By Jerry Barnett Quillette

One of the early signs of trouble for the British anti-racism movement was a tweet sent by Lee Jasper in April 2013, in which he declared that black people are incapable of being racist, and offered to publicly debate anybody who disagreed. I offered to debate him, as did a number of others. I even suggested a venue: the University College London Union (UCLU), where I’d recently taken part in a debate on censorship. My offer was not taken up, and as far as I know the debate never took place.

Jasper, a British-born man of mixed African, Caribbean, and Irish origins, was one of the louder characters in the London anti-racism movement of the 1980s, which sought to oppose the racist far-Right. But he was always intensely ambitious, and skilled at using race issues as a means of self-promotion. In this respect, he was well ahead of the curve, importing Al Sharpton’s brand of American race-hustling into the UK long before it became more generally fashionable.

By the 1990s, although the far-Right threat had clearly receded, the British Left (in the face of a working class stubbornly uninterested in class struggle) was switching its attention to the politics of identity. This was especially true in London and Jasper started to pop up on late-night TV chat shows. In my own social circles, which were mostly made up of people of West Indian origin, “black activists” were generally not taken too seriously. But in left-wing political circles, people like Jasper became flavour of the month. Here was a provocative spokesman of an oppressed underclass, and surely the Left—increasingly dominated by white and affluent people—needed people like him in order to stay relevant.

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