The Labour party’s contribution to the national debate this week has included the idea that someone can be ‘superficially’ black. Rupa Huq, a Labour MP, used this phrase to describe Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng. ‘If you hear him on the Today programme,’ she said, ‘you wouldn’t know he’s black.’ It was a daft yet revealing comment. In her moment of unintended (and perhaps career-destroying) candour, Huq exposed a prejudice that remains pervasive in British politics.

Any such suggestion is, of course, racist, and Labour could not deny it. Huq has been suspended. But she was articulating an attitude that has become widespread. She probably thought that her comments were uncontroversial for the audience at a Labour party conference debate. She will have assumed that they, like her, see real (as opposed to superficial) ethnicity as something to do with attitudes, speech and more. This is a pernicious assumption which deserves to be challenged.

When Kemi Badenoch was equalities minister, she spoke about the special bigotry that confronts those on her side of the debate: the assumption that black people can only think in one way and that those who demur are traitors. Ben Obese-Jecty, a former infantry officer, recently described how stunned he was by the racist abuse he received when running as a Tory candidate. He was called ‘token’ and a ‘sellout’, and worse. ‘I had no idea this kind of vitriol existed,’ he said.

The sewers of social media are full of such abuse. Phrases like ‘Uncle Toms’ and ‘coconuts’ are used to describe those deemed to be brown on the outside but white on the inside. Charlene White, an ITV presenter, said this week that for most of her childhood she was referred to as a ‘Bounty’ and derided for having a ‘posh’ accent. ‘Their point? I wasn’t black enough.’

Such stereotypes, which ought to have been discarded in the last century, have been revived through so-called critical race theory, which makes politics more about race, not less. In this way, bigotry has reinvented itself for a new century. Critical race theory finds new ways to perpetuate the view that whites, blacks and Asians are fundamentally different, sitting at various unmovable positions in a hierarchy of oppressors and victims.

When David Cameron claimed that a young black boy is more likely to go to prison than to a top university – a false statistic, it turns out – he sought to pose as a social justice avenger. He did not think about the harm that a prime minister can do when propagating such myths about his own country. It represented the last gasp of a Tory paternalism. His ‘A-list’ system to increase women and minority MPs ushered in new Tory candidates who took a very different view.

When Badenoch said that Britain was one of the best countries in the world in which to be black, she caused outrage because her point flattened the victimhood narrative. But she also drew a useful political dividing line. The Tories have become the party that stresses empowerment. Labour’s approach remains oddly paternalistic, even proprietorial – claiming (as Jeremy Corbyn once did) that ‘only Labour can be trusted to unlock the talent of black, Asian and minority ethnic people’.

Labour is facing a bit of a crisis in its outdated approach to race, something that is now visibly reflected in the make-up of its politicians. Why is it that the Tory leadership contest was so striking in its diversity? Why is today’s Conservative cabinet perhaps the most ethnically mixed of any government in the world? And why is it Labour which now talks in a language that veers between patronising and borderline racist?

The truth is that the victimhood narrative, so much of it imported from America’s culture wars, was never a fit for modern Britain. There is plenty of inequality, but no BME vs white dividing line. British people with an Indian background tend to outperform those with a Bangladeshi or Pakistani background. Chinese pupils outperform everyone. Whites are less likely to get into university than any other group. Pupils of black African background (like Kwarteng) tend to achieve more at school than black Caribbean.

Barack Obama understood the problem with remarks such as Huq’s. He attacked the notion of ‘acting white’. He said: ‘If boys are reading too much, then, well: “Why are you doing that? Why are you speaking so properly?” The notion that there’s some authentic way of being black – that if you’re going to be black, you have to act a certain way and wear a certain kind of clothes – that has to go.’ The Tories understood this point some time ago. The Labour party has not.

Martin Luther King envisioned a day when his children would ‘not be judged by the colour of their skin, but by the content of their character’. Not so long ago, it looked as if his dream would be realised. Critical race theory has, however, brought back the idea that people should be judged by their skin colour. It now falls to the Conservatives to challenge that prejudice.