John,
England
Before I had any sense of nuance, I looked at race relations across the pond and here in the UK, the way the media had intended for me to see it. Whites are the aggressors, blacks are the victims. Granted it wasn’t always so – I’m old enough to recall various newspapers getting away with snide to blatant racism a couple of decades ago. But today is a very different world – where despite the obvious advances in equality, 1 incident too many derails everything. A black man is killed in police custody in America, by a white man. Yet another horrific statistic, and yet the numbers don’t point to a racist society at all. It’s easy to say that nobody should be dying in police custody, it’s not so easy to proclaim that white people are worse off in this area – for fear of being labelled a racist. Have nuance, play devil’s advocate – it doesn’t matter, if you’re in a discussion with the current political mindset, you are a bigot, you are a white supremacist.
Suddenly, my entire country is racist, our statues of well know philanthropists are torn down because they owned a slave or ‘had racist thoughts’ centuries ago, our memorials of war are desecrated, flags burned and previous leaders through the country’s toughest moments, are vandalized – all in the angry name of the race. Every day, our publicly funded-via a television tax- ‘independent’ broadcaster, the BBC has several more stories race-baiting, articles about how we are all racist towards black people, regardless of any circumstance or counterclaim – you have ‘unconscious bias’.
Yesterday, the BBC claimed that football commentators had a racial bias in that they were 3-6 times more likely to praise a black players ‘speed or power’ but 60% of comments about ‘intelligence and work ethic’ were towards white players. Today, black players have been ‘urged to form a coalition’. Race relations are dead according to the media. The most privileged, extortionately well paid black men in the UK, need to protect themselves from such a vile country apparently.
Forget what percentages mean. Forget the fact that the country is majority white. Forget that ‘speed and power’ are positives in the game. Forget the definition of Racism. The new one? ‘Privilege + Power = Racism.’ This of course means, black people cannot be racist. It’s a phrase that is trotted out in colleges and universities all over the west – Something I’m sure, the rest of the world looks on in bemusement. It feels like a war is coming, one that’ll be fabricated by the media, only making things worse. One moron will commit some heinous crime and it will be seen as ‘proof’ that the whole country is awash in racist sentiment. May the silent majority, black and white, stay sane.
