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Originally Posted by Damien
You cannot tell how integrated someone is by the colour of their skin.
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No, but you can make reasonably confident predictions about the level of integration across a district if houses that were once entirely occupied by white families, are now entirely occupied by black or brown ones. The nuance you are refusing to see is that he is commenting at the level of community, not pointing the finger at individuals. As you point out, he’s not dumb, he obviously knows there are limits to what you can infer about an individual based on their presentation, whether that be race or any number of cultural markers.
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It was the lack of white people he was commenting on, suggesting that it was a failure of integration. He didn't provide any other example. Integration is about language, culture and participation in society. The colour of your skin is not a proxy for these discussions.
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Again - when presented with an individual human being shorn of all context, of course you can’t. Put that individual in a network of streets that are entirely inhabited by people of the same race, none of whom had family in the UK prior to about 1950, and you absolutely can make sufficient inference to begin to identify a problem.
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This is a gaslighting technique,
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Dead right. Here it comes:
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where he defends that statement by pretending it was the following sentence about concerns about integration that people are objecting to. He is smarter than that; he knew what he was doing. It's not the first time he has used white people in connection with his claimed concerns about integration. When talking of a decline of British people in certain areas, he makes sure to specify 'White British'. He also knows, as we all do, that this is taking place when some - not all - right-wing commentators are pushing the idea that you cannot be deemed English and black. If it was a one-off, you could claim he phrased it badly, but it isn't.
As for the metropolitan commentariat class, I think the objections to what he said would extend far beyond them, which is why he has to pretend he was saying something else. He'll keep dallying with this language 'white british' instead of British, making comments on skin colour, then get faux-offended when challenged it saying he is simply talking about integration until such a time he feels confident enough to say what he means. If we are at the point where ethnicity is now a valid concern, then we're already at the extremes. It's not what I want the mainstream parties pandering to.
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… where he has said something he knows is liable to wilful misunderstanding, and has therefore explicitly drawn attention to the likely misunderstanding and provided added reassurance that this is not what he means, but you go on and insist that he means what you need him to mean anyway, because he’s dared raise a subject which is
verboten amongst metropolitan lefties.
It seems to me you’ve been so careful to curate your acceptable beliefs and opinions that you’re quite unable to believe Jenrick might simply mean what he says. It’s a pity because those who choose to see issues in this way (or to be wilfully blind to them, as the case may be) have poured so much energy into controlling what may be said, they’ve rendered themselves unable to engage with the arguments when people inevitably get fed up and start saying them anyway.
There has been a sea-change in public discourse over the past few years - I refuse to believe you’re so deaf you can’t hear it. But until you’re ready to engage with it as opposed to labelling it ‘gaslighting’ (and by making that accusation you’re actually doing the very thing you’ve accused Jenrick of doing), you’re going to be powerless to stop it. At this point by the way I mean ‘you’ very much in the plural, i.e. all those whose instinct reply along the lines of ‘you can’t say that’ when forced to confront the protests of the lumpen proles.