So this is the moral abyss wokeness has dragged us into.

A society where a dying teenage boy can be roughly handcuffed by cops because someone accused him of being racist.

A hellish dystopia where the last thing a kid hears as he gasps his final breaths is a politically correct police officer reading him his rights.

A nightmare world where not even the victim of a vicious stabbing can escape the haughty suspicion of the state’s DEI-trained goons.

The cruel, lonely death of Henry Nowak has caused a storm here in the United Kingdom.

It should send a shiver down your spine too — for it provides a chilling insight into the barbarism of wokeness.

To see where the state’s embrace of critical race theory can lead, look no further than the horrors inflicted on poor Henry.

He was 18 years old, in his first year at Southampton University on the south coast of England.

On Dec. 3, 2025, he was walking home from a night out with pals when he came across Vickrum Digwa, a 23-year-old Sikh man.

Some kind of altercation took place — then an act of pure savagery.

Digwa pulled out an 8-inch knife.

He stabbed Henry five times, in his legs, his chest and his face.

Henry tried to escape, but the blood loss left him too weak.

He collapsed in a stranger’s driveway. 

Digwa chased him, and taunted him, and filmed him on his phone.

It was like a lynching.

Yet as sickening as this attack was, it’s what happened next that’s left Britain reeling.

When police turned up, Digwa told them an evil lie: that Henry had racially abused him.

And the cops bought it.

They believed the man who was standing upright, and disbelieved the kid writhing in terror and agony on the ground.

What they did next defies all logic and humanity: They dragged the fatally wounded boy across the harsh gravel of the driveway.

They yanked his hands behind his back to cuff him.

And the whole time Henry was crying: “I’ve been stabbed!”

He said it four times.

He said “I can’t breathe” nine times, as his pierced lung filled with blood.

Yet the cops carried on.

They read him his rights. They arrested him.

Henry lost consciousness and died.

It’s hard to think of a death as awful and merciless as this. 

A kid choking on his own blood in the dead of a winter night, and the last thing he hears is the slanderous taunting of his killer and the procedural droning of arresting officers.

The bodycam footage of Henry’s dying moments is harrowing in the extreme.

Its release on Monday ignited a firestorm of fury across the UK.

Yet it would be a mistake to see Henry’s death as a failure by individual officers.

No, this horror speaks to a deeper moral rot: It reveals the corrosive effect the ideology of wokeness has had on the institutions of our society.

The reason the cops believed the knife-wielding monster and dismissed his dying victim is simple: The killer was a brown-skinned man, and his victim was a white-skinned man.

Critical race theory is rife in Britain’s police forces. 

Under official guidance, cops must believe every accusation of a “hate crime.”

They’re trained to always be on the lookout for racism.

Indeed Hampshire Police, which covers Southampton, boasts of its devotion to the woke state’s holy mission of hunting down “hate.”

Its “race action plan” fizzes with the kind of critical-race drivel you hear on every Ivy League campus.

It describes the Minnesota death of George Floyd in 2020 as a “pivotal moment” for Britain’s police, too. 

That tragedy compelled the force, it says, to be “anti-racist” in all police actions.

The irony is thick: This force claims to have “learned the lessons” of the death of a black man who cried “I can’t breathe” — yet just six years later its officers are horribly mistreating a white boy who pleaded the same.

It’s precisely their embrace of the post-Floyd BLM mania that led these cops to grossly demean young Henry. 

Having imbibed the infantile script that casts whites as oppressors and non-whites as oppressed, they were primed to believe Digwa and to doubt Henry. 

To them, he was just a white man, and what could be worse than that?

Digwa was finally brought to justice this week, sentenced to life with no chance of parole for 21 years.

Yet so much societal damage remains.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer and virtually our entire political establishment took the knee for the career criminal Floyd.

They’ve done no such thing for the kind, thoughtful Henry Nowak.

And there it is: the “virtuous,” obscene racial prejudice of the woke elites.

Brendan O’Neill is chief political writer for the British online magazine spiked.