The cult of victimhood is inflaming tensions between ethnic-minority groups.
A scuffle in a south-east London shop wouldn’t normally be headline news. But in our age of racial identity politics, Peckham Hair and Cosmetics has been thrust on to the frontline; a clash between an angry customer and a cack-handed shopkeeper has been transformed into a damning indictment of ‘white supremacist’ Britain.
That neither of the two players in this sorry story is white didn’t dent the narrative. Protesters gathered outside the shop, on Rye Lane, on Wednesday afternoon, after a video went viral, showing a middle-aged Asian man – the shop’s owner – violently restraining a young black woman, as she tried to bash him over the head with her basket. At one point in the clip, he appears to place his hands around her neck.
