The Light’s on at Signpost

by George MacDonald Fraser

  This may seem trivial; it isn’t. It is the heart of the matter. It is a denial of equal treatment of black and white, a discrimination based on skin colour, and until this is recognised, and it is acknowledged that prejudice has two edges, and that racism is no more rooted or, to use the foolish and inaccurate term of the Macpherson report, “institutionalised”, in the white community than it is in the black, there will be no improvement in race relations in this country.

  Since I have probably said enough to convince the more obtuse or prejudiced that I keep a Ku Klux Klan uniform in my wardrobe, I should make my position clear. I am what I would call a racist in the sense that everyone in the world is a racist (for you are, you know), in preferring my own kind, by and large, to those of a different kind or culture. It’s no big deal; it’s a question of feeling more at home with those whom I know, and with whom I share a common culture and folk-experience.

  I was happier in a North Country English regiment during the war, among fellow-Cumbrians, than I would have been in a Welsh or London regiment, and happier still when I went to a Highland regiment. I am no sports fanatic, but I feel pleasure when Scotland’s soccer or rugby teams win (especially against England, I admit, and I have a distinct impression, from the sporting press and the TV images of stout fellows with St George’s crosses painted on their faces, that there is some similar national feeling south of the Tweed, especially against Germany).

  This is perfectly natural, and insofar as it shows a race-preference, it is surely racist, but in no sinister sense. I am happier among Britons than among foreigners, but that does not imply hostility to Chileans or Syrians, and I would certainly not discriminate actively against them, or treat them unfairly because they happened to be of a different race, creed, colour, etc. I simply like “my ain folk”, and if there is anyone who does not share this feeling (or says he doesn’t), and maintains that every human being is of equal value to him, regardless of kinship, colour, race, and so forth, I would ask him to consider the following question.

  He is standing on a riverbank with his infant grandchild, and close by is another infant whom he has never seen. Both children fall in, and are in equal danger of drowning. Which one does he try to save first—his own or the stranger?

  The answer is obvious, to me at any rate. You go for your own, you racist, you. Why racist? Because the race is simply an extension of the family. In my own case, I cleave first to my wife, children, and grandchildren; thereafter to my clan, the Frasers, and the folk of Cumberland among whom I grew up, thereafter the Britons, and so on. This is not, surely, to “discriminate against” the Australian aborigine or the American or Italian—or the African. Some fool (and he was a university lecturer, too) to whom I propounded my question, said “Ah, now, if one of the grandchildren were black, it would be an interesting question.”

  “You great balloon,” I retorted, “can’t you see that would be irrelevant? You would save your own, black, white, or khaki.” But he couldn’t see it.

  As it happens, and possibly this is irrelevant, too, although I don’t think so, I owe my life, indeed my existence, to a black African. He was a Kikuyu warrior named Wakibi, and when my father was wounded and had to be abandoned by his comrades in East Africa (it was that sort of war), Wakibi, who was his orderly, refused to leave him, tried to dress his wound, and finally carried him unconscious to safety. So I have an unpayable debt to that wild shield-and-spear hero not only for my father and myself, but for my children and grandchildren. Without Wakibi they wouldn’t be here. Bayete Wakibi.

  It follows that the view of race relations with which I was brought up was slightly unusual for the time. The word “nigger”, which was not uncommon then (though less common than moderns may think) was simply anathema in the Fraser household, and I got into trouble at school for rounding on a classmate who, perfectly innocently, described an African child as “a little nigger boy”. The acceptable term at that time, incidentally, was negro or coloured; black became beautiful later, and now I gather America has adopted Afro-American, which is as clumsy and daft an expression as I can conceive. It is a sign of the times that one has to be careful in choosing words; lack of intention to offend is no excuse, as the tyrants of the race relations industry have made clear. They have shown themselves eager to exploit race sensitivity, taking offence where none is meant, and trying to make mischief where none exists. They belong to all races, and do immense harm while pretending the purest of motives. Most of them I would call arrant racists, not in the Hitler sense, but not in the commuter sense either. Somewhere between and truly dangerous.

  It has long been evident that the Race Relations Act was one of the most foolish and pernicious ever enacted by Parliament, and that the Commission for Racial Equality has proved itself to be a bad and unnecessary institution whose activities have been, to put it charitably, quite deplorable. If these seem unduly harsh and sweeping words, I employ them because, unlike some race activists, I care very much about racial harmony, and far from bringing it about, both the Act and the Commission seem to me to have done immense damage to race relations, and consequently to the social fabric of the country, which is probably beyond repair. They have bred resentment, suspicion, and hatred. We must assume that they were the product of good intentions; well, they have failed, tragically, for the fact is that no one intent on stirring up racial trouble could have done a better job.

  The Commission have been openly pro-black, as has the BBC. How low the corporation’s standards have sunk was seen when a black so-called comedian called the Queen a bitch. In an incredible display of race bias, the Broadcasting Standards Commission decided that this disgusting insult was permissible since the speaker was black. They ruled that “bitch” was acceptable “street slang” for a woman, and the BBC supported this with the feeble excuse that the speaker “was using the term as it is used in ‘rap’ music, to mean ‘woman’ and not as a term of abuse.”

