We share a long history of cultural exchange with America. Much of our way of life has either passed to the Americans, or passed back from them. Music, film and entertainment from the US is hugely influential in our understanding of ourselves, and of our place in the world.

And along with this, we’ve imported a war. No, not the one with Iraq, nor the one with Afghanistan. It’s the cultural war between African Americans and White Americans.

African Americans are the descendants of the enslaved, the oppressed and the dislocated peoples of Africa, brought over through the European slave trade and bought, sold and mistreated by wealthy white Americans. That’s the American legacy, and it’s a taken two wars – one civil and military, the other cultural – to bring them to a point where the Americans have elected an African American as their leader1.

But that isn’t my legacy. Neither I nor my ancestors enslaved anyone. Britain, in fact, was late to the slave trade game, never the major European player, and the second, after Denmark, to outlaw slavery. My legacy is of people like William Wilberforce, who stood up against slavery, and wrote “God Almighty has set before me two great objects, the suppression of the slave trade and the Reformation of society”. A legacy of Britain’s refusal to support the Confederacy in the American Civil War, despite the huge economic pressure she faced thanks her dependence on the cotton trade. My legacy is of a vastly multicultural Britain that has provided a home for members of the commonwealth and others for decades. Where we have oppressed people in the past, in India and South Africa and in other formerly British colonies, we’ve have repaid not only their lands, but have extended a warm welcome to their migration into Britain and given great moral and economic support to their emerging societies.

So everybody, please. Cut it out. Stop calling me racist. In doing so, you’re promoting the fallacy that Britain is born of America. We’re not. There’s an ocean between us, in more ways than one.

Miss Snuffleupagus understands racism in Britain. Racism in Britain is not the continued oppression of black people, it’s not the police and other public bodies acting overtly against non-whites. It’s not an institutional problem with the electorate or a national mistrust of non-white people. Racism in Britain is an issue of expectations, of left wing well-meaners who act as if black people need help and aren’t capable of standing up on their own two feet – and in doing so, denigrate them and lower their abilities to succeed. As Snuffy puts it: “exclude bad black children and the good ones will become out next Obamas. Keep fighting to keep the bad black and white kids in the system and we will remain a nation where the underclass is self-perpetuating.”

Rather than asking why Britain has never elected a black Prime Minister, how about a different question: if our system of government was more like America’s, with a directly elected head of state chosen for candidacy by an open primary, would we have elected somebody like Obama? Put another way: if British people had voted in the American Election last week, would we have voted for McCain? There’s no real way of knowing, but I can make a pretty good guess: Obama would have won a real landslide. Forget a 6% lead in the popular vote, if Britain had been given a chance to vote he would have won 70% or more.

Thanks to our party system; thanks to the fact that it helps more to know the right people than it does to have the right ideas in order to enter British politics; thanks to the way the votes of just a few party members make the real difference to who leads the country, rather than the votes of an entire electorate – thanks to all of this – it will be a long time before we elect a non-white Prime Minister in Britain. To hear that and assume that British people must be racist, though, is unintelligent, insulting and massively prejudiced.

So stop it.

  1. Interestingly, Obama is not a descendant of the enslaved peoples of Africa, but he is still a close cousin. I’m not joining the ranks of people who shout ‘he’s not black he’s mixed race’, because we’re all mixed race if you go back far enough, I’m just calling attention to an interesting difference in his history as compared to the African Americans as a group. [↩]