Black History Month

(Photograph: Richard Townshend, CC BY 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons)

After first entering Parliament back in 2005, the black female Labour Party MP and indefatigable champion of homosexual giraffes Dawn Butler says she was mistaken for one of the House of Commons cleaning staff, something she naturally put down to institutional racism on behalf of those concerned. Obviously, this error was indeed highly offensive – to the building’s cleaners. Such poorly-paid and oft put-upon persons perform an excellent and vital service, wiping up other people’s mess for them, without which our democracy could never truly function. Dawn Butler, on the other hand, provides precisely the reverse service to the electorate, creating piles and piles of needless mess for other people to wipe up for her, then expecting to be sycophantically praised for the fact, just because she skilfully arranged with God to have been born both black and female.

Disturbingly, her self-entitled expectations are often met: in 2021, she received an honorary Blue Plaque (why not a Black one?) bearing her name above a former home-run bakery in London’s Waltham Forest area, within which Dawn worked as a child, under the watchful eye of its owner, her dad (“a great man”, apparently, albeit probably not in the true sense once meant by Thomas Carlyle). People normally have to wait until they are dead to receive a Blue Plaque, so my first thought was that perhaps this award was made to her on the basis of wishful thinking upon behalf of the awards committee, but in fact it resulted from a competition run by the council in which residents were asked to nominate a “local hero”, Red Dawn apparently being the best they could come up with.

Half-Baked Notions

Is a random sausage roll outlet really worthy of being honoured as a site of genuine historical importance? Maybe the one in Pudding Lane where the Great Fire of London is supposed to have started did, but what was it about Dawn’s dad’s own personal Greggs which made it worth marking out for posterity? In a 2023 interview with the Guardian, Dawn explained more fully:

Butler describes her father’s bakery as a hive of activity in the local community. Customers included the athlete Dalton Grant, the singer-songwriter Ben Ofoedu, once of Phats & Small, and the actor and DJ Idris Elba. “Our customers didn’t come to Butlers Bakery just to be served. They lingered to have conversations, creating a real sense of community that I think is lacking today,” she says. She watched children grow into adults, witnessing their journey “from buying a jam doughnut to West Indian hardo bread. The sign of a proper adult”.

Should every chance building that the young Idris Elba once entered to purchase goods and services be preserved for the future historical record too? In fact, even the bakery where Idris once bought Jamaican jam tarts is tragically no longer there in its original form, the place now being something called The Farm Community Kitchen. But what happened to her father’s amazing eatery, which really should have remained preserved in aspic forever, like the Taj Mahal and the Great Pyramid of Giza? According to Dawn Butler’s bizarre ahistorical interpretation, it was deliberately destroyed by the malevolent Margaret Thatcher:

She believes that version of London, which had a sense of togetherness, is long gone. “This idea which [Margaret] Thatcher had, that there’s no such thing as society, and having people just be really selfish about themselves, was a way to destroy something that was really great and powerful. I think we need to bring that back.”

This, it would appear, is the universal prism through which Ms. Butler views all of human history: that any arbitrary act accomplished by a black person, ever, even the simple opening of a small London bakery selling obscure varieties of ethnic loaf to immigrants, was profoundly important and deserves to be remembered in perpetuity, whilst the only notable achievement of white people of the past was to oppress and suppress such non-white wonders, as with Maggie wantonly destroying her dad’s lovely ovens.

Brain-Dead Poets’ Society

In short, I don’t gain the impression that Dawn Butler’s understanding of history is quite on the same level as that of someone like A.J.P. Taylor; her fellow Labour MP David Lammy’s infamous gaffe on Mastermind that Henry VII succeeded Henry VIII to the throne sounds more her level. However, October marks the annual invented racio-political indoctrination event for schools known as Black History Month (for my own previous dismissive views on which, see here), and Dawn has been getting in on the act by releasing a new poem, of her own apparent composition, which she performs in a sort of cringeworthy adolescent slam-style, complete with accompanying racially-tinged images of alleged black pharaohs, skulls of dark-skinned prehistoric humans etc., on her X feed (now deleted, sadly, but the Spectator has posted the video on YouTube to preserve it for the ages).

