Historian David Starkey has issued an apology after saying slavery was not genocide because there are "so many damn blacks" still around.
The academic and TV presenter made the comments during an interview with Brexit campaigner Darren Grimes for YouTube channel Reasoned UK, while addressing the Black Lives Matter movement.
In a lengthy statement on Monday, Starkey admitted his "bad mistake" had cost him "every distinction and honour acquired in a long career".
The 75-year-old said his "principal regret" was that his "blundering use of language… will further restrict the opportunities for proper debate".
Speaking about his use of the phrase "so many damn blacks", he said: "It was intended to emphasise, in hindsight with awful clumsiness, the numbers who survived the horrors of the slave trade.
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"Instead, it came across as a term of racial abuse.
"This, in the present atmosphere, where passions are high and feelings raw, was deplorably inflammatory. It was a bad mistake.
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"I am very sorry for it and I apologise unreservedly for the offence it caused.
"I have also paid a heavy price for one offensive word with the loss of every distinction and honour acquired in a long career."
This is truly disgusting.
And by the same ridiculous, twisted logic the Holocaust would not be counted as a genocide. https://t.co/duHAYi6L7P
— David Olusoga (@DavidOlusoga) July 2, 2020
Starkey said the "misunderstanding of my words in no way reflects my views or practice on race", adding that he had "lived and worked happily and without conflict in multicultural London for almost 50 years".
Addressing the public reaction to his comments, he added: "Central also to British history is a tradition of free speech.
"If that tradition is suppressed on questions of race, resentments will fester rather than disappear.
"My principal regret is that my blundering use of language and the penalty it has incurred will further restrict the opportunities for proper debate.
"For it is only open debate that will heal the divisions in our society that the Black Lives Matter movement has both exposed and expressed."
Starkey resiRead More – Source
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