Lowering the tone
Sir: I enjoy my Spectator and I am not going to cancel my subscription; I am not at all politically correct and I really don't give a
LETTERS
damn. But are you keeping an eye on Taki?
A few months ago he was writing some- thing about a parade in New York, and suddenly made the astonishing claim that not one of that city's huge Puerto Rican population had ever made a positive contri- bution to it, a proposition that music-lovers alone would vehemently deny, and an atti- tude that has led to the greatest crimes of our century. But that's Taki, I thought, bad writing and all; it's what we expect of him.
Now, however, he has got onto the sub- ject of American slavery (High life, 3 Jan- uary), an episode in which millions of peas- ants were ripped away from their homes and loved ones, from their villages and their fields, even from their religions, lan- guages and kinship systems, and taken to what was then the other side of the moon with no hope of ever returning, treated so badly that many of them died or were mur- dered on the voyage. This created a legacy of heartbreak with which we are still living, as well as a new and uniquely ugly sort of racism to justify it. The fact that today's African-Americans may be materially bet- ter off than their distant African cousins is beside the point; to posit that an historical evil can be undone by any subsequent development is to justify anything at all.
I would not ask Taki how he knows that these peasants wanted to escape from 'the misery of Africa', or that Africa was miser- able 200 or 300 years ago, or that Africa might not be less miserable today if such a large number of its best young people had not disappeared from its history: life is too short for discourse with a moron who last week referred to a black man as `Samba' (High life, 10 January). I am not in favour of any sort of censorship except self- censorship, and I cannot forbear to ask: do you really want to print this stuff? Isn't it rather lowering the tone? Will he justify the Holocaust next, and will you allow him to do so?
Donald Clarke
Sycamore Barn, Station Road, Yardiam, Dereham, Norfolk
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