This is not America! For good and ill British race relations are, well, British

The case against US cultural imperialism

Whenever Tomiwa Owolade publishes an article he checks his watch, sits back, and waits for the first heresy hunter to denounce him as “a house Negro” or “Uncle Tom” who “denies the existence of racism.”  He rarely waits long.

Owalade isn’t an Uncle Tom (or Uncle Tomiwa) and he does not deny the existence of racism. Instead, he makes two arguments that guarantee him unpopularity with a segment of online activists, whose political attitudes are made in America. For that achievement alone he is worth reading.

His first claim is in the title of his polemic This is Not America: Why Black Lives in Britain Matter (out today from Atlantic Books). American notions of racism are local. Even the despairing belief that America is irredeemably racist, which runs from Malcolm X in the 1960s to today’s critical race theorists, is an unavoidably American argument, however loudly the Trumpian right denounces it as the modern version of communism. The global dominance of US culture does not make American ideological disputes relevant to the rest of the world. Only an unthinking and faintly servile search for moral equivalence leaves many unable to grasp this frankly obvious point.

The great art critic Robert Hughes described in the 20^th century about how his fellow Australians felt a “cultural cringe”. They could not believe their art was worthwhile until it had earned approval from London, the old imperial metropolis.

The imperial centre has shifted. “Britain’s relationship with America is a case of cultural cringe,” Owolade writes.  “All too often, we judge ourselves by America’s standards rather than our own.”

Judge the UK by its own standards, and you find no politician, however right wing, would have a hope in hell of securing election if they stood on the standard platform of a US Republican. To propose destroying socialised medicine, banning abortion, and licensing the sale of assault rifles on every high street is to take the road to political oblivion. And yet, progressives import American ideas wholesale – and tellingly many in the UK now follow the American fashion and call themselves “progressives” rather than reach for the European labels of socialist, social democrat or liberal.

Meanwhile Owolade’s second point is of the utmost urgency for UK readers who want to understand their country.