Dear Laurie,

 

The contribution on racism was what interested me most in last Wednesday’s broadcast, particularly the observation that much so-called “racism” isn’t racism at all (certainly not the way it is defined in any of my dictionaries), but a natural picking on some “personal” characteristic that happens to be determined by race (e.g. skin colour). I realised this when I read a newspaper report some time ago about “racism in the playground”. An Asian boy had called a white boy “fatty”, who responded by calling him a “Paki”, which was construed as a “racist” slur. In fact, “Paki” was just the equivalent of “fatty”. They might just as easily have picked on each other’s noses or ears, or whatever.

 

It seems to me that the whole subject of racism needs extensive examination from anthropological, sociological and psychological perspectives. The meaning of the word has been completely changed from what is used to be, and it is applied very differently, depending on your particular race. It is perfectly understandable and acceptable for a black person, for example, to emphasis and cultivate his or her “black identity”, but if a white person were to do the same (i.e. emphasis and cultivate a sense of “white identity”), he would be considered “racist”, or at the very least, to have “racist” tendencies - which is the modern equivalent of being a heretic or a leper (seriously, there is scope here for at least a dozen sociology/anthropology/psychology PhDs).

 

There is a reason, of course: black people generally are not in positions of power that would result in their sense of black identity disadvantaging non-blacks; whites, on the other hand, are.

 

Race and immigration are intrinsically linked, because without mass immigration race would be what it was in the past: a principle national characteristic, which together with language, culture (including religion) and history, bind a people together; When I was a young boy, in the 1950’s, people of noticeably different race automatically qualified as foreigners from distant lands, and very different to English men and women.

 

The mass immigration of the past 50 years, it seems to me, has undermined one of the main pillars of national (and personal) identity. But we are not allowed to talk about it. In fact, we are not even supposed to think about it (thinking NOT allowed!); to do so would be, or could all too easily become, “racist”.

 

This is a very big, sensitive AND frightening subject (not least because of the insane and criminal misuse of the concepts of race and national identity by the Nazis, the shock of which entered deep into the European psyche, from which, I believe, we are still cowering), but it is also a vitally important one, which we go on denying and avoiding at our peril.

 

If ever there were a subject for Thinking Allowed, this, surely, is it.

BBC Radio 4 - Thinking Allowed