This recent article by Anthony Reddie, titled “The Wounded Psyche of White Privilege”, trace the roots of Brexit to a new rise of an English nationalism he traces back to Elizabethan times and through the years of British Empire.
Reddie describes himself as a black liberation theologian and an anti-colonial educator, whose work over the past 20 years has been committed to challenging “the twin behemoths of alleged white superiority and black marginalisation”. He states: “Whatever the merits on either side of the referendum debate, I remain convinced that the underlying socio-cultural and religious thrust of the Leave campaign was the conflation of notions of white entitlement and, as a corollary, the demonisation of black and other visible minorities in the UK.”
He believes Brexit paved the way for the Windrush scandal. “The Brexit vote was a nationalistic, white-centred event that cynically used migrants as the scapegoat for the problems of the nation. The undercurrent of Brexit was a rejection of multiculturalism and the legacy of Windrush that has brought the infusion of new Christian faith communities and radical collective living born of Caribbean values and our African heritage into this nation.”
Reddit also criticises the “diffidence” of the Church’s response to Brexit claiming to have witnessed white church leaders showing “more care for dissatisfied and disillusioned poorer white people, who largely do not attend their churches, as opposed to black migrants who do, in disproportionately large numbers — often maintaining inner cities after they had been vacated by “white flight” in the 1980s and early ’90s.”
