TRIGGERnometry - June 04, 2026


Henry Nowak: How Anti-Racism Gave You Racism - Konstantin Kisin


Episode Stats


Length

8 minutes

Words per minute

166.1457

Word count

1,382

Sentence count

90


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
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00:01:00.000 Henry Novak, How Anti-Racism Gave You Racism
00:01:09.000 Cast your mind back exactly six years.
00:01:11.000 It's the summer of 2020 and Britain is undergoing
00:01:14.000 what its commentary breathlessly describes as a reckoning.
00:01:17.000 The murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer
00:01:20.000 sent hundreds of thousands of British people into the streets.
00:01:23.000 Statues were toppled.
00:01:25.000 Corporations issued groveling statements.
00:01:28.000 Police officers, British police officers in British cities policing British people,
00:01:33.660 took a knee before the protesters.
00:01:35.600 The message, repeated endlessly by politicians, journalists and institutions of every kind,
00:01:41.560 was unambiguous.
00:01:42.900 Racism kills and we will do whatever it takes to make sure it never happens again.
00:01:47.940 Sorry, we just got attacked racially by some white person.
00:01:50.740 What did he say? Did he...
00:01:52.860 Was he racially abusive?
00:01:53.880 The police needed a report, come here.
00:01:55.460 Yeah, he was.
00:01:56.240 Do you want to speak to my brother?
00:01:57.240 He's then laid a punch onto me. He's pushed me back and my turbans come off.
00:02:01.300 Six years later, an 18-year-old student named Henry Novak was stabbed five times on a Southampton
00:02:06.620 street. As he lay bleeding, he told the police officers who arrived at the scene exactly what
00:02:12.180 had happened. He had been stabbed by Vikram Digwa, who was standing nearby. Digwa, for his part,
00:02:17.720 told the officers something else, that he had been the victim of a racist attack. The officers
00:02:23.420 believed Diggler and handcuffed Novak. As he lost consciousness, he could be heard on body cam
00:02:28.840 footage repeating the words, I can't breathe. The same four words that six years earlier had
00:02:33.760 become the defining phrase of a political movement. They were stenciled on murals,
00:02:38.200 chanted at marches, printed on t-shirts. They were spoken on the floor of the United States
00:02:43.600 Congress and quoted in parliamentary debates in Westminster. When British police officers knelt
00:02:49.240 in the streets of London, it was those words they were kneeling for. Henry Novak's last words,
00:02:54.640 captured on body cam footage released by Hampshire police in the small hours of a Tuesday morning,
00:02:59.740 the middle of the night when the fewest people would see it, were the same. I can't breathe.
00:03:04.520 He said them while handcuffed on the pavement, bleeding from five stab wounds, to officers who
00:03:09.920 had decided that the man who put those wounds in him was the real victim. You will not see Henry's
00:03:15.080 words stenciled on a mural. No politicians will quote them in the comments. No corporation will
00:03:20.160 change its logo. The same establishment that made four words immortal when spoken by a black man in
00:03:25.420 Minneapolis has met the same four words spoken by a white boy dying on a street in Southampton
00:03:30.380 with what can only be described as a determined institutional silence. That silence is not
00:03:36.160 neutral. It is a statement. It tells you exactly whose suffering the system has decided counts
00:03:41.860 and whose does not.
00:03:43.380 And it was produced not by the old racism,
00:03:45.400 not by skinheads and yobs,
00:03:47.140 but by the people who spent six years telling you
00:03:49.420 they had abolished it.
00:03:50.680 Digua was convicted of murder last week
00:03:52.640 and sentenced to life imprisonment.
00:03:54.440 Hampshire police issued a public apology.
00:03:57.060 Their IOPC launched an investigation
00:03:59.260 and a country that had spent the better part
00:04:01.780 of a decade being lectured
00:04:03.240 about the unique and unforgivable evil of racism
00:04:06.720 was left to contemplate
00:04:08.460 what its anti-racism had actually produced.
00:04:11.400 The answer, if you're willing to look at it honestly, is this, a new form of racism,
00:04:17.400 a bureaucratic racism, an actually institutionalized racism, a racism so thoroughly laundered through
00:04:24.160 the language of progress and inclusion that the people enforcing it genuinely believe they're
