Is Bright Simons Justifying UK Mirror Racial Bias Against Lord Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng?

I was not the least bit flabbergasted by the fact that less than a month after he had been named Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, that is, UK’s Minister of the Treasury, and the second-most-powerful elected politician in the United Kingdom and The Commonwealth, for that matter, by Prime Minister Liz Truss, that the Oxbridge- and Ivy-League-educated Dr. Kwasi Addo Kwarteng would be depicted as a convicted felon by London’s Daily Mirror newspaper (See “UK’s Kwasi Kwarteng Calls Out Popular Newspaper for Wrongly Depicting Him as Convicted Criminal” Ghanaweb.com 10/1/22). It happens routinely right here in New York City and nearly everywhere else in the United States of America, where African humanity constitutes the very foundational fabric of the greatest modern civilization, every day.

Significantly, what flabbergasted yours truly almost disconsolately was the rather patently asinine and noetic or no-brainer attempt by Mr. Bright Simons, the Vice-President of the Accra, Ghana-based IMANI policy research institute, to justify the obviously deliberate and downrightly malicious Daily Mirror misidentification and inexcusable misrepresentation of Lord Chancellor Kwarteng with another Ghanaian-descended Goldman Sachs banker called Elias Preko, who was criminally convicted of gross professional misconduct not very long ago, by scandalously asserting that “By the way, Africans struggle to tell Chinese folks apart too.”

Dear Reader, trust me, absolutely no intelligent and reasonably well-educated African or Ghanaian editor or reporter of any major or reputable newspaper anywhere on the proverbial Primeval Continent would confuse the image and looks of China’s President Xi Jinping with the legendary and immortalized Chairman Mao Zedong / Tsetung or another of the distinguished and globally prominent and renowned predecessors of Premier Xi. This is decidedly a “garden-variety racism” of the most heinous and unpardonable kind. You see, with Lord Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng, a possible British Prime Minister in the not-too-distant future, we are not talking about just any NIGGER but, of course, I guess I readily recognize the fact that in the mind of the stereotypical rabidly racist white British denizen, we are still talking about the rarefied and highly unlikely stupendous achievements of an ordinary nigger, nonetheless, I suppose, going by the patently pedestrian and morally reprehensive estimation of IMANI’s Mr. Simons on this most perennially intractable conundrum.

Which, by the way, is absolutely no conundrum at all, going by the primary and/or fundamental reality of the deleterious and decidedly indelible aftermath of the massive and protracted enslavement of global African humanity around the world. It is not a facile matter of “cognitive bias,” in the clinically dispassionate sense in which Mr. Simons almost perfunctorily uses the term. Rather, it is the inescapably execrable and despicable assay at the summary genocidal expurgation of global African humanity from the realm of contemporary civilization and culture which ought to be squarely reckoned as such. In “Taneyian” terms, that is, in reference to the March 6, 1857, Dred Scott Decision by the United States’ Supreme Court, Lord Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng has absolutely no right of any distinctive political and intellectual achievements which the Caucasoid Briton is bound to respect and/or honor.

It could even have been the legendary half-Scottish and half-Ghanaian pioneer politician and another “Akyemkwaa” from Okyeman or the Akyem-Abuakwa State of Ghana, as in the Asogli State of Ghana’s Eweland, to wit, Lord Paul Boateng, the man who a little over two decades, or so, ago came closest to clinching the coveted cabinet portfolio of Lord Chancellor in the Prime Minister Charles Lynton Blair – aka Tony Blair – Labor Party government, and it wouldn’t have made a whit of a difference. You see, the Lord Chancellorship of Dr. Kwasi Kwarteng is laudably heroic because it was the most unlikely of its kind, one that was strikingly akin to the historic naming of the late Gen. Colin Luther Powell as the very first African-descended United States of America’s Secretary-of-State, in the government of President George W. Bush, or the Junior President Bush.

The Conservative Party of the UK is in many striking respects the analogical equivalent of the now-King Charles, III, allegedly asking his younger son, Prince Harry, precisely what “colorful” breed of royal princes and princesses Harry and his half-white African American wife, Meghan Markle, intended to add to the purebred stock of the Windsor Clan.

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By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD

English Department, SUNY-Nassau

Garden City, New York

Oct. 7, 2022

E-mail: [email protected]