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Historian says he wasn’t condemning black culture, adding that black educationalists defended his comments The historian David Starkey has defended comments he made last week on BBC’s Newsnight – when he appeared to blame the recent riots in English cities on a black “gangsta” culture – by claiming that “the subject of race has become unmentionable, by whites at any rate”. In an article in the Daily Telegraph , he describes the public reaction to his remarks as “hysterical”, and says that a breach in what he calls the taboo on discussing race is “punished by ostracism and worse … the witch finders already have their sights on me”. The article comes after a furore provoked by comments made by him during a discussion on BBC’s Newsnight, during which he said that “the whites have become black”. In his Telegraph article Starkey writes: “But how, then, to explain the black educationalists Tony Sewell and Katherine Birbalsingh defending the substance of my comments on ‘gangsta’ culture, as well as Tony Parsons, who wrote in the Labour-supporting Daily Mirror that, ‘without the gang culture of black London, none of the riots would have happened – including the riots in other cities like Manchester and Birmingham where most of rioters were white’.” Admitting that friends agreed his greatest error was mentioning the politician Enoch Powell , whose 1968 rivers of blood speech attacked immigration , Starkey added that part of the legacy of the reaction to Powell had been “an enforced silence on the matter of race”. Starkey defends comments he made on Newsnight that white “chavs” have “become black”, by arguing that discussion of the successes or failures of integration in Britain is central to any examination of the state of the nation today. Saying that he was misconstrued as condemning all black culture, the historian writes: “I was trying to point out the very different patterns of integration at the top and bottom of the social scale.” David Starkey Race issues UK riots London Daily Telegraph Equality National newspapers Newspapers Hannah Godfrey guardian.co.uk