Twitter’s Blue Tick brigade attempted to show a united front against online abuse by repeatedly mistaking Wiley for every other BAME artist they had ever heard of. This reached peak irony when The Guardian helpfully published a photo of Kano instead of Wiley, under the caption ‘Some of my best friends are black’.
Most seemed to have responded to Wiley’s racist outburst by then googling the phrase ‘generic grime artist’ and hit copy and paste. Worryingly, these are the very same moral arbiters of racism, who still think Lenny Henry presented the Ten O’clock News.
Twitter noticed a marked decline in racist abuse since these celebrities staged a 48-hour boycott, which raises the question as to who was the problem in the first place? One celeb commented in between shooting their new ‘blackface’ comedy character: ‘Of course I know who Wiley is, he’s the bastard who keeps trying to capture the Road Runner.’
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