Britain’s inaugural professor of ‘Black Studies’ has branded the United States of America a “racist project from its very beginnings”, akin to “Europe on steroids”.
Kehinde Andrews, who teaches at the publicly-funded Birmingham City University’s School of Social Sciences, told Bloomberg that the idea of “incremental change, progress within the system” in the United States frames the issues the country faces incorrectly, as “the actual system is the problem”.
“I mean, you have to understand America is a racist project; I mean, from its very beginnings what it essentially is is Europe on steroids; a place where European colonialists go and create a system built on white supremacy, which explains why there’s so much violence, why the police carry guns, why we’re seeing this play out today,” the academic alleged.
“It’s not that black people don’t trust the system that’s the problem, the problem is the system, and it’s about much more than trying to cross hands across the aisles, it’s about saying let’s think about defunding the police, let’s think about decarceration, we actually take these much more transformative steps, because baby steps are not in the right direction, they just, in some ways the make it worse,” he complained.
When his interlocutor suggested that “transformative steps without legislation… open up Pandora’s box” Andrews answered, perhaps somewhat ominously, that “Pandora’s box is exactly what needs to be opened up”.
Professor Andrews has become something of a media darling in recent years, appearing regularly on television, on radio, and at publicly broadcast university events to lambast the West in general and the United Kingdom in particular for its inveterate racism and white supremacy, which in his view persists down to the present day, despite his own privileged position as a public figure.
Andrews has, to cite just a few examples, denounced the Enlightenment as “little more than White identity politics” and complained that “its racist knowledge still underpins university education”, and denounced Sir Winston Churchill as “the perfect embodiment of white supremacy” and branded the British Empire “far worse than the Nazis.”
He has also called on sportsmen to take a knee “or clench a fist” during the British national anthem in Colin Kaepernick style displays because the British flag is a symbol of “oppression”, and said that the St George’s Cross flag for England, too, should be scrapped for being “offensive” and “something like the Confederate flag in America”.
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