Mail Ghost Racism EXPOSED

Racist bigotry has for many years been a stock in trade of the right-leaning part of our free and fearless press. Their problem has not been doing the racism - they have no difficulties with that - but ensuring they can muster the appropriate level of plausible deniability, deployed along with righteous indignation, in order to minimise the fallout following publication.

Dominique Samuels

This is done in a variety of ways: the increasingly desperate and downmarket Telegraph crudely excused its anti-Semitic smear of George Soros by telling staff that it wasn’t. Far more convincing was the Mail hiding behind Jewish staff members to excuse its anti-Semitic attack on the memory of the late Ralph Miliband. As well as having a Jewish name on the by-line.

The Mail has now been called out doing something similar to push anti-black racism: having a black author’s name on the by-line. But here’s the twist: the black author didn’t write what appears below that by-line. Ghost writers are nothing new: the Mail is applying a novel twist of saying “It can’t be racist, because a black writer wrote it”, when that writer didn’t.

You think I jest? That is what is alleged by right-wing “culture warrior” Dominique Samuels, in a move that may incur the displeasure of those who labour under the régime of the Mail’s editor in chief, the legendarily foul mouthed Paul Dacre. She’s been asked to have her name on others’ copy.

As she put it: “The outrage fest about Notting Hill Carnival is tiresome and to be honest manufactured … I was asked to be the face of a ghost-written, negative, bordering on racist piece by the Daily Mail paper last year and eventually turned it down because it was a complete misrepresentation of what I witnessed whilst I was there … The violence etc that happens is of course not acceptable but it’s estimated that 2 million people attend the festival every year”. Ava-Santina of PoliticsJOE was unimpressed.

“I think this is a tweet we should be paying a LOT more attention to … Ghostwritten racist piece? Sorry?” Lily Allen was equally unimpressed. “This is beyond fucked up. Unsurprising, but fucked up nonetheless. I wish people wouldn’t buy into these divisive tactics”. Unsurprising. And why so?

Why'd you f***ing keep using my photo, c***?!?!?

The Mail wants to show that Carnival is not the sort of event that the Mail’s Kind Of People should attend. It wants to show that having all these black people around is Not A Good Thing, but doesn’t want to get called out for yet more crude racist bigotry. So it puts a black name on the by-line, and by doing so shows “We can’t be racist, because a black person wrote it”.

Except, as Ms Samuels has now admitted, they didn’t. And it wasn’t the only example: asked about another Meghan hit piece [“This clash of the Royals was about culture - NOT colour”] “was this ghost-written for you?” she conceded “yeah it was”. Professor Jonathan Portes of KCL observed “Even by the standards of the Daily Mail, this is pretty jaw-dropping”. So it was.

Meanwhile, Ms Samuels told “It’s pretty much standard for newspapers to have ghost writers for guest columnists, and I thought because I’d never written for them before it would be fine. Eventually when it came to the Carnivsl article and I been published by them multiple times, I’d had enough and wanted to write it myself for this particular topic”. Or was it?

Ash Sarkar of Novara Media registered her dissent. “I don’t mean this to be shady, but it’s not standard practice at all! Ethics aside, it doesn’t make sense for a newspaper to pay out twice … It's not ‘standard’ to ghostwrite a political opinion piece from a commentator - if true, it's deeply racist and unethical”.

Writer Nels Abbey applied context. “This is very revealing, a public service even. Britain's most popular newspaper ghostwrote a racist article and went hunting for a Black 'culture warrior' to be the face of it. This is the very racism laundering and diversity drenched racism we've been screaming about laid bare”. Or, as another Tweeter put it, “The most important point here is that they’re paying to put the face of a person of colour on racist honk most likely written by some white dude”. The Mail is well and truly busted.

But don’t expect them to stop. The agenda is unchanged, they throw around enough money, and someone will be desperate enough to bite. Sad, really.

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