Deborah Orr: Why we should bin Black History Month

It's wrong for all the reasons that multiculturalism more generally is wrong

It is Black History Month again, as it has been every October since 1987. You can be forgiven if the festival has passed you by, as this special period, dedicated to celebrating the history and traditions of "black and other minority ethnic groups", is not much observed, except by local councils, state schools and sundry lovers of what young people used to solemnly refer to as "identity politics".

What, I wonder, must schoolchildren think of this concept that implies that the history of white people can be celebrated endlessly all year round, while the history of black people can be dealt with comprehensively in a few short weeks? Not much, I'll wager, just like the vast majority of the rest of us. Black History Month may have been adopted to be vibrantly affirming of black-and-other-minority-group identities. But it just comes off as patronising, worthy tokenism.

Launched in 1926 as Negro History Week, it was imported to Britain as part of the African Jubilee celebrations marking the birth of the philosopher and social reformer Marcus Garvey. It has been limping along these shores ever since.

Yet its pedigree in the US is a fine one. It is part of the history of the 20th-century civil rights movement, a history which itself needs no ethnic month of celebration since it is of such vital importance to all students of modern history. And of course, as with all history, you have to know the preceding period to understand the bit you're focusing on, and before you know it, lo and behold, we humans are all connected by our common narratives, rather than divided into our separate ones.

In other words, Black History Month is wrong for all the reasons that multiculturalism more generally is wrong. Black History Week emerged during a rather inglorious period in our own history, when we greeted hostility to post-colonial immigration with feeble, stupid multiculturalism. The latter, it turns out, was not a laid-back ideology of tolerance that allowed a thousand flowers to bloom, but an excuse for tokenism, laziness, patronisation, ghettoisation, simmering resentment, poverty, alienation, fundamentalism and terrorism.

Which is why, I guess, Trevor Phillips, head of the Commission for Racial Equality, never mentioned Black History Month at all when he launched "an outspoken assault on the dogmas of the race-relations industry" on Monday. Phillips has in recent months become increasingly trenchant in his condemnation of multicultural attitudes, and has distanced himself from earlier arguments that tended to finger white racism as the motor of ethnic underachievement. He speaks now of "sleepwalking to segregation" as a real and present danger for British society, and he is by no means alone in his beliefs.

The left-of-centre think-tank Demos recently republished an updated version of a pamphlet written by the Liberal Democrat MP Vincent Cable, which also condemned multiculturalism as it "detracts from the important task of creating a sense of shared identity called 'Britishness', and allows racialism to flourish behind an outward veneer of politeness and respect for different ways of life".

Patrick West, writing for another think-tank, Civitas, is more uncompromising in his assault on what he calls "hard multiculturalism" and the double-standard by which "hard multiculturalists" insist on celebrating all other cultures yet refuse to do anything other than denigrate their own. He also, as he explores this theme, points to a pretty paradox whereby, since multiculturalism itself is a western concept, repeated nowhere else in the world, it actually elevates western values above all others anyway.

This is stretching a point, I think, since multiculturalism appears to me to be a perculiarly British adaptation of values developed as part of the American left's retreat into identity politics during the Reagan years, and the campus revulsion of the "dead white male". Far from being a "western value" it's a British compromise, an elaborate way, in fact, of spending a great deal of time and solemn labour on doing absolutely nothing except wallowing in fear and uncertainty, but turning it out into accusatory aggression. It's what the left did when the miners' strike failed.

The process continued and deepened a period of confusion and self-loathing from which socialism only began to recover with the emergence of the anti-globalisation movement. All that can be said in defence of such behaviour is that times were hard. Norman Tebbit was raving about "the cricket test", mixed-race couples got jeered at in the streets, "Paki" shopkeepers got their faces slashed with knives for no good reason, and conservatives doughtily defended such monstrosities as the apartheid regime in South Africa. In such a context, things like Black History Month seemed like an easy success to shore up failure.

Vincent Cable argues in his Demos pamphet that the politics of left and right are being replaced by "politics of identity". My own view is that this process began a long time ago, when the left moved away from the economic and class battleground and began concentrating instead on gender, sexual and ethnic identity as the defining arenas where the fight for human rights had to be slugged out.

Cable argues that Britain must strive for "multiple identity, not multiculturalism", and that is, I think, right. However, you can't get much more of a multiple identity than that of the "black, one-legged, lesbian single-mother" of 1980s anti-left comedy. Maybe the thing we have to learn from the experience of multiculturalism is that it is important to acknowledge the strength of human identity, and to seek always to identify our common experience rather than to seek to emphasise our difference.

Most of those eager to dismantle multiculturalism are keen to champion English as the common language in these islands. (That things have got to this parlous state, whereby English has to be talked up as a language we might all think about adopting, is actually quite beyond satire.)

But even though so many voices appear to be in agreement, the lazy nods to the vibrant society we're supposed to love - the Friday-night curries and the Moroccan themes at parties - are as far as we seem capable of going. It would be nice to think that this time next year there would be no black history month - with no black history, no white history, and no special history for any shade in between - just a history of humanity and what in our ignorance and our greed, and sometimes in our curiousity and our desire to help, we put each other through. But it is probably best not to count on it.

d.orr@independent.co.uk