  Would the BBC be equally tolerant if a white person called the offending comedian “a nigger”, possibly advancing the excuse that the term was inoffensive because it was acceptable in certain white circles? Of course not; the BBC’s racist bias aside, such an excuse would be false and hypocritical, as it was in the case of the black comedian (who, to do him justice, expressed regret for his ill manners). Words in the English language are not to be redefined by an immigrant minority in a way which they know perfectly well will give gross offence to those who speak the language properly, especially when the insult is directed at the Queen. A broadcasting authority with any sense of fitness would have banned the offender for life instead of trying to pretend that such despicable behaviour can be condoned in an unpleasant vulgarian simply because he is black.

  This insistence on viewing the race question through dark glasses has become virtually an official policy which, while it fails to satisfy the black community who continue to nourish an understandable historic resentment, helps to build a similar—if usually unspoken—resentment in a white community which has been brainwashed into feeling guilty, and is thoroughly fed up with being made the scapegoat for problems which the race relations industry has created.* The race propaganda is, to use modern jargon, counterproductive; the parrot-cry that we are a multi-racial society, when we are not (London and many large centres of population are, but the greater part of the country is not, as yet), the nakedly racist demand that there should be quotas of blacks in Parliament (and Welsh, Scots, Cornish, Jewish, why not?), and the apparently disproportionate number of black and brown faces among television presenters—all these things sow in the mind of the white population a feeling that they are being unfairly dealt with, that the dice are loaded against them—but by God they’d better not say so.*

  But if it is largely fear of being called Nazis that keeps them quiet, there is also at work in them the instinctive tolerance and sense of fair play that distinguishes the island race, for which they are given little credit. They know too that the most militant and abusive black leaders
no more represent the black population than the National Front does the white, and that the huge majority of blacks want nothing more than fair treatment and opportunity. I’m not pretending that the worst kind of white racists don’t exist; we know they do. But they are a tiny minority. What I have called racial preference is universal, among all ethnic groups, but it’s harmless, and only the race relations industry, in their untiring search for alleged offence, however trivial, would deny this.

  We have not yet sunk to the point reached in the USA where the bigots demanded and got an apology for the use of the word “niggardly” (comment on the ignorance or stupidity of the complainant is superfluous—and would probably be described as racist anyway), but it is sometimes a near thing. The radio commentator who implied that black athletes were good runners because they were used to being chased by lions, was admittedly making a reference to their ethnic background, but could it be called seriously racist, and would any intelligent person take offence at what was obviously meant to be no more than a joke, albeit a pretty feeble one? Yet there came the knee-jerk blare of protest from the race relations lobby, the commentator had to apologise, and race relations had taken another knock, not so much from the thoughtless comment as from the over-reaction which gave the incident so much publicity. The accounts I read, incidentally, contained no complaints from black athletes.

  Racial jokes of this kind are as old as time. People have been finding humour in the traits, real or imagined, and the idiosyncrasies, habits, faults, and preferences of different races, since Stone Age man first noticed that the folk in the next cave were, by his lights, eccentric. Irish jokes, Scotch jokes, Polish jokes, Flemish jokes, Welsh jokes, American and English jokes, sub-continental Indian jokes…we know them, and nobody really minds. Why not black jokes, provided they are told without intent to offend? I don’t know, and I can’t imagine what reason the Commission for Racial Equality would give. I can only be sure it wouldn’t be the true one, for the true one is buried deep in the black consciousness, and no one dare speak its name. It is to do with slavery, and centuries of perceived racial inferiority, and that is all too recent to be got rid of easily. If it has bred in black people a race-consciousness, a resentment, even a hatred, that is not surprising. I’m not black, but if I were, I would feel it, by God I would, and it would take a great effort of will to realise that only time, and toleration, and a refusal to be offended, and institutionalised kindness and good manners, can hope eventually to consign race hatred and prejudice, if not recognition of racial difference, to the dustbin of history.

  It is taken for granted, by all parties, that the task of bringing about this happy state of affairs rests squarely on the white community. I am not so sure; it is going to take some effort on the part of blacks, too. There was a black lady academic lecturing in this country not long ago, who said, in a reproachful tone, that whenever she met white people, she was aware that they were registering her skin colour. It didn’t occur to her, apparently, that she was doing exactly the same thing about them. When she does understand that, she will have done something to improve race relations.

  Reverting to the matter of inter-racial humour, I’m reminded of an encounter I had in Beverly Hills with a very old, plainly very rich gentleman named Marx. (He looked extremely like Groucho, but wasn’t, and I like to think he was either Zeppo or Gummo, but he probably wasn’t one of them either.) He used to take breakfast in the Pink Turtle café of the Beverly Wilshire every day, as I did. One morning I needed an extra cent to pay my bill, and to my surprise Mr Marx, whom I had never met, rose and offered me a copper; I accepted gratefully, and next morning laid a cent on his table as repayment. He fell about laughing, crying “A Scotchman and a Jew!” The point being, of course, that Scots and Jews are notoriously careful of money, and this is a constant subject of jokes—to which we don’t take exception because we don’t mind; in fact, we’re rather proud of our tight-fisted reputation; it’s a virtue, in a way.

