Britain’s first professor of Black Studies claimed on Monday that the patriotic song Rule, Britannia! is racist propaganda and that Land of Hope and Glory should be renamed as ‘Land of Racism and Servitude’.
Following reports that the BBC may scrap the two patriotic songs from the Last Night of the Proms Broadcast, Professor Kehinde Andrews backed up the call to drop the songs, saying that it is not “about banning the songs, it’s about saying what songs are appropriate.”
“‘Britons never, never, never shall be slaves,’ – that’s racist propaganda at a time when Britain was the leading slave-trading nation in the world. The idea that we’re having this conversation now, that’s a disgrace,” Andrews said of Rule, Britania! on Good Morning Britain.
“Land of Hope and Glory, a much more reasonable name for the song would have been ‘Land of Racism and Servitude’. I understand that’s not a catchy song, but that’s the nature of the country we’re talking about,” Andrews added.
The Black Studies academic went on to explain that “the fact that the majority of people think this is OK doesn’t mean it’s OK. That’s because of a deficit in our school system that don’t teach the horrors of the British Empire. It’s not something to celebrate.”
Kehinde Andrews’ outlandish proclamations were put in check by another black panellist on the British morning show, freedom of speech campaigner Inaya Folarin Iman, who said that the professor has a “one-dimensional view of Britain”.
“He sees it as a land of racism and hate and all of these things, that’s completely and fundamentally divorced from what most people believe to Britain,” she explained.
‘I don’t think this helps a single ethnic minority life. I find it very hypocritical that a lot of people don’t have a problem with music that talks about stabbing and violence and the N-word this and the N-word that, but a song that brings a lot of joy to the British people is somehow an issue of censorship,” Iman said.
“Pride in nationhood unifies us all, regardless of our background, and should be a bulwark against divisive identity politics, which forces everyone to be perpetually conscious of racial, gender and generational divisions and to judge others by their differences. This move does not ‘modernise’ the Proms, but undermines what is special about it,” Iman went on to write in the Daily Mail.
Professor Kehinde Andrews has long been a figure of controversy in the UK, often taking to British airways to denounce the country and British historical figures as being racist.
In July of 2018, the Black Studies professor said that flying the English flag should be done away with as the English were “flying this flag during the Crusades, and going around through Muslim countries trying to convert them”.
In February, he continued his assault on Britain, arguing that the “British Empire did far more harm to the world” than Nazi Germany, going on to proclaim that “whiteness is a psychosis”.
Amidst the Black Lives Matter campaign to tear down statues honouring British historical figures, including Sir Winston Churchill, Andrews argued in June that “Churchill did some good certainly, but let’s be honest Churchill is also responsible deaths of millions of black and brown people. Churchill was a eugenicist.”
“In fact, Churchill and Hitler would’ve probably agreed on many things when it comes to race,” he added.
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