An unintentionally hilarious piece in the Guardian reveals the lengths to which our left-wing comrades are forced to go to resolve the comical dilemma in which they find themselves over the anti-gay prejudice among black people, particularly fashionable Jamaican rappers. Since to be against prejudice of any kind is the ark of the covenant, and since any negative attitude towards any approved victim group is ipso facto prejudice, and since according to this thinking black people and gay people are, as approved victim groups, immune from taking the rap (as it were) for any negative attitudes towards anyone else, it follows that black people cannot be prejudiced against gay people. But since Jamaican rappers' lyrics often contain appalling and disgusting prejudice against gay people (amongst others) so much so that the Home Office has refused entry to some such artistes, the left is sucking its teeth.

In the Guardian, Decca Aitkenhead presents the perfect solution to this knotty problem. The reason Jamaicans are prejudiced against gays is -- their minds have been poisoned by white people! Thus it is not Jamaican homophobia that should be vilified (as opposed to any other kind) but those who criticise the prejudice:

'It's a failure to recognise 400 years of Jamaican history, starting with the sodomy of male slaves by their white owners as a means of humiliation. Slavery laid the foundations of homophobia, and its legacy is still unmistakable in the precarious, overexaggerated masculinity of many men in Jamaica.'

Of course! How silly of us! Aitkenhead goes on:

'Many Jamaicans are not homophobic, but the prevailing attitude to gays is ignorant and sometimes violent. But the fact remains that of all Jamaica's injustices and deprivations, homophobia cannot be singled out as uniquely intolerable. Although activists are right to campaign about it, it's wrong for public opinion to seize on the issue with no thought for political context.

'A better emotion would be culpability. Every ingredient of Jamaica's homophobia implicates Britain, whose role has maintained the conditions conducive to homophobia, from slavery through to the debt that makes education unaffordable. For us to vilify Jamaicans for an attitude of which we were the architects is shameful. To do so in the name of liberal values is meaningless...Jamaicans weren't the architects of their ideas about homosexuality; we were.'

Got that? Of course, among other things Aitkenhead is effectively arguing that Jamaicans are too stupid even to develop their own prejudices by themselves. Racism, or what? But then, for these Savanorolas of sanctimony, the left is constitutionally incapable of an attitude problem.

Priceless.

Posted by melanie at January 5, 2005