  I’d like to think that the black athlete/lion joke would be received in the same way. For one thing, it recognises a sporting phenomenon—that black athletes, on the whole, far outclass their white rivals in track events. Watching the skill of black footballers, I foresee the day when the premiership teams will be largely black: they are that good, and living proof of an obvious truth which is invariably denied by the politically correct: that there are such things as racial characteristics and special racial skills. Black boxers have long dominated a sport in which supremacy belonged successively to the English, the Irish, the Jews, the Italians, and the Hispanics; the Chinese can murder the world at table tennis; the Iroquois are famously immune to vertigo at great heights; illiterate Madrasis, they say, can tell you the square root of a number by some mysterious mental process; children of Southeast Asian origin have startled educationalists by their brilliance—and these things have nothing to do with immediate environment; they are in the creature to begin with.

  This, to be sure, is heresy to the politically correct; they deny the evidence manifest all around us, in the human and animal kingdoms. Exactly why they do, is a mystery; presumably they fear that to recognise racial differences will lead to racial discrimination—and that is precisely the fear that must be eroded if racial harmony is ever to be achieved.

  There are hopeful signs. I have alluded to racial jokes, and there is no more powerful tool in the destruction of race prejudice than humour, as witness such comedians as Sammy Davis Junior and Charlie Williams, who have found race funny; that excellent television programme, The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, is forever sending up racial attitudes, showing the other side of the coin exploited by Alf Garnett. This is a healthy sign, and perhaps a portent, if only an infinitesimal one to set against the evils that beset the races—the National Front, the Paki-bashing, the abuse shouted and scrawled on walls, the shameful exploitation of cases like the Stephen Lawrence murder, the naked anti-police prejudice fuelled by asinine inquiry findings, and worst of all, I say again, the damage done by the bigots of the race relations industry—who, of course, have a vested interest in mischief-making, since the biased exaggeration of race problems can be used to justify their existence and the waste of public money on their salaries.

  Sometimes I wonder if the pendulum is beginning to swing, and the public is awakening to the sheer dishonesty of the campaign to burden them with guilt. The race bigots do tend to overreach themselves, as with the ridiculous report of Mr Straw’s costly and unnecessary inquiry which reached the incredible conclusion that the words “British” and “English” carried harmful racist connotations, and indeed that “Britishness” did not exist; they cited their own garbled version of an imperial history which they plainly did not understand, or want to understand, to support their case. It would be comic if it were not deadly serious.

  It may be, for all I know, that the substantial minority of the inquiry body who were not of white British extraction, and who presumably were from recently arrived families, did not find “British” a desirable, or even understandable, word. Why should they? An ethnic minority, of whatever colour or race, are seldom in tune with the majority, and are certainly not the most authoritative commentators on the country’s identity. One can imagine the scorn that would be poured, very properly, on a second-generation British immigrant to, say, modern India or South Africa or the USA, who pontificated on the very essence of those countries. Yet the nonentities (I’m sorry, but they are no more) of the Runnymede Trust (and there’s a mind-boggling misappropriation for you), do not hesitate to tell us that our entity is a lie, that Britain is racist, and the empire a thoroughly bad thing. Impudence is far too mild a word.

  It is possible, I suppose, that the non-white members of the inquiry tended to feel uncomfortable or excluded in Britain, perhaps even resentful, and that this distorted their view. Sometimes such views seem to carry an undertone of simple hatred, and that the attitude of the inquiry to Britain and the British was hostile is beyond a doubt. But that was
in tune with New Labour, who set out, quite deliberately, to undermine the traditional values on which the United Kingdom was founded, and which served as an example to the world.

  Whatever the emotions and motives of the inquiry, it is a pity that it reached such fatuous conclusions, entirely at odds with the beliefs of the rest of the population, including that vast majority of non-white citizens who are glad and proud to be British, and are aware that, with all their admitted faults, the island people are far more racially tolerant than most, and that this, ironically, is a legacy of that imperial past which is an object of such loathing to the politically correct.

  It is not a past understood, obviously, by Mr Straw who, although he had the belated sense to reject the mischievous report on which he had squandered a small fortune over three years, has a most curious view of British history. He spoke, at one time, of the “English propensity to violence” which he believed was used to “subjugate” the Scots, Irish, and Welsh “who’ve been over the centuries under the cosh of the English”. Really, one doesn’t know where to begin in the face of such monumental ignorance, and can only lament that Student Straw must have spent less time at lectures than he did on street-corner agitation.

  I’ve delivered myself on the race question, and the longer I ponder it the more insoluble it seems—to me, at any rate. There is so much misunderstanding, so much hypocrisy, so much contradiction and inconsistency and, alas, so much dishonesty and ill will, that the subject begins to resemble an enormous Gordian knot, and contemplating it I can see no happy issue until the whole of mankind is khaki-coloured, which I suppose is inevitable unless the human species wipes itself out with Aids, or drugs, or racial and religious war, or a combination of all three. But not in my time, with luck.