Alana Lentin’s article (The egregious Sewell report only bolsters those who want to discredit antiracism, 6 April) attributes to me views that I do not hold. Ms Lentin asserts that for observers [of the commission’s report] like me, “the state’s ongoing brutalisation of Black people in the US” is “really a story of social media-enabled ‘identitarian sects’ for whom crying ‘institutional racism’ is a ‘gravy train’”.
I have never said any such thing about police brutality in America. In fact, the Spiked online column that is linked in this assertion (At last, the myth of ‘institutional racism’ is collapsing, 31 March) does not even mention the US.
Ms Lentin brands me as one of the UK’s “loudest opponents of antiracism”, which some of your readers will take to mean that I must support racism. This is an insidious implication. What I oppose is the colonisation of the noble cause of antiracism by middle-class grifters who seem more interested in stirring up identitarian tensions than in bringing about true racial equality.
Ms Lentin quotes me as saying that people in the UK are “sick and tired of being called racist”. They are.
In the working-class immigrant community I come from, people believe that the accusation of racism has become a way for members of the cultural elite to reprimand the less well-off for their supposedly low-status, regressive ways of thinking. Ms Lentin’s opinion suggests they are right to think this.
Brendan O’Neill
Editor, Spiked
