Celebrity historian falls victim to riots
Francis Sedgemore, Sunday 14 August 2011 at 0:32 UTC
WARNING: contains weak language from the start…
It took Starkey less than a minute to mention Enoch Powell, and after that the crash was inevitable. The result: intellectual carnage.
Feed the writer! 
Sunday 14 August 2011 at 01:00 UTC
Train wreck tv. It’ll be some time before Starkey gets another series methinks. Anyway Bethany Hughes is much better looking!
Sunday 14 August 2011 at 01:11 UTC
Same questionable content level, though. It’s not a question of intellectual ability; television breeds laziness in its producers as well as consumers.
Sunday 14 August 2011 at 03:27 UTC
Starkey talks of watching the black Labour MP David Lammy on the telly with the picture turned off, and imagining him as a successful white uncle tom. I like to watch Starkers with the sound turned off, and picture him as an over-excited idiot. It doesn’t take much imagination.
Sunday 14 August 2011 at 15:55 UTC
What a moron!
Namechecking Enoch Powell surely has controversy value but then you’d have expected he would have made sense, but no, the controversy was all he had to offer.
He’s upset that honest-to-god British criminals now had their cockney corrupted by Jamaican patwa and therefore can be called black, that for a racist xenophobic shit like him is the utmost insult.
Sunday 14 August 2011 at 16:05 UTC
Can I offer and outsider opinion: to me it looked as four (?) persons in the room spouting crap. Sorry for not being able to offer a more nuanced and/or intelligent opinion.
Sunday 14 August 2011 at 16:11 UTC
Funny, innit? Racist xenophobic shit will be how David Starkey is remembered, but what he is in fact is a mildly racist cultural snob who favours the Whig interpretation of history. Starkey appears genuinely distressed that events such as the recent riots are upsetting this tidy Enlightenment teleology. Damnèd mass culture!
Sunday 14 August 2011 at 16:13 UTC
Snoopy – no, you may not! Either say something learned and profound, or shut up.
Sunday 14 August 2011 at 16:53 UTC
Shutting up then.
Sunday 14 August 2011 at 16:56 UTC
It strikes me that there’s more than a touch of ‘epater les bourgeois’ in Starkey, and that he’s partly enjoying getting a rise out of people by winding them up. Sad perhaps, especially in these circumstances, but that’s folk.
This issue about language “Feds” etc, has been alluded to in an earlier post here and is much more of a pointer than many may think who like to dismiss language and what it means at very deep levels.
Unfortunately the issue doesn’t get properly clarified in this Newsnight interview.
Maybe Newsnight should have invited Thomas Chatterton Williams, an African-American writer, into the studio to explain it properly.
He warns that “… there are no two ways about it — hip-hop culture is not black culture, it’s black street culture. Despite 40 years of progress since the civil rights movement, in the hip-hop era — from the late 1970s onward — black America, uniquely, began receiving its values, aesthetic sensibility and self-image almost entirely from the street up.”
“This is a major departure for blacks, who traditionally saw cultivation as a key to equality. Think of the days when W.E.B. Du Bois “[sat] with Shakespeare” and moved “arm in arm with Balzac”; or when Ralph Ellison waxed universal and spoke of the need “to extend one’s humanity and one’s knowledge of human life.”
“The historian Paul Fussell notes that for most Americans, it is difficult to “class sink.” Try to imagine the Chinese American son of oncologists — living in, say, a New York suburb such as Westchester, attending private school — who feels subconsciously compelled to model his life, even if only superficially, on that of a Chinese mafioso dealing heroin on the Lower East Side. The cultural pressure for a middle-class Chinese American to walk, talk and act like a lower-class thug from Chinatown is nil. The same can be said of Jews, or of any other ethnic group.”
“But in black America the folly is so commonplace it fails to attract serious attention. Like neurotics obsessed with amputating their own healthy limbs, middle-class blacks concerned with “keeping it real” are engaging in gratuitously self-destructive and violently masochistic behavior.”
“Sociologists have a term for this pathological facet of black life. It’s called “cool-pose culture.” Whatever the nomenclature, “cool pose” or keeping it real or something else entirely, this peculiar aspect of the contemporary black experience — the inverted-pyramid hierarchy of values stemming from the glorification of lower-class reality in the hip-hop era — has quietly taken the place of white racism as the most formidable obstacle to success and equality in the black middle classes.”
Washington Post, 2007
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/27/AR2007052700926.html
Sunday 14 August 2011 at 17:00 UTC
A cultural snob would have been able to make an argument that stands, he’s a parody of a cultural snob.
He’s educated enough to understand the gigantic flaws in what he was saying, but he did it anyway, because he found the provocation amusing.