Why I am a racist

and you are too, probably.

I have a party piece which scandalises people. ‘I’m a racist,’ I say. ‘I’ve denied work to black people because of their skin-colour.’ I then explain the circumstances. I once wrote a comedy about the life of Michael Jackson narrated by Bubbles the chimp which required a multi-racial cast, and the producer and I agreed not to offer a black actor the role of Bubbles in case it created difficulties for him or the other company members. At the read-through we hired a white guy who was pretty useless as Bubbles and the project faltered. This haunts me. If I’d had the guts to cast a black actor as the chimp I might have found a great performer and created a show that succeeded. And although I kidded myself I was being ‘sensitive’ to the cast, I was chiefly concerned about my own comfort. I had no idea whether a black actor would feel awkward playing an ape because I never offered the opportunity to a black actor. I just assumed. And the black guy who played Michael had no qualms about impersonating a man who shared his bed with boys.

When I explain the Bubbles story to my friends, they tell me I’m not a racist. But I am. Here’s another example. I chose a same-race bride and we had a same-race child. And my parents exercised those preferences as well. Just like their parents. Racism seems to run in our family. It may run in yours too. It’s unarguable that reproduction is the bedrock of all racism. Creating more people from your own race is bound to reduce the proportion of humans from other races. And most cultures in history have preserved their blood-lines in this way, by discouraging inter-racial unions. But far from decrying the practice as ‘racism’ they regarded it as crucial to their self-preservation. A virtue rather than a vice. A policy not to be scorned but to be saluted and maintained with venerable labels like ‘tradition’ or ‘respect for the past’ or ‘clan loyalty’ or ‘marrying in’. Racism of this type seems to be a human instinct.

Like seeks out like.

But in 1945 a radical experiment was undertaken by the victors of world war two. Nothing like it had ever been attempted in history. The western powers, counter-radicalised by the horrors of Nazism, tried to expunge racism altogether by creating a society where every race would meet on equal terms. Nearly 80 years later, the results are in. And it hasn’t been a thumping success. I notice this every day in my local area, Tower Hamlets, which is a racially mixed part of east London. Virtually all my neighbours practise voluntary apartheid. The races live alongside each other but seldom mingle.

As I roam the cricket pitches in Victoria Park, I often see two Asian elevens competing against each other. No whites are present and no blacks either. Football is much the same. Two teams of black or mixed-race men play soccer together on a Sunday afternoon. There are no whites on the pitch and no Asians, (who seem to lack enthusiasm for football). Children’s parties in the summer are strikingly short of diversity. All-black families and all-white families are commonplace. As are all-Asian parties, although Asians use the parks less frequently because they dislike dogs.

The secondary schools are a little different. When the gates open at 4 pm, the kids spill out across the pavement and the throng looks like a plenary session of the UN: all the colours on earth are represented. But a few hundred yards away from the school, a new picture emerges. Black kids are walking home with black kids, white kids with white kids, Moslems with Moslems, Sikhs with Sikhs.

Like seeks out like.

When we choose our acquaintances freely, and not at the behest of workplace quotas, we act in ways that have the appearance of racism. Humans are designed this way and we have great difficulty suppressing our fundamental natures. And our great difficulty is audible. We can detect our great difficulty in the shrill rhetoric we use whenever racism is discussed. Rather than calmly stating that we deplore racism, as we deplore pollution or torture, we crank up the volume and scream, ‘I am ABSOLUTELY NOT A RACIST.’ Or we state absurdities like, ‘I don’t see colour,’ or, ‘I do NOT have a racist bone IN MY BODY!’

The decibel level is revealing because we’re apt to make a lot of noise about practices we secretly resent. A vegan will always tell you how many years have passed since he last ate a sausage but a happy tippler is unlikely to declare publicly that he drinks three glasses of wine at lunch-time. Self-denial makes us boastful. Self-indulgence makes us bashful. And by bellowing at top volume about our anti-racist views we unwittingly register our distaste for a creed our hearts reject.

A perverse race mania grips us. Someone who makes a tactless remark about child poverty, say, or multiple sclerosis, will be told to shut up. But a cheeky aside about ethnic differences may cost you your job, or your career. The comedian Frankie Boyle was called a racist and he successfully sued for defamation. He had to. The mere allegation was too serious to be overlooked and he counter-attacked as if he'd been accused of fraud or wife-beating.

Race mania has ballooned into a massive industry – unconscious bias training – whose crass goal is to certify white people as ‘morally hygienic’ and to give them an exemption pass: ‘I’m not a racist because I went on a course.’ I attended two such programmes and they strengthened my racial prejudices and weakened my faith in humanity. Is it really true, I asked myself, that society is seething with ethnic hostility as the tutors want us to believe? The aim of the course was bonkers: to fight racism with more racism. It was like filling a fire extinguisher with petrol. And it stoked my social paranoia too. I began to fear that I was being held responsible for conquering lands that no ancestor of mine has ever visited because my forebears were dirt-poor peasants who lacked the funds, or the leisure, to move away from the barren fields they tilled.

I mention my heritage not just to record a historical fact but to let you know that my ancestors were victims of racism and that I therefore – according to the twisted logic of race mania – cannot be racist. This is how we rationalise it: ‘I experienced the pain so I wouldn’t inflict it on others.’ Which is patently untrue but everyone is so desperate to avoid the charge that they either claim to be sufferers or they point the finger elsewhere – as if that automatically exonerates the accusers. The opposite is the case, of course. A victim of racism is more likely to harbour resentment against the race that oppressed him.

