Black Lives Matter is a threat to racial equality

The Marxist organisation is undermining the role of capitalism in empowering the new black middle class

Irecall my first brush with explicit racism well. The victim was Me and the perpetrator was Myself. I was five years old, crazy about Barbie, and my dad came back from a business trip brandishing Nairobi’s equivalent. I remember the horror. A doll that isn’t blonde? Unnerved by the familiarity of her features – Coco Pops skin, exploding hair – I made her play the baddie in my dolly games before eventually banishing her to the cupboard under the sink. Recently – as an adult who is thankfully at ease with her dark hue – I visited a toy shop and was shocked: dolls of all races, along with shaved-head Barbies, vitiligo Barbies and Barbies with fake limbs.

The shift is profit-driven. By the millennium, Mattel was losing market share to more diverse brands, as the latter took a gamble on white middleclass parents ambivalent about “blonde bimbo” dolls, and a rising number of ethnic-minority customers. Mattel jumped on the bandwagon, profits climbed – and, as you read this, millions of non-white girls are playing with dolls with skin just like theirs.

This is testament to the power of capitalism. For all the railing against “structural racism”, there is a new black British middle class, and brands are responding. The purchasing power of ethnic minorities is now worth £300 billion – and though their disposable income is lower than that of white Britons, they go to the cinema more often, spend more on beauty (black British women spend six times as much on hair products), and are keener to snap up the latest technologies. As a result, everything from mobile phone adverts to the range of concealers in Boots is becoming more diverse.

A nasal whinge of a word that, “diverse”. But diversity is an unapologetic function of capitalism. Not that you’d guess this from the rise of the hard-left Black Lives Matter movement. It is a serious threat to racial equality, and not just because its American-imported lectures on police violence and “white silence” grate against Britain’s racial nuances. The Communist BLM threatens to undermine capitalism’s role in improving race relations, as it toxifies diversity, tarnishing it as virtuesignalling tokenism.

Because, let’s be clear: brands are embracing diversity for profit. After assuming for decades that ethnicminority markets were too niche, and targeting them jeopardised a brand’s appeal to white consumers, a couple of commercial earthquakes have shifted the dial: Vogue Italia’s all-black edition in 2008, for example, sold out in the UK and US in 72 hours, prompting the publishers to run 30,000 extra copies. A decade later, the Sixties African Marvel superhero Black Panther enjoyed the fifth biggest opening weekend in movie history when the character was adapted for Hollywood’s first all-black blockbuster. These are capitalist triumphs that hit a new sweet spot; selling aspirational stories to ethnic minorities and hip exoticism to white cosmopolitans. Some may snort at such cynical commercialism, but it is gifting minorities self-esteem, in a way marches to “defund the police” never will.

Of course, because capitalism is “evil”, we all have to pretend that this progress is political. Commercial endorsements of edgy, vacuous movements like BLM only add to the pageantry. But as billion-pound brands “take the knee”, and donate millions to a Marxist organisation, a divisive form of “woke” consumerism is emerging.

The backlash is already here: the Premier League has been “besieged” by letters complaining that supporting BLM is anti-semitic, and a survey finds that 41 per cent of Britons don’t think brands should back BLM. And yet “woke consumerism” struts on with defiance. Just take the Blm-themed September issue of Vogue. When a magazine portrays a cover shot by a black photographer as a political breakthrough, it smacks of tokenism. When a model poses for the cover in a Black Panther-style beret, it reinforces stereotypes about black violence. It also destroys gains made by capitalism as the Marvel Black Panther – who predates the political movement – is dismissed as “wokeness”.

Incidentally, the model in question is quite the majestic embodiment of tortured Left-wing irony. Adwoa Aboah, born to a Ghanaian father and an English aristocratic mother, has spoken of how “boys weren’t into my braids, so I conformed – painfully relaxing my hair, which didn’t win them over either”. For the Left, the personal is political, so naturally she describes herself as a model second and an activist first. In truth, the personal is commercial – and Ms Aboah has collaborated with Revlon, which in the Seventies cornered the market in black hair relaxer.

So I’ll concede one point on which the Left is correct: consumerism doesn’t have a conscience. It’ll flog straight hair to insecure black women in the same way it’ll sell failure to the working class (one sports label recently hosted a brand party in a blacked-out building strewn with dirty mattresses). But unlike today’s Marxists, markets are self-correcting. Real aspiration will outperform the fake stuff in the end; just like brands twigged they could make money from groups outside the white middle class, they will twig that black Barbies sell better than hip hoodies printed with the words “Unemployed” (I kid you not). And so capitalism enslaves, and so it frees. It’s the part that Marx never grasped – nor his latest BLM devotees.