More than a decade after the terrorist outrage in the London Underground, which sparked the racial profiling of terror, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has been severely embarrassed over his adviser’s below-thebelt attack on racism. Most particularly, Andrew Sabisky’s outrageous suggestion on the use of what he calls ‘enforced contraception’ to avoid the creation of a ‘permanent underclass’.

He has couched his remark with the no less outrageous contention that “black people have lower IQs”. The remarks, as emotive as they are beneath contempt, are bound to cause a flutter in the roost on either side of the Atlantic not the least because of the confrontations between blacks and whites in recent years ~ a thread that is common to the dispensations of Barack Obama and Donald Trump.

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So beneath contempt indeed that No. 10 Downing Street has declined to comment on Sabisky’s perception, almost dehumanising. The Labour party has been remarkably swift in its response, however. It has called on the Prime Minister to sack Sabisky. The controversial views on racism have been articulated at a critical juncture for Mr Johnson, specifically when his prospects ~ electoral as well as Brexit ~ are distinctly on the upswing.

Unwittingly or otherwise, it is a reflection too on the man at the helm after a decidedly unstable phase in the British narrative. In a sense, Sabisky has stoked the discourse over genetics and the colour of the skin. “The Prime Minister’s views are well publicised and well documented,” the spokesman said more than 10 times, when asked to give Mr Johnson’s views on the intelligence of black people and eugenics, and the methods of study to selectively breed people to improve the human race. Sabisky has claimed that black Americans have a lower than average IQ than white people and are more likely to have an “intellectual disability”.

The greats like Martin Luther King must be spinning in their graves. Even worthies in the world of sport may fly off the handle over his tweet, “ I am always straight up in saying that women’s sport is more comparable to the Paralympics than it is to men’s.” A muted response on the part of Mr Johnson and the Conservative party is in reality a feeble response to an ugly development.

The black is once again the target of white prejudice, if not violence and killings quite yet as in the United States. Britain, with its profoundly libertarian tradition, was expected to be respectful towards colour. Rather, the views of a prominent member of the Prime Minister’s cabal are profoundly contemptuous. Mr Johnson has failed to condemn Andrew Sabisky’s appalling comments; indeed he seems to have endorsed the idea that white people are more intelligent than blacks. The prejudice is dehumanising.