Rishi Sunak is the first nonwhite British prime minister, and it has sent the Left into a meltdown.
He is, I keep seeing online, not properly Asian, because he is well off, well spoken, and privately educated.
I should explain that. In the United Kingdom, “Asian” is an umbrella term for people from Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Nepalese, and Sri Lankan backgrounds. I know the word has different connotations in the United States, and I wouldn’t bother making the point but for a racist rant by Ronny Chien, a presenter on The Daily Show, to the effect that “Indians are not Asians, OK?”
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The success of ethnic minority conservatives triggers a certain kind of left-winger. Some complain that Sunak’s success is bad for Asians because he is not committed to higher state spending. Others are furious that, upon taking office, he praised “the country I owe so much to.” (“He has basically internalized the old instruction to ‘demonstrate your gratitude’ so favored by racists and routinely directed at brown Britons,” complained the writer Sathnam Sanghera.)
And others have evolved a hideous theory about East African Asians (both of Sunak’s parents were part of that industrious diaspora), arguing that they are not really people of color because the colonial hierarchy made them look down on black people.
While all this ugliness is bubbling away on the Left, Sunak’s race is a matter of almost complete indifference on the Right. He is hailed by some and denounced by others for scrapping his predecessor Liz Truss’s scheduled tax cuts. But beyond some mild satisfaction that the Tories have lived up to their self-image as the party of hard work and opportunity, no one cares about the PM’s ethnicity.
I’m slightly annoyed at having to write about this at all, but I was pushed into it by another rant on The Daily Show — this one by the mixed-race South African comedian Trevor Noah titled “Unpacking the Backlash to Rishi Sunak.”
“You hear a lot of people saying, ‘Oh, they’re taking over. Indians are going to take over Great Britain and what’s next?’” Noah declaimed to cretinous cheers from his audience.
You do? Really? A lot of people? I guess I must be talking to the wrong people, but what do I know? I just live here.
This being 2022, Noah then swerved into some babyish anticolonialism, complaining that Charles III is the king of Jamaica. Well, yes, he is, because that’s how successive Jamaican governments have wanted to keep things.
Lumping racism and colonialism together glosses over, for example, the way the keenest supporters of slavery in the U.S., much like the architects of apartheid in Noah’s native South Africa, rejected colonialism precisely because they disliked London’s inclinations toward racial equality. It ignores, too, the extent to which colonialism in Africa was driven by antislavery activists.
That, however, is just a minor quibble. The more serious criticism of the Left’s reaction to Sunak’s win — The Daily Show is an outlier, but not by much — is that it is based on a fantasy. The Conservative Party has given Britain its only Jewish prime minister, its only three female prime ministers, and now, its first Hindu prime minister.
All that Noah could find by way of evidence was a single racist nutter on a radio call-in — a nutter who went viral precisely because what he said was so jarring. To be clear, that’s one nutter in a nation of 68 million people.
Over the summer, Sunak was one of 11 candidates contesting the Tory leadership. Six of the 11 were not white. True, the members picked Truss, a white woman, in the runoff. But their preferred candidate, according to every poll, was Kemi Badenoch, a black woman brought up mainly in Nigeria. Do those on the Left, I wonder, ever look at this and ask themselves whether affirmative action is all it’s cracked up to be?
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I’ve complained before about how British media tend to import America’s racial language. White conservatives are called “Klansmen.” Black conservatives are called “Uncle Toms.” The Black Lives Matter narrative was replicated without modification, resulting in the hilarious sight of white protesters shouting, “Hands up, don’t shoot,” at unarmed London police officers. It is no exaggeration to say that British media were more excited by President Barack Obama’s victory than by Sunak’s.
I suspect that it is precisely this lack of interest that most infuriates the woke. It is bad enough for conservatives to beat them on the only metric they care about. But for them to do so with an indifferent shrug must be intolerable.
