If white people wear their hair in cornrows, they can be and have been accused of “cultural appropriation.” What should happen, then, if a Nigerian-born author tries to appropriate a whole nation and entire culture?
What does happen is that if it’s a Western nation and culture, the person gets accolades and riches.
A case in point is a story out of the United Kingdom. Per The Telegraph:
Stonehenge was built by black Britons, a new children’s history book has claimed.
The illustrated work by Nigerian-born British author Atinuke, titled Brilliant Black British History, states that “every single British person comes from a migrant” but the “very first Britons were black”.
…The book published by Bloomsbury and promoted by the Arts Council-funded literacy charity the Book Trust states “Britain was a black country for more than 7,000 years before white people came.
“And during that time the most famous British monument was built, Stonehenge.”
The introduction to the book further states that “Britain has been a mostly white country for a lot less time than it has been a mostly black country”.
Atinuke’s book for readers aged seven plus takes the reader through a chronological overview of black people’s presence in Britain, beginning with claims that Cheddar Man, the oldest human remains found in Britain, had skin “as dark as dark can be”.
Not surprisingly, the “claims made in the book have caused concern among some established historians that young people may be brought up reading ‘misinformation,’” The Telegraph continues.
“Recent genetic analysis has shown that the inhabitants of Britain in the period when Stoenehenge [sic] was completed, around 2,500 BC, were pale-skinned early farmers whose ancestors had spread from Anatolia.”
Moreover, Atinuke’s claims about Cheddar Man, thus named because the remains were found in Cheddar Gorge in England, are also incorrect. In reality, geneticist Susan Walsh at Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis, who was part of a team that created a computer model designed to predict skin pigmentation, says that we don’t definitively know the ancient man’s skin color. The idea that he had dark skin is a “probable profile,” but “DNA testing is not advanced enough to say for certain,” reported the Daily Mail in 2018.
In addition, the same profile indicates that Cheddar Man had blue eyes, and in the reconstruction of his head presented at the Mail, he has straight hair.
This is significant because if people are going to discuss race — which they do incessantly today — it ought to be done accurately and intelligently. And the reality is that having blue eyes and straight hair is inconsistent with the “black,” as in African, phenotype.
Atinuke, however, doesn’t (at least according to the reporting) claim that ancient Britons were African; she says “black.” Yet if this simply means they might’ve had dark skin, note that many Caucasians have just that. In fact, along with Arabs and Persians, most Indians (from India) are classified as Caucasian — even though many of them have very dark skin.
Such a meaning would also be deceitful. After all, the term “black” with respect to demographics is a racial designation, not merely a color indicator (and, in fact, no one is actually “black” complected).
But Atinuke doesn’t stop at Stonehenge in building her edifice of lies. As the Blaze informs:
She also catalogues black populations throughout Britain’s history, from the time of its Roman conquest through the Middle Ages and onward.
For instance, according to the author, during the period of the Tudors and Stuarts — which partially overlapped with the Barbary slave trade — Britain was enlightened by black Muslims who brought “new knowledge about textiles, medicine, maths and navigation.”
Historian and author Zareer Masani suggested that Atinuke’s book “seems typical of the kind of wokedom that’s been colonising our schools and universities,” reported the Telegraph.
Masani added that the book … is “evidence of brainwashing children with outright lies, confusion and misinformation.”
“The Nazis claimed that the cultural achievements of the north were the work of blond, fair-skinned folk,” said David Abulafia, a historian and professor emeritus at Cambridge. “Making skin color a criterion for judging great achievements like Stonehenge is therefore not a new idea. It is also rubbish. It only gets interesting if their skins were blue or green.”
British conservative commentator and Anglican deacon Calvin Robinson told GB News, “It’s massively hyperbolic. It’s actually insane, the revisionist history that takes place in there…. You can say that we had a diverse culture to some extent, but it was so minuscule. Up until the 1950s, Britain was predominantly white and that’s not a judgment call. That’s not saying it’s a good thing or a bad thing. That’s a fact” .
Robinson noted on X that the “book provides no sources, funnily enough.”
Perhaps, however, Atinuke would echo prevaricating comedian Hasan Minhaj, whom I wrote about yesterday, and say her claims are “emotional truths.” And her story is much like that of Minhaj, who fabricated personal stories of victimhood. Like so many other modern snake-oil salesmen, they both realized they could become rich providing anti-Western fare for weak, value-signalizing, self-flagellating white moderns.
So while Atinuke calls her birth continent “Amazing Africa” and says she hopes to return to her beloved Nigeria, don’t ask why she isn’t there right now trying to make it more amazing, a real-life Wakanda. She’s too busy making her bank account more amazing in the land of milk and honey badgers turned jellyfish.
