The identitarian Left’s obsession with promoting grievance and victimhood overshadows the patriotism and positive feelings ethnic minorities have towards Britain, argues Rakib Ehsan in Spiked. While challenges persist, many ethnic minorities appreciate the opportunities and shared values of living in the U.K. It is time to foster unity and celebrate our multicultural democracy, says Ehsan.
In the U.K., the worldview of the woke Left now holds sway in the spheres of politics, education, media and entertainment. Countless politicians, academics and pundits are gripped by a warped, pessimistic view about the state of race relations. On a near daily basis, they promote caricatured portrayals of the supposedly miserable lives of ethnic minorities living in Britain today.
Deploying largely American concepts such as ‘white privilege’ and ‘white supremacy’, identitarian Leftists present Britain as a racist dystopia. They claim that our economic and social systems are deliberately rigged against ethnic minorities – that British institutions are ‘institutionally racist’. And they have embraced the American Black Lives Matter movement – even though BLM has very little to tell us about British society and history, and its aims are rejected by most Brits. Labour leader Keir Starmer may be haunted for some time by that image of him, alongside deputy leader Angela Rayner, ‘taking the knee’ during the BLM protests of 2020.
