The racism of the anti-racists

Here's a shocking story. A student, active in white racia. The student in question is Ntokozo Qwabe, whom I wrote about in this column a while back as the chap who wanted to tear down a statue of Cecil Rhodes in Oxfordl politics, gets cross because he sees a black student filming him. He knocks the smartphone out of the black student's hand and then posts on Facebook: "I wish I'd actually not been a good law abiding citizen & whupped the black sass out of the bastard".

The same student had earlier boasted of reducing a waitress to "black tears" after refusing to tip her. Yet, curiously, he has a following in the media and even in politics.

Actually, I just played a little trick on you. I swapped the colors.

He is now back in Cape Town and evidently as charmless as ever. The actual words of his Facebook post were that he wished he had "whipped the white apartheid settler colonial entitlement out of the bastard." It was the "white tears" of a waitress that he had enjoyed.

Do you feel any differently when the story is flipped? I hope not. Most people will have responded in the same way to both versions: with disgust at the student's behavior. But there are a few who insist on seeing the episode, as they see everything, through the prism of imagined hierarchies of victimhood.

Such people come in all colors, and are disproportionately concentrated in universities: You generally have to be educated to be that dumb.

Oddly, the people most obsessed with making everything racial often call themselves anti-racists. This is because anti-racism has become the highest card in the leftist deck.

A couple of weeks back, Britain had its own Black Lives Matter protest. It wasn't about police brutality or racism, but about airport expansion. A handful of narcissistic idiots disrupted traffic at London City Airport in the name of black people on grounds that, er, climate change affects black people. All but one of the protesters (you've probably already guessed this) were white.

Where does it come from, this obsession with race? At first, it was a laudable reaction against institutionalized discrimination. There are plenty of people alive who still remember segregation and apartheid.