The United Kingdom’s National Health Service (NHS), supposedly overtaxed by COVID-19 patients, nevertheless found time to publish a blog hectoring white people about their alleged racism.
The blog, titled “Dear white people in the UK,” was posted on the NHS Senior Leadership Onboarding and Support website, which means it’s primarily targeting the people who make life-and-death decisions for all of Her Majesty’s subjects.
Authored by Aishnine Benjamin, equality, diversity and inclusion lead at the Nursing and Midwifery Council, the piece aims to convince white Britons that they are all racists — or, at the very least, the beneficiaries of institutional racism — and that they must join the anti-racism crusade.
Benjamin begins by recommending that they read Peggy McIntosh’s 1989 essay White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack. In that essay, McIntosh argues that racism is not found in “individual acts of meanness” but in “invisible systems conferring unsought racial dominance on [whites] from birth.”
“My schooling gave me no training in seeing myself as an oppressor, as an unfairly advantaged person, or as a participant in a damaged culture,” McIntosh, who is white, writes. “I was taught to see myself as an individual whose moral state depended on her individual moral will.” However, she later came to believe that “whiteness protected me from many kinds of hostility, distress and violence, which I was being subtly trained to visit, in turn, upon people of color.”
Benjamin also commends to the reader Robin DiAngelo’s book White Fragility along with a host of lesser-known publications making the case that white people are inherently racist and can’t handle being told so.
“Don’t be defensive,” Benjamin tells millions of people she has just insulted. “This isn’t personal and it’s not really about you. Everybody is at a disadvantage when our formal institutions perpetuate inequalities.”
Moreover, one cannot be neutral on matters of race. “Don’t say ‘I’m not political’ to excuse yourself from this conversation,” she orders. “Right now, ignorance isn’t an excuse.”
Readers are also instructed to be “open to hearing what black and minority ethnic people are saying,” to “work on your empathy,” and — as if she needed to tell them this after the foregoing — to “be uncomfortable.” (Just remember that your discomfort is a manifestation of “white fragility.”)
Naturally, kids must be drafted into the anti-racism movement, too. Benjamin suggests making sure children know about “black British history.” (Word has apparently not reached her that the word black must now be capitalized when used to describe humans or their history.) Toward that end, she touts the Black Curriculum, which, according to the Henry Jackson Society, is “ideologically[ ]aligned” with Black Lives Matter. She also recommends “buy[ing] books and toys that show the true diversity of the world we live in.”
Benjamin then urges the reader to take action. “Use your power and your privilege for the benefit of humanity,” she writes. “Break the foundations of structural racism.” Also, “Vote.” Although she adds “no matter what your political leaning,” it’s hard to shake the feeling that she wouldn’t take kindly to someone’s casting a ballot for, say, Nigel Farage. In fact, she includes a link to Operation Black Vote, a left-wing activist group.
“Britain’s National Health Service — the taxpayer-funded, eternity-waiting-list for cancer patients but if you want your [penis] chopped off you’re right at the front health service — is now promoting racial Marxism to the nation,” tweeted Raheem Kassam, editor-in-chief of the National Pulse.
Benjamin’s blog could be dismissed as the ravings of just one crank in the NHS leadership but for the fact that, according to Sky News, the agency has already declared it will refuse treatment to patients who make “homophobic, sexist or racist remarks.” As far as the NHS is concerned, if you’re not woke, you’re a dead bloke.
Benjamin concludes her anti-racism pitch with a reminder that there’s no sitting this debate out. “Diversity,” she asserts, “isn’t a fun to have it’s a must have.” Would anyone dare tell her that sentence, along with a few others in her blog, is ungrammatical? After all, as Rutgers University has informed the world, insistence on good grammar is — you guessed it — racist.
