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A
Henry Novak. How anti racism gave you racism? Cast your mind back exactly six years. It's the summer of 2020 and Britain is undergoing what its commentaria breathlessly describes as a reckoning. The murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer sent hundreds of thousands of British people into the streets. Statues were toppled, corporations issued groveling statements. Police officers, British police officers in British cities policing British people took a knee before the protesters. The message, repeated endlessly by politicians, journalists and institutions of every kind, was unambiguous. Racism kills and we will do whatever it takes to make sure it never happens again.
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Sorry, we just got attacked racially by some white person.
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Gopri, what did he say?
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Was he racially abusive? The police need a report. Come here. Yeah, he was. Do you want to speak to my brother? He's then laid a punch onto me. He's pushed me back and my Turban's come off.
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Six years later, an 18 year old student named Henry Novak was stabbed five times on a Southampton street. As he lay bleeding, he told the police officers who arrived at the scene exactly what had happened. He had been stabbed by Vikram Digua, who was standing nearby. Digua, for his part, told the officer something else, that he had been the victim of a racist attack. The officers believed Digler and handcuffed Nowak. As he lost consciousness, he could be heard on body cam footage repeating the words I can't breathe. The same four words that six years earlier had become the defining phrase of a political movement. They were stenciled on murals, chanted at marches, printed on T shirts. They were spoken on the floor of the United States Congress and quoted in parliamentary debates in Westminster. When British police officers knelt in the streets of London, it was those words they were kneeling for. Henry Novak's last words, captured on body cam footage released by Hampshire police in the small hours of a Tuesday morning, the middle of the night, when the fewest people would see it were the same. I can't breathe. He said them while handcuffed on the pavement, bleeding from five stab wounds to officers who had decided that the man who put those wounds in him was the real victim. You will not see Henry's words stenciled on a mural. No politicians will quote them in the comments. The no corporation will change its logo. The same establishment that made four words immortal when spoken by a black man in Minneapolis has met the same four words spoken by a white boy dying on a street in Southampton with what can only be described as a determined institutional silence. That silence is not neutral, it is a statement. It tells you exactly whose suffering the system has decided counts and whose does not. And it was produced not by the old racism, not by skinheads and jobs, by the people who spent six years telling you they had abolished it. Digwa was convicted of murder last week and sentenced to life imprisonment. Hampshire police issued a public apology. The IOPC launched an investigation. And a country that had spent the better part of a decade being lectured about the unique and unforgivable evil of racism was left to contemplate what its anti racism had actually produced. The answer, if you're willing to look at it honestly, is this a new form of racism, A bureaucratic racism, an actually institutionalized racism? A racism so thoroughly laundered through the language of progress and inclusion that the people enforcing it genuinely believe they're on the right side of history. What else do you call a system in which a dying teenager's word counts for less than his killers because of the color of his skin? To understand how we got here, you have to understand what the post Floyd reckoning actually did to British institutions, especially the police. The response to Floyd's death wasn't merely emotional. It was ideological and it was systematic. Forces across the country underwent mandatory diversity and anti racism training. The principle, drilled into offices explicitly or implicitly, was that accusations of racism must be taken with the utmost seriousness. That the historic failure of institutions to believe minority victims of racism was the original sin and it needed atoning for racism is bad. Attempting to address it is good. The problem is what happens when you apply it without judgment. In the real world, you train officers to weight an allegation of racism so heavily that it overrides the evidence in front of their eyes. You produce exactly the outcome we saw in Southampton. A man bleeding to death on the pavement, begging for help, being told by officers who should be saving his life, they don't think he's been stabbed. What is particularly striking about this case is the way it mirrors almost exactly the injustice that movement was supposedly designed to prevent. George Floyd died saying I can't breathe while a police officer knelt on his neck. Henry Novak died saying I can't breathe while police officers knelt on his back and handcuffed him. The British establishment that wept for Floyd has been conspicuously quiet about Novak. The politicians who marched through London's streets in 2020 have not rushed to the cameras. The corporations that changed their logos and funded diversity initiatives have not issued statements. This is not an accident or even a surprise. It's the logical consequence of an ideology that does not actually oppose racism. It simply reassigns its acceptable targets. I want to be precise here because precision matters. I'm not saying that the officers who attended the scene that night are bad people or that they set out to let Henry die. I believe, in fact, the opposite, that they were following the spirit of their training and of the culture that had been built around them in good faith over many years. The problem is not the individuals. The problem is the system that produced them. The system that taught them, in effect, that an allegation of racism is a trump card that overrides normal investigative procedure, normal medical common sense and normal human judgment. That system was built with the best of intentions by people who genuinely wanted to address real injustices. And it has produced a policing culture in which a killer can stab a teenager five times, claim to be the victim of racism, and watch the officers handcuff the person bleeding out on the street. They will not acknowledge what they've built. They will say that this was an isolated failure of individual officers, not a systemic problem. They will say that raising this case is itself a form of racism, an attempt to undermine legitimate anti racism efforts by dwelling on edge cases. They will say, as they always say, that the real problem is that we haven't gone far enough. But that game is up. Anyone with the eyes to see and the ears to hear the truth knows what happened here. A young man is dead. His killer exploited an ideology to escape justice, if only briefly. And the institutions that were reformed in the name of anti racism are now openly racist against white people. If you appreciate these videos, you should know that they're available on my substack days, weeks, sometimes months ahead of time and@constantinekissen.com this article has also been printed in the Free Press and the Australian, so please go ahead and share it with friends and family.