There are times when you hear an educated person from an older generation try to defend the casual racism/sexism/whateverism of their time, and while you cringe a bit — case in point, anything Clint Eastwood has said recently — there’s a degree to which many people forgive their ignorance due to their age and era.
Unfortunately, such a case cannot be made for Historian David Starkey. On the BBC News programme Newsnight, Starkey put his toe so far past the line it’s shocking. The panel included author Owen Jones, who wrote a book called “Chavs: the Demonization of the Working Class,” a book that Starkey cited at one point to explain his argument:
What’s happened is that a substantial section of the Chavs that you wrote about have become black. The whites have become black. A particular sort of violent, destructive, nihilistic, gangster culture has become the fashion. And black and white, boy and girl, operate in this …
