No, Lucy Letby was not enabled by ‘whiteness’

Name me naive, however I actually thought the identitarians would sit the Lucy Letby case out. Absolutely, all these commentators who make a very good dwelling by making completely all the pieces about race would realise that plying their grift, utilizing former nurse Letby’s homicide of seven infants and tried homicide of six extra as little greater than a dramatic backdrop, would strike even their very own viewers as low. Sick even.

I received’t make the identical mistake subsequent time. Certainly, Letby’s conviction had barely been handed down by the jury, restrictions on what commentators and social-media customers may say had barely been lifted, when the entire standard suspects started banging on about ‘whiteness’ and racism and what they supposedly needed to do with Letby’s crimes.

‘Lucy Letby exemplifies how the ideology of Whiteness retains Britain in a chokehold’, stated Dr Shola Mos-Shogbamimu, our main racialist pundit. ‘They believed her tears / denials despite the fact that proof stated in any other case for no different purpose than she’s White. A Black or Brown nurse would’ve been reported to the police instantly and sacked for suspicion.’

Warming to this theme, an article in Glamour – which, like all different vogue mags, now appears to function an abundance of po-faced identitarian agitprop for some purpose – bluntly asserted that ‘Lucy Letby’s white privilege helped her commit murders in plain sight’. The writer linked Letby to the ‘white girls tears’ phenomenon – the woke notion that white girls get away with racism within the office as a result of they’re ‘shrouded in a veneer of fragility’ and cry at any time when they’re known as out.

That Letby managed to evade the police for therefore lengthy, by convincing the blinkered administration of the Countess of Chester hospital that she was the topic of a witch-hunt, has been held up as proof that white girls can primarily ‘Karen’ their approach out of something, even homicide allegations. The truth that one of many consultants who pleaded with the hospital to droop Letby and name within the police, Dr Ravi Jayaram, is of South Asian heritage has been sufficient to maintain this simplistic narrative.

Identitarian Twitter (sorry, X) has been awash with claims that White hospital administration protected a White nurse as a result of they didn’t imagine a Brown physician (their capitalisations). Disturbingly, this declare has been aired not solely by the acquainted names from the Good Morning Britain ‘race debate’ Rolodex, but additionally by the president of the Royal School of Nursing, Sheila Sobrany, who posted this over the weekend, in response to an ITV Information interview with Dr Jayaram:

‘If we’re going to study something from this case we have to cease denying that racism is a severe situation within the NHS, this physician would have been listened to if he was white and Lucy Letby would have been stopped sooner if she wasn’t white.’

Elsewhere, writer Kelechi Okafor got here perilously near buying and selling in notions of collective racial guilt. ‘Lucy Letby shouldn’t be an anomaly, she is the usual’, Okafor stated in a video. ‘We’re not saying that each white lady goes round killing folks. However the identical system and assemble that protected her… is identical assemble that protects white girls within the office when a grievance is raised in opposition to them…’

It’s onerous to know the place to start with all this bullshit. First up, the notion that Jayaram wasn’t listened to as a result of Letby is white and he’s not is a grotesque mangling of the information. A number of consultants and clinicians, lots of them white, raised the alarm about Letby. Dr Stephen Brearey, head marketing consultant on the neonatal unit the place Letby labored, was the primary to alert hospital executives to the truth that infants had been dying and Letby was the widespread denominator. His alleged abundance of white privilege didn’t imply Brearey was taken any extra severely by the hospital’s bigwigs.

Then there may be this concept that the hospital and the media had bother computing Letby’s guilt due to some ingrained, racist sense that white girls are angels and violence is the protect of ethnic minorities. ‘What number of non-white prolific baby killers see their cherubic childhood photographs plastered on each entrance web page beneath headlines emphasising their light nature?’, requested that Glamour piece, referring to a couple of the tabloid write-ups about Letby, which have splashed previous pics of this unlikely killer at her commencement and having fun with drinks with pals.

This previous noticed usually emerges within the wake of terrorist assaults. Identitarians assert that tabloids current racist white killers as good younger boys led astray – replete with snaps of them as cute, blond-haired youngsters – however deal with black and brown Islamist terrorists as nearly congenitally violent. However this declare can’t face up to even a cursory Google. After Mohammed Emwazi was unveiled because the notorious Jihadi John, the Each day Mail described a younger Emwazi as an ‘angelic’ schoolboy.

What we see right here is that woke racial identification politics can solely maintain itself on the idea of blind religion. As a pseudo-religion. Its adherents are satisfied of The Narrative – of a everlasting white supremacy and black victimhood that seeps from each pore of society – and see it enjoying out in every single place. When the information don’t match their sermons, we’re patronisingly assured that racism works in mysterious methods.

It will be tempting to put in writing all this off because the ridiculous wittering of some influencers. Because the bilge of people that don’t have anything to supply public dialogue past the identical senseless slogans about ‘Karens’, ‘white tears’ and ‘poisonous whiteness’. However to take action can be to underplay how a lot this considering has permeated our establishments. Certainly, seeing the president of the RCN rehearse these mantras is hardly surprising, given how a lot the NHS has fallen to wokeness in recent times.

Extra importantly, we will’t get away from how ghoulish and contemptible this behaviour is. These persons are utilizing useless infants to push a divisive racial agenda that has diddly squat to do with Letby and her evil crimes. There isn’t a case so horrific the woke set received’t exploit as a way to hearth off some sassy one-liners about how we’re all ‘dying of whiteness’.

That is low. Even for them. And we actually can’t allow them to get away with it.

Tom Slater is editor of spiked. Comply with him on Twitter: @Tom_Slater_