The BBC has produced and aired a “take” by trans model Munroe Bergdorf, in which white people are excoriated as inherently racist and “the most violent and oppressive force of nature on earth”.
Bergdorf, who was previously given a platform by the BBC when cosmetics firm L’Oreal sacked them for similar racist comments, was speaking on the October 12th edition of the BBC This Week current affairs programme.
“What kind of country is modern Britain? No doubt it’s a country that likes to think of itself as inclusive, but that depends on where you’re standing,” Bergdorf complained.
“For me, as a transgender mixed race person, we live in a deeply racist society.”
“Why should we expect anything else from a country that’s built its success on the enslavement of non-white people?” Bergdorf alleged.
“It’s that continuous cycle of racism that explains where we are now. Why does the UK acknowledge the sacrifice of people killed in wars, but not the spilt blood of black people?”
In fact, there are many British memorials commemorating the victims of the slave trade and celebrating its abolition. The oldest, according to Historic England, is the Anti-Slavery Arch in Stroud, Gloucestershire, erected in 1834 by Henry Wyatt to celebrate the passing of the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833.
The most recent appears to have been a memorial erected in June this year to commemorate Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton, a parliamentarian who campaigned tirelessly against slavery.
The British probably did more to end the institution of slavery than any other people, following the abolition of the trade at home in 1807 with a sustained, worldwide campaign against the practice.
Arab Muslim slavers in North Africa, who had enslaved white Europeans and black Africans for centuries, were forced to curb their practices after the intervention of the Royal Navy, and British Christian missionaries like Dr. David Livingstone and Dr. John Kirk worked tirelessly to put an end to the related East African slave trade.
Bergdorf continued by making the disturbing claim that racism is somehow written into white people’s DNA, telling them they “need to understand that racism is not learned, it’s inherited, and either consciously or unconsciously passed down through privilege” — much like the Abrahamic concept of Original Sin.
“The uncomfortable truth is that the white race is the most violent and oppressive force of nature on earth,” the model concluded.
The police arrest hundreds of people for similar comments about non-white people every year, and encourage the public to report them through its online hate crime portal. The fact that Bergdorf’s comments have been aired by a publicly-funded broadcaster without apparent sanction has resulted in many accusations of double standards on social media.
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