judgments without sufficient evidence. Like the time in September 2020, when it launched – with much hullabaloo – an investigation into racial discrimination against ‘black, Asian and other ethnic-minority groups’ across British policing.

The IOPC said the investigation was an urgent response to ‘a global conversation on race… set in train by the horrific murder of George Floyd, and the subsequent Black Lives Matter movement’. The organisation said it was the death of Floyd that drove ‘its decision to bring forward its focus on race discrimination’.

Yet here’s the thing. In September 2020, the trial of Derek Chauvin – the police officer who was eventually convicted of murdering Floyd – was months away. It only started the following March. In other words, this national watchdog not only jumped to conclusions – it expected plaudits for doing so.

The hypocrisy of a police body criticising ordinary Brits for making snap judgments, while revelling in doing exactly that, typifies the double standards in law enforcement today. Nor has this state of affairs come about by accident.

At the heart of the institutional capture of policing is another project launched during the Floyd carnival in 2020. The Police Race Action Plan is a lavishly funded, top-down strategy to brainwash Britain’s 169,000 police.

From the moment the plan appeared in 2022, the fingerprints of the race lobby were all over it. The first clue appeared in the foreword written by two chief constables, Sir David Thompson and Andy Marsh. They began with a humiliating apology that wouldn’t have felt out of place during China’s Cultural Revolution. ‘We accept that policing still contains racism, discrimination and bias. We are ashamed of those truths, we apologise for them, and we are determined to change them’, these allegedly grown men wailed.

Abasement from white officials is a trademark of critical race theory. Another sign of the lobby’s influence was its strangely precise use of the word ‘anti-racist’. In one sentence, the foreword declares, ‘the challenge for this plan is to create a police service that is anti-racist’. That may seem uncontroversial. But then the next sentence warns that ‘being “not racist” is not enough’.

In other words, ‘anti-racist’ isn’t the same as ‘not racist’. So if the Police Race Action Plan is not about making officers ‘not racist’, what is it about?

The answer is in a best-selling book by American academic Ibram X Kendi, perhaps the world’s most influential prophet of the ‘anti-racism’ cult. In How to Be an Antiracist (2019), Kendi argues there is only one way for a white person to become ‘anti-racist’. And that’s by actively opposing the racism that he claims permeates Western civilisation, its institutions and economy. The first step in what should be a lifelong commitment is the acceptance of the central tenet of the race lobby: no white person can ever be ‘not racist’.

Yes, it turns out critical race theory and ‘anti-racism’ are – irony of ironies – based on a fundamentally racist assumption. That is, if someone is white, they are an inherent beneficiary of white supremacy. This means that they are ineradicably racist, whatever they say or do. To deny this as a white person, in Kendi’s view, is only further proof of racism.

As dangerous as this idea may seem, it’s now been embraced by some of Britain’s most important institutions. It’s summed up in this line from Kendi, which the director general of the Bar Standards Board, Mark Neale, quoted when celebrating Black History Month last year: ‘The heartbeat of racism itself has always been denial. Whereas the heartbeat of anti-racism is confession.’ A medieval witchfinder could not have put it better.

The idea has been enshrined in the Police Anti-Racism Commitment, published in March last year, and one of the fruits of the Race Action Plan. This has, quite rightly, been criticised for its insistence that policing should not treat everyone the same or be colourblind. Just as bad is its suggestion that police should respond ‘to individuals and communities according to their specific needs, circumstances and experiences, with understanding these will be racialised’.

In other words, no encounter between a white person and a non-white person should be viewed as one between two equal citizens. It must be seen as ‘racialised’, and judged through the prism of race.

The public demanded a police force that is ‘not racist’. Instead, the people in charge of that force have bullied officers with an ‘anti-racist’ ideological barrage that effectively insists every young white man is some sort of white supremacist. The race lobby often calls for the defunding of the police. I know one good place to start: with anti-racist training.

Malcolm Clark was LGB Alliance’s head of research from 2019 to 2022. Visit his Substack, The Secret Gender Files, here.