Here (via the Spectator) are the lyrics, which appear to be addressed to an unnamed white man, perhaps one who bigotedly doubts that local bakeries are deserving of Grade I Listed status purely because Stringer Bell from The Wire once used to shop there:

You wanted to see me broken

Head bowed and tears in my eyes?

More for you; you didn’t realise

That my strength is powered by your lies.

You are the wrong one, the violent one, the weird one;

Where was I?

I am the Chosen One

Because I am of the First Ones.

You see this skin I’m in

This beautiful mahogany brown

This skin you don’t like [shot of Kamala Harris], I believe.

So why you try so hard to achieve [shot of Dawn with a bemused fruit juice seller]

By burning yourself with the sun?

For me there’s no need

Because I am the Chosen One

For I am of the First Ones [another shot of a pharaoh like African figure].

I know I’m black and beautiful

An African freedom fighter [shots of U.S. civil rights figures, including Martin Luther King]

My skin is my protection,

And you, my friend, don’t matter.

Because I am the Chosen One

For I am of the First Ones.

You created a structure

That made you seem great

But the simple reality is [shot of Dawn speaking in the Commons]

It is all fake.

Because I am the Chosen One

For I am of the First Ones.

So you wanted to see me broken?

Head bowed and tears in my eyes?

More for you, you haven’t realised

My strength is despite your lies.

Whilst I would dispute many elements of Dawn’s specific chosen interpretation of human history here, I do note it contains a certain amount of respect for at least one esteemed figure of her own race’s proud past heritage – namely the dire black American pseudo-poet and Oprah Winfrey avatar Maya Angelou, whose piss-poor 1978 poem Still I Rise, also addressed by an arrogant black woman towards an anonymous generic whitey, features curiously similar lines like these:

You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I’ll rise. …

Did you want to see me broken?
Bowed head and lowered eyes?
Shoulders falling down like teardrops,
Weakened by my soulful cries?

Angelou died back in 2014, but Butler has clearly been hoovering up her influence nonetheless. She repeatedly quotes the poet in speeches, and recited her own ‘adaptation’ of Maya’s poem Phenomenal Women at the Labour Party Women’s Conference in 2017, so it seems clear this particular female phenomenon must have been inspired by her heroine’s previous work when composing her own.

This Butler Serves Only Herself

The actual content of Butler’s poem, which is supposed to articulate the ‘true’ nature of black history, is rather telling. She claims the standard narrative of human history is “powered by your lies” that Caucasians were the main actors and innovators in past world affairs, which would appear to align her with contemporary Afrocentrist models of human history, by which I mean those that seek to counter this fake narrative with an even more fake one of their own by pretending black people did everything worthwhile in centuries gone by instead.

As Butler then continues, “My skin is my protection” – it certainly is these days. This, for example, is a tweet Dawn emitted from what passes for her brain immediately following the Labour Party’s return to the Commons to form the new UK Government in July:

Someone – I would guess a wicked white person – appeared to report Dawn to the police for this, presumably alleging it was racist. She didn’t seem too worried, however, her response being as follows:

This ruffled a few feathers: someone even reported me to the police. Honestly, I can’t stop laughing. My morning message to those people is, get used to me celebrating my greatness, I will not play small to make you feel better about yourself.

What was it, besides her obvious “greatness”, that made her feel so sure she could get away with this? Well, as her poem says, “you, my friend, don’t matter/Because I am the Chosen One”. Dawn is a fan of two-tier policing, it appears.

Butler’s general attitude towards this country is well illustrated by her rationale for wearing hideous show-off lime-green suits on the Parliamentary Estate, which make her resemble a radioactive human highlighter pen from Chernobyl: “It signifies a sea change in my attitude to structures, from trying to fit in to understanding that you’re not going to fit in, because this establishment was not built with somebody like you in mind. But you’re here and you’ve earned your place here. You don’t need to justify yourself, so instead of fitting in, stand out.” Spoken like a true Chosen One.

