I am confused. I read the full article but had to keep going back to try to find where I had missed bits, then was heartbroken not to find a punchline at the end. Imagine my disappointment on realising the author was serious.
Rather than make a reasonable but bland proposal, meandering through the antithesis and leading to a rational conclusion, he chose to start with a ludicrous comment before heaping ordure on it.
"The argument for enforced diversity." What is it that should shake me to my core, stiffen the sinew and stuff? The possibility of the wrong non-white face on a banknote. Wow. It makes not a whit of difference to me whether is is Walter Tull or Jethro Tull, Mary Seacole or Seabiscuit. It is a piece of paper I might have in my pocket sometimes. Watch TV game shows to find out how critical it is, how few people know how many Churchills make an Austen, or who the bloke on the £20 is anyway.
This is the logic of the video somebody put up a few days back. I agreed that I should be furious about my oppression in favour of multiculturalism and anti-white hate speech, and I possibly will be if it ever happens. I am not a downtrodden minority in my own country, or rather I am not being held down by recent migrants.
The author (is it Thomas Sowell) gets himself in a knot after that, switching between the English dominant culture and the clientele of the Athenaeum as if they were interchangeable. I wouldn't expect to see a glut of BAME members at the Athenaeum, but he then kind of shifted away from his first (only?) mention of Public schools, where the crafty foreigners are quietly taking hold. Non-whites might not getting invites to the club, but they can buy places at the schools like anyone else.
That is the root of the conflict that worries the author. It is not that incomers want to take from the established ruling class, the politics of envy; it is the privileged who fearblosing what they never earned and can't justify - the politics of jealousy. Not what we, white and non-white, want, just what they, white and exclusive, want to cling on to.
His examples didn't really show his workings out either. Huguenots and Jews were the only successful immigrants since 940 because they integrated. Quite apart from the most famous date in English history, when we begged to be allowed to integrate with the Normans, I am not sure the integrated Jewish people in the few English cities where they were allowed to settle in exchange for gold are quite ready to forget being libelled and driven out in the late thirteenth century. I haven't researched the Huguenots before starting this post, but weren't they among the early settlers in North America, seeking freedom they didn't have in England? I might be making that up.
The BAME community is as diverse as his supposedly rock solid English culture. When I see Hull City shirts spilling out of the Athenaeum he can call me and gloat. Meanwhile, his arguments are riddled with inconsistency and he does not speak for me.
Incidentally, my misconception that the article was an elaborate joke was dispelled when I glanced at the comments. Wow, just Wow, as my children would say, but more convincingly than the writer of the article in the link.