Last night on our Monday Night Panel on LBC, we discussed the state of race relations in this country. It was overall a really interesting hour long discussion with Trevor Phillips, Anjum Peerbacos and Dr Kehinde Andrews.
There was, however, one exchange which left a nasty taste in my mouth.
Dr Kehinde Andrews told us that people with a platform need to be "more responsible" about how they talk about race.
"A lot of stuff that comes out of some people does actually promote this right-wing view which makes it terribly worse."
But when I asserted said that progress was being made, Kehinde disagreed.
"In politics for example, you have leafy Tory constituents in the south-east of England that have no issue at all in picking black candidates to stand in safe Conservative seats. That would not have happened 15 years ago," I said.
Dr Andrews replied: "Why is that a good thing? You can have 100 black Tories but it wont make any difference to me!"
I responded: "You are exhibiting the problem by saying that. You absolutely are the problem because if you don't think that that is progress, then I'm afraid you're living in a different world to the rest of us."
Dr Andrews then said: "There's no place for Tories in black activism."
I think this is a disgraceful thing to say. All it does is entrench divides in society. Clearly Kehinde thinks that Tories are intrinsically evil and racist. How dare he tar millions of people with the same brush. If I indulged in lazy stereotypes about various ethnic minorities, I would deserve to lose my job, and yet a political academic, teaching in a British university feels free to say this sort of ridiculous and bigoted thing without any fear of being held to account for it.
Well I'm holding him to account for it now.
