English Historian Blames Black Culture for Riots

(David Starkey)

During a televised discussion of the past week’s riots in England on Friday night, a prominent English historian sparked outrage by insisting that black, Afro-Caribbean culture was to blame for the mayhem and looting, even when the rioters were white.

David Starkey, who has presented several documentaries on the Tudor period, said during a BBC debate: “the problem is that the whites have become black — a particular sort of violent, destructive, nihilistic gangster culture has become the fashion — and black and white, boy and girl, operate in this language together; this language, which is wholly false, which is a Jamaican patois, that’s been intruded in England, and this is why so many of us have this sense of literally a foreign country.”

Asked if he was saying that the prophecy of Enoch Powell — an English politician who claimed in a speech in 1968 that immigration would eventually mean, “the black man will have the whip hand over the white man” in Britain — had come true, Mr. Starkey replied: “That’s not true.” He added, “it’s not skin color, it’s cultural.”

The historian then sought to illustrate his point by referring to the way one of London’s leading black politicians, David Lammy, speaks. “Listen to David Lammy,” Mr. Starkey said, “an archetypical, successful black man: if you turned the screen off, so that you were listening to him on radio, you’d think he was white.”

The other participants in the debate quickly objected to Mr. Starkey’s remarks. Owen Jones, the author of a book about working class culture in Britain, told the historian: “It’s utterly outrageous, obviously, what you’re saying. What you’re doing is you’re equating black culture with criminality.”

A short time later, Emily Maitlis, the BBC journalist who was moderating the discussion, told Mr. Starkey that he was using the terms black culture and white culture as synonyms for bad and good.