Race mania has sprouted an international wing. All across the globe we hear expressions of post-colonial remorse being proclaimed. As I happen to have an impeccable Celtic pedigree, (Welsh father, Irish mother), I’m aware that my forebears were conquered by the Anglo-Saxons and so I watch these English rites of self-flagellation with a mixture amusement and contempt. Mostly amusement.

Why would a white person who has never owned a slave apologise to a black person who has never been a slave? First, to deflect suspicion. ‘I can’t be a racist. I just said sorry.’ The whites who express regret for the past probably know, in their heart of hearts, that the act of contrition creates a very agreeable image of themselves as munificent, charitable figures reaching out to needy, helpless foreigners. Some whites go further and ‘take the knee’ which must look like blatant self-deceit to the recipients of the apology. ‘Black people,’ cry the genuflecting whites, ‘I give you my tears, my pity and my guilt, but not my job, my car or my house.’

Some white people embrace the nonsense of ‘silence is violence’ which teaches us that black people are being continuously brutalised by whites, including me, even while we’re having a bath or taking a nap. Are we really that powerful? I mean all of us? A self-aggrandising white fetish is at work here. It’s absurd to argue that Ann Widdecombe, while knitting a scarf in her kitchen, is simultaneously oppressing Scary Spice, the Nigerian high commissioner and Pele.

Beneath these screechings about remorse lies a topsy-turvy racism. White people never expect contrition for being enslaved by other whites. Tens of thousands of Englishmen were press-ganged into the Royal Navy during the era of colonial expansion. And the penalty for refusal or for attempting to escape was death. But not a peep of regret is uttered about that system of coercion. Does anyone pester the Russians to apologise for serfdom, (the ownership of farm-workers by aristocrats), which was abolished in 1861 – far later than the transatlantic slave-trade? No need, it seems. The victims were white. What about the potato famine? My mother’s home-town in County Kerry has a mass-grave containing the bones of a thousand starved peasants who were buried, ‘during the terrible years of 1849 to 1851.’ Almost certainly, the remains of my kinsmen lie in that desolate pit. But will I get a heart-felt speech from Prince William and a reparation payment? Not a chance. Race again. Only people from Africa and Asia qualify for apologies and cash handouts. The English love the idea that they oppress black people but they just can’t see their fellow whites as victims. Do they privately believe that whites are their equals and black people aren’t?

The white race has monopolised – or colonised perhaps – the business of imperial contrition, even though it involves twisting the truth inside out. Whites were not solely responsible for transatlantic slavery. Every black Caribbean has an ancestor who was sold to a European by a west African. But Africa is rather slow in joining the choir of remorse. Their voices aren’t welcome. Black activists don’t want blacks apologising to blacks. And whites are distressingly eager to pretend that colonialism is their unique responsibility and that the sins of the Mughals, the Ottomans, the Persians, and other imperial powers, can be overlooked.  

Colonial guilt has become a whites-only affair even though history implicates all races. And the English clearly want to dominate the field. Their desire to apologise to everyone, (apart from me), looks like a perverse form of superiority, or exceptionality, or supremacism even. ‘Only we, the English, are enlightened enough to bless the world with our self-abasing sorrow.’ This weird white supremacism affects other parts of the liberal agenda. The policy of inward migration to the UK assumes that everyone arriving here will adopt our customs automatically because our society is patently superior to others. That’s the woke view. And it’s a perfect example of Anglo-centric smuggery.

Subsidised art reveals the same tortured delusion. The bigwigs at the Arts Council feel obliged to expose migrants to white drama. And they hire black actors to appear in Shakespeare, Ibsen, Chekov and so on. But what for? Do they secretly expect these masterpieces to have some civilising effect on the newcomers? The contrary experiment is never attempted. There are no grants for white lads from Essex to recite Yoruba poetry or to perform theatrical versions of Bollywood musicals. Our cultural leaders tacitly award the first prize to white art.

There’s nothing new here. You may already have shrugged aside the hypocritical aspects of the anti-racism agenda. But I’m worried. The attempt to rid ourselves of racial division by suppressing human nature is a policy that may be repeated more vigorously in future. Legal threats and physical coercion could be deployed. The Covid terror showed us that large populations are easy to manipulate. And our new masters may decide to turn humanity into a single race, ‘for our own good’. The dream of 1945, which has obviously failed, could be imposed on us by force.

‘A thing like that could never happen,’ you might say. Well we live in a world where, ‘a thing that could never happen’ seems to happen all the time. Ten years ago no one imagined that a rapist could oblige the authorities to place him in a locked cell with a woman he hadn’t yet attacked but was about to. During the pandemic, billions of us were given a magic serum that didn’t work, and we took the jab, ‘for the good of humanity’. Racism could be erased with the same tactics. Bullying boffins will perform medical interventions under an Emergency Powers Act. Any of us could draft the rules.

• Same-race relationships are banned.

• Defaulters must be jailed or sterilised.

• Same-race embryos will be terminated.

Job done. And within two generations racism will be wiped out because racial differences will vanish altogether. Any sensible person would recoil from such a policy, and so would I. But I wouldn’t dare challenge the new dispensation because I’m the guy who didn’t dare cast a black man as Bubbles. It might be racist.