Nigel Farage has said that there is a ‘half-black’ person in his manifesto, before adding that his party, UKIP, are ‘non-racist.’
Baffled? Yep, so are we.
The UKIP manifesto was released last week and some people were a bit bothered by the fact there didn’t seem to be many people of colour in it. After all, if we’re to follow UKIP’s slogan and ‘believe in Britain’ then we should also probably believe that, yes, 14.1% of the people who live in this country are black and minority ethnic (BAME). So someone asked him why there was a lack of representation of minorities. The response? A few BAME Ukippers heckled the journalist asking the question.
Nigel was then asked once about the lack of representation of BAME people in the manifesto, to which he responded, reports Channel 4: ‘Well, firstly there was one fully black person. There was another one of our leading spokesman who is half black and that didn’t get a mention. So the premise was wrong.’
Half black? Does anyone even say that? Like, which half of this guy was black? Which was white? Does Nigel mean mixed-race? Has he never understood that that might be a preferable term?
Nigel then added that: ‘We’re just about sick to death of the sneering media class trying to make Ukip out to be something completely other than it is.
‘We’re a non-racist, non-sectarian political party, but we don’t have all female quotas, we don’t have all black quotas, we treat everybody as being equal.’
There’s a difference between being directly racist and letting institutionalised racism flourish by not accepting that some people just aren’t given the same opportunities in life from the moment they’re born. But Nigel’s basically managed to achieve both in this interview, so fuck knows why we’re splitting hairs right now.
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.