00:04:29.400 on the right side of history. What else do you call a system in which a dying teenager's word
00:04:34.200 counts for less than his killers because of the color of his skin? To understand how we got here,
00:04:38.840 you have to understand what the post-Floyd reckoning actually did to British institutions,
00:04:44.040 especially the police. The response to Floyd's death wasn't merely emotional, it was ideological
00:04:49.880 and it was systematic. Forces across the country underwent mandatory diversity and anti-racism
00:04:56.100 training. The principle drilled into offices explicitly or implicitly was that accusations
00:05:01.680 of racism must be taken with the utmost seriousness, that the historic failure of institutions to
00:05:06.740 believe minority victims of racism was the original sin and it needed atoning for. Racism
00:05:12.180 is bad. Attempting to address it is good. The problem is what happens when you apply it without
00:05:17.380 judgment in the real world. You train officers to weight an allegation of racism so heavily
00:05:22.660 that it overrides the evidence in front of their eyes. You produce exactly the outcome we saw in
00:05:28.560 Southampton. A man bleeding to death on the pavement begging for help, being told by officers
00:05:34.300 who should be saving his life that they don't think he's been stabbed.
00:05:38.500 What is particularly striking about this case is the way it mirrors almost exactly
00:05:42.400 the injustice that movement was supposedly designed to prevent.
00:05:46.140 George Floyd died saying, I can't breathe, while a police officer knelt on his neck.
00:05:51.300 Henry Novak died saying, I can't breathe, while police officers knelt on his back and handcuffed him.
00:05:56.040 The British establishment that wept for Floyd has been conspicuously quiet about Novak.
00:06:01.520 The politicians who marched through London streets in 2020 have not rushed to the cameras.
00:06:06.900 The corporations that changed their logos and funded diversity initiatives have not issued
00:06:11.820 statements. This is not an accident or even a surprise. It's the logical consequence of an
00:06:17.000 ideology that does not actually oppose racism. It simply reassigns its acceptable targets.
00:06:22.360 I want to be precise here because precision matters. I'm not saying that the officers who
00:06:26.740 attended the scene that night are bad people, or that they set out to let Henry die. I believe,
00:06:32.080 in fact, the opposite, that they were following the spirit of their training and of the culture
00:06:36.260 that had been built around them, in good faith, over many years. The problem is not the individuals,
00:06:42.020 the problem is the system that produced them, a system that taught them, in effect, that an
00:06:46.960 allegation of racism is a trump card that overrides normal investigative procedure,
00:06:52.680 normal medical common sense, and normal human judgment.
00:06:56.120 That system was built with the best of intentions
00:06:58.600 by people who genuinely wanted to address real injustices.
00:07:02.380 And it has produced a policing culture
00:07:04.440 in which a killer can stab a teenager five times,
00:07:07.980 claim to be the victim of racism,
00:07:09.920 and watch the officers handcuff the person
00:07:12.060 bleeding out on the street.
00:07:13.520 They will not acknowledge what they've built.
00:07:15.520 They will say that this was an isolated failure
00:07:17.720 of individual officers, not a systemic problem.
00:07:20.520 They will say that raising this case is itself a form of racism and attempt to undermine legitimate anti-racism efforts by dwelling on edge cases.
00:07:30.200 They will say, as they always say, that the real problem is that we haven't gone far enough.
00:07:35.880 But that game is up. Anyone with the eyes to see and the ears to hear the truth knows what happened here.
00:07:41.660 A young man is dead. His killer exploited an ideology to escape justice, if only briefly.
00:07:47.080 And the institutions that were reformed in the name of anti-racism are now openly racist against white people.
00:07:54.140 If you appreciate these videos, you should know that they're available on my substack days, weeks, sometimes months ahead of time at ConstantinKissen.com.
00:08:03.360 This article has also been printed in the Free Press and The Australian, so please go ahead and share it with friends and family.
00:08:17.080 You