Poland’s first black member of Parliament–Let’s hope they fare better than America with their first black president

Why is ‘race’ the measure of what’s to be laudatory in politics?

And So It Begins…

Alex Kurtagic

Last December, Nigerian-born John Abraham Godson became Poland’s first Black Member of Parliament. As is to be expected, the BBC reported this development with obvious jubilation, using the phrase “hailed as a landmark”. No mention was made in the BBC report of exactly how or why this is good for Godson’s constituency, what policies he advocates, or whether he is a man of outstanding character. Instead, the focus was on the man’s race and on White Poles’ racism in a country with “only” 4,000 Blacks.

Over the past decades, it has become habitual for the press in European countries to celebrate the advent of a “first Black” public official, framing such reports in terms of landmarks, and, implicitly but never subtly, of triumphs over racism. For all the professions of anti-racism, the anti-racist press remains obsessed with race.

(We are too, I suppose, but we are not pretending to be anti-racists and we would probably think less about race were it not because the anti-racists made it such a pressing issue in light of their anti-White bias.)