A Little Bit of Racism Goes a Long Way

According to the Daily Hate (I can’t remember which specific right-wing rag I read this in, so I’ll generalise), social workers fail to properly investigate alleged child abuse when it occurs in non-white families, for fear of being seen as racist.  The clear implication here is that we should be employing more overtly racist social workers, as that would undoubtedly get them further with their investigations.  Indeed, I’m sure that having local authority officers kicking in doors and shouting ‘Get your hands off that kiddie, you child-beating Paki bastard’ will save countless children from harm.  Doubtless, in defence of their proposals, those advocating the application of racism as an enforcement tool would point to the successes of Britain’s police when being a racist bastard was a key core requirement for candidates applying to join.  Back in the ‘good old days’ when coppers were allowed to conduct their investigations along the lines of pointing at the first non-white person they saw and bellowing ‘It was that black bastard what done it!  You are nicked Sambo!’, then fitting them up with evidence as required, they cleared far more crimes than they do today.  The fact is that we probably all need to be more racist – we’ve all gone too woke and spend far too much time being polite to each other.

At least, that’s undoubtedly what the average Nigel Farage or ‘Tommy Robinson’ supporter thinks – and practices.  Think of all the times that someone has cut you up at the roundabout or traffic lights and you are about to launch a stream of invective at them, before seeing that they are, say, Chinese, so you bite your tongue and instead just smile and wave them on for fear of being seen as racist?  Wasn’t it all so much easier back in the day when you could just have shouted ‘Are you blind, you slitty eyed chinky bastard!’ at them? Sadly, I remember those ‘good old days’.  Growing up in the seventies, there was still rampant racism in the UK – you saw it everywhere, it seemed to be hard baked into the culture, an unwelcome relic of Empire.  Crude ‘race’ jokes were still stock-in-trade for the country’s – predominantly white and working class – comedians, as was blackface, (not just on the Black and White Minstrel Show – Benny Hill, for instance, regularly donned black or yellow face, often with Bob Todd ‘browning up’ to play ‘comedy’ Indians and Pakistanis, even Spike Milligan frequently indulged in the latter).  As a child, I laughed along at some of this stuff, after all, I told myself (along with everyone else) it’s all just a bit of harmless fun, (just as we convinced ourselves that the rampant sexism and misogyny we saw on our TV screens was just a bit of harmless fun, also).

But it wasn’t.  As I grew older and my extended family became ever more multicultural and we started to see the rise of National Front and their racist thuggery on our TV screens, it suddenly didn’t seem so harmless, let alone fun.  It started to become very personal.  Luckily, where I lived, we didn’t see much overt racism first hand – the local National Front seemed to be a couple of skinheads who hung around bus shelters drinking strong cider and scrawling graffiti on toilet walls, but we still saw it all unfold on the TV news.  Certainly, we saw and heard enough to know that any return to those ‘good old days’ would most certainly not be a good thing.  Sadly, though, the racists do seem emboldened by the rise of the likes of Trump and Farage and, disturbingly, over the last year, I’ve been seeing the return of the open use of various hateful racist epithets, unchallenged, on certain social media platforms.  The people doing this are, obviously, pushing the boundaries, to see what they can get away with – not so long ago they would have found themselves widely condemned and ostracised.  Now, there’s largely silence when they roll out the racial abuse.

But hey – we’re all just too woke, too ready to get upset by silly words, is what they’d say in their defence.  Except that they aren’t just words, they are an encapsulation of irrational hate designed to dehumanise the target, their etymology inextricably tied up with imperialism and ideas of white supremacy.  I remember when, not too long ago, these self same people were complaining about ‘political correctness gone mad’ and how we couldn’t risk offending anyone any more, sound familiar?  But, in reality, like ‘woke’, a lot of so called ‘political correctness’ was really about being polite to people, not dehumanising and degrading them by using offensive terms to describe them. So what these ‘critics’ are really complaining about is that they were no longer able to call non-white people things like ‘darkies’, ‘wogs’ and much, much worse.  They wanted the right to vent that unreasoning hatred toward the ‘other’ that seems to seethe and bubble away inside of them.

I’ve never understood such hatred and the burning need to offend and degrade that it seems to engender – hating requires so much energy, it’s exhausting.  Being polite and considerate, by contrast, is so much easier.  (Which isn’t to say that I don’t still curse and gesticulate at idiots who cut me up out on the road – but I’m indiscriminate on racial, gender and cultural grounds as to the type and level of abuse and I don’t hold on to it, one good swear and wanker sign and I’m done).  As a brief digression, I feel that I have to make some defence of my younger self who laughed at those racist jokes – I didn’t really understand a lot of them.  Indeed, I was so naive back then that I had to have the old Christmas cracker joke of  ‘What time did the Chinaman go to the dentist? – Tooth  hurtee!’ – laboriously explained to me, as I had no idea that Chinese people were meant to speak that. The only Chinese people I knew were a pair of twins I went to school with whose father, originally from Hong Kong – then a British territory, owned a local dry cleaning business and who spoke impeccable English (not surprisingly, as they’d been born and brought up here).  A point which still holds true – that when you know people from ethnic minorities personally, on an individual basis, as friends, colleagues or neighbours, it is much more difficult to hate them simply for looking different or having a different cultural background. Which is why the racist playbook concentrates on generalising about ‘them’, that amorphous army of faceless ‘immigrants’ who are probably all rapists and murderers and tries to ignore them as individuals, who might be good, or might be bad, just like any other group of individuals.

Doc Sleaze