‘I’m dreaming of a non-white Christmas.’ That’s the aim of Black Lives Matter (BLM) activists in California, who want people of all ethnicities to direct all their festive spending to black-owned companies and pull investment out of their white-owned counterparts. 

The countdown to the holidays is well underway. Christmas trees and decorations have started to appear in the streets, shops are full of ‘must-have’ gifts, and there’s even a rebooted ‘Home Alone’ movie. But the idea of goodwill to all isn’t being preached by everyone.

#BlackXmas is an initiative of Black Lives Matter (BLM) activists in Los Angeles. The premise is simple: not to spend any money on Christmas items that aren’t produced by black-owned businesses.

Something similar, Black Pound Day, already exists in the UK, but it’s only a single day every month and its worthy aim is to help small local firms trying to establish themselves. #BlackXmas has a poisonous racist agenda, as it explicitly encourages consumers to divest from white businesses.’

The foreign-owned or controlled Press instead of ignoring or criticising Black racism draw the reader and viewer attention to the initiative thus acting as a free of charge Public Relations Campaign for BLM.

The sheer discrimination of this bigoted stance is bad enough. You can only imagine the uproar where the roles were to be reversed and a white campaign group was urging a boycott of black-owned businesses.

But it also exposes the primitive thought process of those behind it. They are, in essence, conceiving every white-owned business to be something akin to a cotton plantation, with workers in shackles watched over by domineering guards on horseback.

The facts are the opposite: Athletes such as golfer Tiger Woods and Formula One world champion Lewis Hamilton have made such a splash in their white-dominated sports that kids of colour across the world now believe it’s possible for them to succeed, too.

Getting wrapped up in settling scores, as BLM’s is actively trying to bankrupt a business because of the owner’s skin colour is blatant discrimination.

And then to wrap it up into Christmas is doubly depressing. Whether you’re religious or not, it’s a time of year when families, friends and communities should come together. Not in the eyes of BLM, though, which appears to believe it’s the best time of year to crank up the racial division.

That’s illustrated in another element of the campaign, ‘If You Must Buy, #BuyBlack’, which presumably wants parents not to hunt down the latest toy for their kids, but instead to trawl corporate records to see who manufactures it and if they are black.