Back in the mid-1980s when I was an undergraduate at the University of Southampton, a leftie housemate told me not to say ‘black coffee’.
‘It’s racist,’ she declared, quite categorically.
At the time I was young and naïve. For a few months I actually stopped using the phrase ‘black coffee’, until I worked out what a load of rubbish it all was.
Unfortunately, the sort of baloney spouted by my former housemate appears to have infected British institutions. There’s no other way to explain the behaviour of police officers in the Henry Nowak murder case.
On 3 December 2025 Nowak, at the time a student at my alma mater, was stabbed on his way home. He had been out with friends celebrating the end-of-year exams. Alas for him, he crossed paths with a lying, weapons-obsessed Sikh on Belmont Road in Southampton. It was still early, not even midnight.
Belmont Road is in Portswood, a leafy, safe part of Southampton. I lived in the area as a third-year undergraduate, so I can imagine the scene very well. Police arrive. It’s winter, and quiet. There’s a white boy on the ground, weak but alive, and a black boy on his feet. The black boy tells them he has been racially abused.
Officers accept the latter’s version of events uncritically. They handcuff Henry Nowak even while he bleeds to death. Henry pleads for help, to no avail. Harrowing footage is recorded on the officers’ body cameras.
Henry Nowak died. Officers realised too late that he’d been telling the truth: he really had been stabbed and wasn’t able to breathe. Somehow, they had failed to check.
We should not be surprised. It strikes me that every organisation in this country — be it the BBC or the British Museum, the National Trust or a NHS trust — every single one is obsessed with race, and not always in a good way.
In 2025 London’s Metropolitan Police Force commissioned and paid for a pamphlet with the grand title ‘30 Patterns of Harm: A Structural Review of Systemic Racism within the London Metropolitan Police Service’. You can download it here for yourself (though I really wouldn’t bother).
Its basic premise is simplistic: if you’re black, you have necessarily experienced ‘harm’. Indeed, the author invites Black readers (Black being always capitalised, whereas white is just white) with this warning:
Please approach the text at your pace, with what you need around you. Step away when you must. This was not written to retraumatise, but to confront what has been systematically denied.
In this vein I read parts of the pamphlet and was duly traumatised.
I, privileged brown lesbian immigrant that I am, was traumatised by the complete absence of balance and objectivity shown by its author. I hesitate to call the pamphlet a ‘report’ — ‘report’ gives it more weight than it deserves — this is very much a pamphlet, written in the preachy style favoured by activists.
I was traumatised time and again by its incessant use of meaningless jargon. Colourism. Misogynoir. Adultification. Apparently, Adultification makes Black childhood an impossibility (section 9.23).
I mentioned the above to my Nigerian neighbours. They are a family of 5: she arrived as a child; he came as a teen to boarding school and then stayed, choosing to build his life here; they have 3 daughters. The girls attend local schools and are therefore living out varying stages of impossibility in awful, racist England.
Frankly, my neighbours were perplexed. First they scratched their heads, at a loss as to what it all meant. When I explained, they laughed. Finally, when I told them where this came from, they were incredulous.
It beggars belief that London’s Metropolitan Force, Britain’s largest, would waste tax-payers’ money on such drivel. The quality of the pamphlet is risible. I would also laugh, were it not for the very real-world consequences.
Too many people regard racism as a white problem. It isn’t — and I should know: I grew up with Chinese supremacist ideology. My own father (may he rest in peace) believed that everything superior came from China. As a child in Malaysia, I heard snide comments about other races and groups: Malay, Indian, Sikh, white, black, you name it and we Chinese can come up with a put-down. Needless to say, we’re highly talented at spotting other people’s racism; at the same time we’re quite unwilling to even examine, let alone admit to, our own.
My mother lives in Florida. On a visit to England roughly 10 years ago, I took her to the New Forest, where we stayed with a friend.
On Mum’s last night, a Saturday night, we went out for a meal à deux at a local pub. It’s a very popular pub and because I had been foolish enough to only book the night before, I was amazed they had a free table. It was their only available table, cramped and not in the best location.
I knew we were lucky to have even secured it, but there was no shifting my mother. She was convinced we’d been short-changed. Her rationale? Our race.
I didn’t bother arguing. When someone is utterly convinced they are right, discussion isn’t possible.
Viewing every outcome, every situation in life, no matter how big or small, through the prism of race gives you a wonderful excuse.
Not chosen for a job you really wanted? Well, it’s never because you didn’t work hard enough or simply weren’t good enough, heaven forbid — it must be your race, my friend.
Arrested and charged? Again, nothing to do with the gang you joined and the drugs they found on you, mate, nope, you were searched because you were targeted. And you were targeted because of your black skin.
In this ridiculous ideology, if you’re black you’re always a victim and if you’re white, you’re part of the perpetrating class. We need to stop this nonsense. At once.
I fought hard for equality in the 1980s and am absolutely appalled by what the movements we helped start have morphed into. So-called Diversity, Equity & Inclusion, or DEI, is the polar opposite of what we sought to achieve.
The ‘E’ in DEI doesn’t necessarily stand for Equality, as you might have assumed; no — at times it stands for Equity, which means fairness. Some DEI campaigners consider Equality with disdain. Take the following from an organisation that calls itself Race Forward:
Distinction Between Equity and Equality
Equality uses the same strategies for everyone, but because people are situated differently, they are not likely to get to the same outcomes. Equity uses differentiated and targeted strategies to address different needs and to get to fair outcomes. Equality-focused strategies don’t work for, or benefit, everyone
In other words, there are DEI campaigners who want us to treat people differently, depending on our perceptions of how advantaged or disadvantaged people are. This is an invidious, slippery slope.
Such woke madness has found its way into Britain’s police forces. In an op-ed published in the Telegraph on 5 June 2026, Lord Tony Sewell, the Tory peer and educational consultant who chaired a Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities, highlights current guidance from the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC). Officers are to respond to ‘individuals and communities according to their specific needs, circumstances and experiences, with understanding that these will be racialised’. Furthermore, the NPCC is clear that ‘racial equity’ is not ‘racial equality’, it is not treating everyone the same or being colour blind.
Britain’s police officers are being told to deliberately treat members of the public as not the same! The officers who arrived at Belmont Road on the night of 3 December 2025 did just that. They ignored Nowak (white boy, therefore presumed privileged) while responding with the utmost care to the Sikh boy’s needs (a differentiation which lefties seem to think will improve racial equity).
Where is common sense in this debacle? Did officers not stop to ask what the hell they were doing? Evidently not, so terrified were they of being called ‘racist’. What happened is an insidious consequence of DEI.
If equality is no longer the bedrock of our institutions, how is this country supposed to be governed? Equity should be the outcome, not a governing tool. You don’t achieve racial equity by applying racism in reverse.
Lord Sewell puts it bluntly. ‘Racial equity is dangerous madness — and the opposite of justice.’ The sooner we ditch this woke nonsense, the better. Sometimes black just means black.
Window into Other Worlds 
