When I was at Cambridge, some of my fellow students, and some dons, used to say this thing that first amused me, but became increasingly irritating. I would be at a party, talking nineteen to dozen in my usual way, and then I would find someone staring at me with a look of wonder. The inevitable remark would then come. “You speak such good English.” And this at Cambridge, one of the most competitive universities in the world. To be at Cambridge was surely to be among the best: it is why I had applied in the first place. Why would anyone be surprised that a student at Cambridge spoke good English? Isn’t it a condition of admission? Wouldn’t you imagine that we all spoke good English?
But the subtext was clear: you are a black person and, therefore, you are not supposed to speak such good English. I was the first black African student at my college, and no, this was not as long ago as you think. My special status was stressed to me a number of times, particularly by one don who beamed at me and said, as soon as he met me, that I was the second Rhodesian at Sidney Sussex! And are you going back to Rhodesia after you finish, he asked, to which I responded that that was an impossibility as the country no longer existed.
I eventually developed an effective response to the you speak such good English comment. Anytime I heard this, I said, why so do you, in a tone of happy camaraderie.
These memories came back as I listened in wonder to the historian David Starkey on Newsnight. He said three things: that Enoch Powell was partly correct in his Rivers of Blood speech and that the white kids who looted all over England were victims of black culture, and, finally, that if you heard the Oxbridge-educated Tory MP David Lammy speak without seeing him, you would think that he was white.
He speaks such good English, you see.
That a historian would bandy about such imprecise terms as white culture and black culture is frankly baffling. What is white culture? Going to the opera? Divorce? Or having a nuclear family? Atheism? Or the creationism that is becoming rampant in the American south? Scientology? The gay pride parade of Amsterdam? Or the gay curing programmes of the kind advocated by Michele Bachmann's husband? The binge drinking of London? Football hooliganism?
And don’t get me started on black culture, which seems to be reduced by Starkey, to a very specific sub-culture influenced by hip hop and rap music and street gangs.
But gangs, of course, are not part of white culture, because the Teddy Boys, back in the 50s were not white at all, oh no. And those Victorian street gangs, the Sloggers, the Scuttlers? When Dickens wrote about Fagin’s gang of pickpockets, about murderous gang member Bill Sykes, why he must have had some sort of Jamaican influence because Bill Sykes? He was acting black.
Missing in David Starkey’s analysis is any awareness of class. Because this is the essence of Starkey’s reasoning: any white person who is not how you imagine a white person to be has become black, and any black person who is not how you imagine a black person to be has become white. To be black is to be poor, it is to be uneducated, to be inarticulate. A middle class black man like David Lammy becomes, not middle class, but white. And the working class hooligans who were looting trainers are acting black.
I very much fear that England is going to get this spectacularly wrong. All the commentators, like Starkey, are responding reflexively from within the narrow framework of their entrenched positions.
But that is another subject for another day. Listening to Starkey took me back to Cambridge, where my fellow students actually thought to express surprise that a fellow Cambridge student spoke English well. And why? Because I was black.