Dear Uncle Kwasi,
Trust all is well with you. What an incredible month and a week it has been for you — appointed Chancellor on 7 September 2022, unveiling your mini budget on 23 September 2022, seeing the financial markets crash immediately and then getting your P45 on 14 October 2022. You must feel humiliated in getting the sack less than 24 hours after going on air to say, “I’m not going anywhere.”
When you were appointed Britain’s first black Chancellor of the Exchequer, very few black people rejoiced at your milestone. Likewise, when you were sacked from your post 38 days later, very few black people wept at your misery. Undoubtedly, you were the smartest guy in the room; your razor-sharp intellect honed at Eton, Harvard and Cambridge contributed to your meteoric rise within the Conservative party. So why were many black people apathetic to your rise and fall?
Uncle Kwasi, it is because you spent most of your political career denying your blackness. When the Windrush scandal exposed your government’s hostile policy of wrongly detaining and deporting blacks who arrived in the UK from the Caribbean, you were dispatched to defend the government’s position by denying the claim of institutional racism. You once argued that there is a consistent expectation in the media that MPs from ethnic minorities should engage with ‘black’ issues. You said, “The heart of…
