Even a few seconds can feel like an eternity when your favourite Spectator TV debate is interrupted by a sweaty bloke in a bedsit flogging digital currency. YouTube understands how painful its ludicrous advertising interludes have become which is presumably why they invented the five-second skip button. Regular ads are bad enough but it's those twenty-minute infomercials that somehow manage to catch us off guard that really grate. How does YouTube know when I am least able to reach for the skip button? It happened again the other day during my morning shower; midway through a favourite song a perky female voice barged in to ask whether it was 'ok to call someone queer'. This didn’t sound like your average get-rich-quick scam – in fact it didn't sound like an advertisement at all.
Turns out Google had interrupted my morning routine not to sell me life insurance but to 'educate' me about the importance of identity and 'Allyship'. During the nine-minute sofa discussion perky Radio 1 minority presenters Nick Grimshaw (gay) and Clara Amfo (black) answered questions about each other's 'communities', taking it in turns to prove how much they understood and were willing to learn about their various struggles, this being 'the ultimate test of Allyship'. Honing in on all the latest identitarian talking points, Nick bemoaned the fact that he had learnt nothing about black history at school other than that black people were enslaved and even that took less than an hour of teaching time 'before it was back to Queen Elizabeth.' A finger wagging Clara jumped in to remind us that 'black history is history' with much nodding along from Nick - Allyship indeed.
Clara appeared to be saying that because we can all trace our ancestry back to the African savannah we are all in some way black, but doesn’t this undermine the point of Black History Month? Grimshaw’s derogatory tone made it perfectly clear what he thought of white history - stale, boring, reeking of the establishment. But surely if we follow Clara Amfo’s inclusivity argument to its logical conclusion, history shouldn’t be racially charged in this way.
In later segments we hear about the 'othering' of black hair by thoughtless white people, the intersection of black and queer 'experience' through the brightly coloured pride flag. We are told that 'equity' rather than 'equality' is what levels the playing field and that the best way to support trans people is 'by reinforcing their identity by using pronouns.’
Clara later jokes that she feels embarrassed about fancying men especially in the current climate while Nick muses on 'Black excellence' as 'a celebration of blackness'. They warn us that casual racism is never casual and that true Allyship means speaking up for minorities 'but never over them.' On the question of 'why black music is so good', we learn that 'any music you like started with black people' and that, like history, 'all music is black music'. But who says all black music is good? I happen to be a fan of funk and soul for instance but I can't abide Grime or R&B. Stating that Black music is great simply for being black infantilises the medium's rich diversity; it also smacks of paternalistic head-patting. And while it's true that African rhythm permeates most popular music the Western classical tradition began with music created by and for the Christian Church.
It says a lot about giant tech companies such as Google that they are prepared to stake their reputation on these extended propaganda films, which are clearly designed to make us think more favourably of their company. It says even more about where we are as a society that a mega corporation thinks that a veneer of activism is all it takes for us to turn a blind eye to some of their more dubious practices. It seems the purpose of Google has shifted from those innocent 'do no harm' days to something far more politically driven.
Maybe I'm being pedantic but it is the lazy little assumptions masquerading as fact in these videos that eventually serve to undermine the diversity and inclusion doctrine, of which Google's Allyship discussion (over two million views and counting) is a typical example. In more highbrow circles, we are being asked to accept falsehoods about prominent black historical figures such as Mary Seacole who is arguably not the saintly nurse celebrated in sculptural form in the gardens of St Thomas' Hospital but rather a shrewd businesswoman who travelled to the Crimea in order to set up a profit making hotel. Her failure to sell luxury goods to the officer class eventually led to her bankruptcy. Historian Dr David Starkey has described such rewritings as a dangerous manufacturing of the past and 'historical propaganda'.
If we are to take Black History Month seriously, we deserve an honest, well-documented history rather than a progressive fantasy promulgated by white, guilt-ridden liberals. We do Allyship a serious disservice by sugar coating minority history.
True Allyship, rather than the facile version pumped out by Google, would involve a genuine desire to come together rather than a cynical retreat into tribalistic safe spaces and buzzwords. As to the question of whether it's ok to call people like Nick 'queer', his answer is 'not to my face.’