But what does Dawn mean, that she is “the Chosen One”? Isn’t that David Icke? Not any more, because, unlike pale-skinned Icke, Dawn is “of the First Ones”, which may make her sound like something from H.P. Lovecraft, but in fact refers to her opinion that the first human beings came out of Africa and must therefore have been pure black, like she is. But is this really something that has been covered up by racist, white-written history, as lines like the following imply?

You created a structure

That made you seem great

But the simple reality is [shot of Dawn speaking in the Commons]

It is all fake.

No, Dawn, what’s really fake here is your whole twisted, obsessively Afrocentrist view of history. If white people “created a [false] structure” of all history intended purely to glorify themselves and belittle black people, then how come all the standard Western anthropology textbooks openly admit that humankind as a species probably did begin in Africa as opposed to, for example, Leighton Buzzard or Budleigh Salterton? Piltdown Man was exposed and acknowledged as a hoax, you know, and derided as a racist hoax at that, not inserted into the National Curriculum or anything.

Night is Always Blackest Before the Dawn

Butler has very strong opinions about the National Curriculum though, particularly in regards to the history aspect of it, about which she is apparently “passionate” (never trust anyone who says they are “passionate” about anything at all, it means they can only ever speak in debased cookie-cooker buzzwords). To mark Black History Month 2020, the very same year George Floyd himself made history by joining it as a corpse, Dawn contributed to an urgent debate on the matter in the Commons, albeit via the medium of prose rather than poetry this time around.

Predictably, she thought we needed urgently to “decolonise” the History curriculum, on the grounds that: “At the moment, history is taught to make one group of people feel inferior and another group of people feel superior, which has to stop.” To be fair, I quite agree – except that, unlike Dawn, it is my opinion that the children being made to feel superior in Britain’s schools today are Chosen Ones like her and those being made to feel inferior are the Unchosen Ones.

But what’s the point of doing all this, anyway? Won’t dwelling on past misdeeds just increase tensions between the races, instead of encouraging people to get along and feel their common humanity? Not to a mentally and morally superior Chosen One like Dawn:

I have often delivered learning and development courses, where… people have been told that they are racist. … This is how people respond: first, “I don’t see colour”. The goal is not for people not to see colour; we do not want people to be colour blind. If people do not see colour, the likelihood is that they will not see the discrimination that comes off the back of it. We need the acknowledgement, and we need people to be non-judgemental when they see colour, not to prejudge someone because of the colour of their skin. We need people not to be colour blind.

No, you just want them to remain blind to your motives in a more general sense. I’d prefer they were taught to see them with acid clarity, hence this article.

“We need to look at history and improve it,” Dawn added. You can’t, though, because it’s in the past, obviously – unless by “improving” history, you mean systematically falsifying it to make white people feel guilty about their very existence, thereby to emotionally manipulate future generations of British kids into voluntarily assuming a position of perpetual racial inferiority.

I would humbly suggest that one of the best ways to “look at history and improve it” in our schools would actually be to abolish Black History Month altogether – an idea with which, surprisingly, Dawn Butler herself agrees… but only so it is “taught daily” for all 12 months of the year instead, “in all its glory” (so, not including Idi Amin, Papa Doc, Emperor Bokassa, etc. etc. then?)

If this does not occur, then the consequences for black people in Britain could be truly dire: in 2023, Dawn told no less an outlet than Grazia magazine that almost half of young black Britons now “plan to migrate amid racism concerns”. Maybe that’s because they’re now busy being told, every bloody minute of every bloody day, that they live in an irredeemably racist country where evil white supremacists are just itching to bring back the transatlantic slave-trade any day now.

Though, if that’s the way you feel, Dawn, perhaps you would like to be a pioneer? Think of it as an excellent opportunity for you to reconnect with your past heritage in the land of your stolen ancestors, as one of the lucky Chosen Ones.

 

Steven Tucker is a journalist and the author of over 10 books, the latest being Hitler’s & Stalin’s Misuse of Science: When Science Fiction Was Turned Into Science Fact by the Nazis and the Soviets (Pen & Sword/Frontline), which is out now.

This piece was first published in The Daily Sceptic, and is reproduced by kind permission.

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