Personal Racism

We were expressing perhaps somewhat smug satisfaction recently that our offspring appear to be free of racial hang-ups. We had talked with old friends who, like us, have lived for some years in the South Pacific, and their kids too all seem to have linked up with, and fallen in love with, people of other races and cultures, and live around the world. Our children effortlessly played and went to school with Fijians, Indians, Samoans – indeed as part of a cultural minority where they were. They enjoyed the differences. They simply assumed the need to make personal adjustments. A safe monocultural club, society, suburb or street seems to them simply anaemic.

Former US President Jimmy Carter has just said bluntly that much of the antagonism to President Obama’s health reforms is plain racism. So many of Obama’s critics, he said, actually object to any Afro-American being President of the United States – that’s what bothers them. One of the many tragedies of our time, it seems to me, is the abyss that seems to run down the middle of US history, society and politics, including some of its awful versions of Christianity, separating people God actually made of one blood.

And from the major to the utterly minor: The NZ Geographic Board has ruled that NZ’s small city of W(h)anganui should be spelt in the Maori way, with the “h”, since it is a Maori word and might as well be correct. This led the somewhat manic mayor of W(h)anganui, Michael Laws, to publicly label the NZ Geographic Board as racist. What Mr Laws meant was that they had presumed to make a decision which favoured Maori. And that is precisely the kind of decision that seems to have power to keep many non-Maori New Zealanders awake at night. Once upon a time in NZ white folks made decisions, and the natives simply had to listen and obey.

Clifford Longley, writing in The Tablet about regulation of the media, says that Fox News is: “the blatant and unashamed example of what happens when broadcasting is insuffiently regulated. Some of the people who appear regularly on it in the United States, not just guests but anchor persons and presenters, are rabid, raucous, racist, partisan and bigoted, happy to stir up any kind of rabble-rousing nonsense such as the idea that Barack Obama isn’t really American but Kenyan and isn’t really Christian but Muslim”. And to be sure, on the few occasions I have dialled up Fox News on Sky it has seemed to me beyond belief.

I guess the roots of racism are about as complex as humanity. Many PhDs have been researched therein. But surely racism is a choice, for adults, even if millions of racists have never thought of it as such or would be incapable of understanding the implications of choice. You can choose to be otherwise. Jim Wallis of Sojourners magazine expresses gratitude to Jimmy Carter for having so publicly named and nailed the evil disease, because that is what we should always do. Racism is unnecessary and destructive, immoral, blasphemous, even in its so-called benign forms.

Antisemitism is ignorant and always intolerable. Racism based on colour, equally. Religious bigotry, and the now too familiar emanations from Islam and some sections of so-called Christianity... Social discriminations of all types... to realise how embedded this is in English society read the novels of Jane Austen, the writhings of many of her early 19th century characters to be sure they are inhabiting their correct social stratum (or that of their betters) and that others remain where God in his infinite wisdom has placed them.

The relentless paranoia of much of right-wing politics... I have lived long enough to cease trying to find excuses for these things. Our friends seem all now to have seen the new movie, The Young Victoria, which portrays Lord Melbourne as a kindly avuncular guy, precisely the kind of bloke a teenage queen might want as her Prime Minister. He was in fact a rancid and promiscuous old bigot who stubbornly resisted social change, and maintained the primacy of privilege. Just a little bit of that does emerge slightly in the movie.

I suppose I am suggesting that one of the principle tasks of maturity in today’s world is to be personally free of racism and of all tribal attitudes which tend that way. I am beyond making global claims, but I would think that this would be one of the best contributions anyone could make towards world peace. Simply refuse to have adversaries or enemies, anywhere. Don’t permit them that power over you. And if they are people who are seeking to eliminate you, well... it’s tough, sure, but still don’t make them enemies. Jesus was right about that.