(Twelve-minute read) 

This subject remains somewhat taboo so before I start I wish to state that I am of white skin and that it’s evident to me that a person can’t have racist attitudes unless he or she believes that there are such things as races.

Having traveled most of Africa and a great portion of the rest of our world I don’t believe in a race but in humanity as a whole.   

Sadly, within humanity, racism has been a plague since the record began and prevails to the present day.

Yet the root cause and origin of racism is in fact not human, and hence leads to inhumanity – “a denial of the right of existence of entire human groups.

Armenian Genocide,  Bosnia, Cambodia, and Rwanda, The European colonization of the Americas, Tribes such as the Yahi were hunted to extinction. The liberation war of Bangladesh in 1971, The Darfur Genocide, The Yazidi in Iraq by ISIS. The Rohingya in Myanmar. The Uyghurs in China not to mention The Holocaust. 

So, to have any understand racism, you need to understand the concept of race.

The phenomenon of racism is like standing in front of a mirror seeing your mirror image as the only acceptable image.

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The vernacular meaning of “race” is quite different from its biological meaning.

In the vernacular, when one person describes another as being a member of a certain race, they are not pretending to be making a claim about that person’s genetic make-up.

We are inclined to conceive of races as populations that are defined by the possession of a shared essence that all and only members of the population share.

Of course, this is all baseless.

The present-day biological notion of race has nothing to do with the past’s so-called “scientific” racism.

The idea that members of the same race resemble one another is prevalent and intuitively compelling. The only problem with it is that it’s dead wrong.

Members of the same race resemble one another in more ways than members of different races do.

But this doesn’t work either.

If we are serious about combatting racism we should not be celebrating racial diversity.

Instead, we should be concentrating our efforts on undermining the very idea of race.

If we considered only very few traits—primarily skin color overall visual similarity is the basis for assigning people to racial categories. One has to ask oneself as to whether democracy, the rule of law, and human rights can ever properly take root till racism disappears, which still casts a shadow over society. 

Recent debates about slavery in Britain and the United States have understandably focused on the toxic legacies those systems bequeathed to the black peoples of the Caribbean and the US, the descendants of the slaves.

One could say that both Britain and the USA of today were foundered on slavery and colonialism.

Britain as a nation is built in no small part, on slavery and colonialism, it has long infected their culture and institutions.

Since politics emerges from these cultures, racism is embedded in their institutions and involves distributing resources and power, it could never be immune.

Will this crucial bring about a post-imperial day of reckoning?

Not likely. 

In 1968, Enoch Powell warned there would be “rivers of blood” if non-white immigration were not halted. In 1978, Margaret Thatcher referred to Britain as being “swamped by people with a different culture” – a phrase repeated by David Blunkett in 2002 in reference to asylum seekers’ children in schools.

In 2009, the British National Party won two seats in the European parliament.

In 2014, Nigel Farage, then the leader of Ukip, said: “the basic principle” of Powell’s rivers of blood speech was “correct”: His party topped the poll in the European elections later that year.

The current prime minister has refused to apologize for referring to black people as “piccaninnies” with “watermelon smiles” and Muslim women as letterboxes.

It’s difficult to see what meaningful conversation you can have about racism in British politics that does not involve the Windrush scandal.

Racism is a systemic form of discrimination in the foundations of the country, not a cricket club with its centuries-old legacy, that shapes lived experience today in England today. 

As such, it cannot be weaponized because it is already a weapon.

As well as denying people employment, housing, education, equality, human rights, safety, and opportunity, it in both countries can literally kill.

Racism can, however, be deployed in many ways. 

It may galvanize, distract, deflect, distort, scapegoat, and marginalize. It is an incredibly effective tool for dividing people and giving a sense of superiority to those to whom you have nothing material to offer.

Does it mean that nothing can be done about it?

The racism that exists in politics can only be eradicated through politics and education.

England’s post-imperial self-reckoning feels harsher, largely because it has been postponed for so long, and the memories of power and glory are so ineradicable.

In the U.S. The Constitution is where institutional racism was encoded from its origins.

There is no such thing as an ‘illegal’ asylum seeker.

 

Racism is always reversible — march toward equality.

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All human comments are appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

They look like one another