When is it socially acceptable for a white person to tell a black person he looks like a monkey eating a banana? For some of you the answer will be ‘never’; for others: ‘Oh my God. I can’t believe you even asked such a racist question!’ But I must confess that when my white tennis friend Glen made some quip on these lines to my black tennis friend Rodney at our class the other weekend, I found it funny.
What made it so was not, of course, the stupid joke itself but the context. Here we were in gag-inducingly PC south London, conspiring in the kind of banter so verboten it could almost get you put in prison. Glen laughed, Rodney laughed, we all laughed. It was the laughter not just of rebellion and transgression but of liberation. No longer would we have play that silly game so many people — middle-class liberals, especially — feel obliged to play in these enlightened multicultural times. The game that goes: ‘Gosh. Do you mean to tell me that that person has a completely different skin colour from mine? I can’t say I ever noticed.’
This pretence that we’re all colour-blind is a poisonous nonsense, as I was reminded at a meeting of our local park committee. We came from all manner of backgrounds, those of us gathered round the table: young policemen, late middle-aged Irish cleaning ladies, Kiwi council administrators. And though we were all theoretically equal, none of us was under any illusion as to how the hierarchy of power went: lowest on the rung were the white, well-spoken professionals; at the top those who were poor, preferably living in council accommodation and above all black.
On this occasion it suited me fine. The person who most closely fitted these requirements was a friend whose views accorded with mine and I used him shamelessly to advance my cause. But under different circumstances, I imagine I would have been mightily pissed off. Why, in God’s name, should someone who contributes far less to the local economy than I do be treated as more valuable because of the colour of his skin?
And why when I’m filling out a form whenever I use an NHS hospital do I have to specify what race I am? And why, when a charity is having to apply for funding, must it be punished if it doesn’t tick all the right ethnic boxes, even if it’s in one of those English villages where there just aren’t enough ethnic people to go round? And why — as my friends at the Portman bridge club noticed the other day — do you score brownie points if you’ve Chinese on your committee, but not apparently Jews? Is the Holocaust too far distant that Jews don’t cut it as an oppressed minority any more? Or are Jews — as Red Ken Livingstone suggested in his disaster of a mayoral election campaign — just too rich?
I could provide plenty more examples of the stupidity and injustice surrounding race and multiculturalism, as could we all. But I want to get on to the case of John Derbyshire, the columnist who was sacked by the US conservative weekly National Review for an article he wrote in Taki’s Magazine called ‘The Talk: Non-black version’.
It was a response to a spate of US newspaper articles about ‘the Talk’ black parents give their kids to prepare them for the outrageous injustices of whitey’s world. Yes, the timing — in the wake of the killing by a white man of Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old black boy carrying nothing more dangerous than sweets — was insensitive. Undoubtedly the satire was heavy-handed, tasteless and often quite breathtakingly offensive, e.g.: ‘Do not act the Good Samaritan to blacks in apparent distress.’ But a sackable offence? Why?
One of the very few columnists brave enough to stick up for ‘the Derb’ was the great Mark Steyn: ‘The left is pretty clear about its objectives on everything from climate change to immigration to gay marriage: rather than win the debate, they’d just as soon shut it down. They’ve had great success in shrinking the bounds of public discourse, and rendering whole areas of public policy all but undiscussable. In such a climate, my default position is that I’d rather put up with whatever racist/sexist/homophobic/Islamophobic/whateverphobic excess everybody’s got the vapours about this week than accept ever tighter constraints on “acceptable” opinion.’
Steyn is right. However ill judged the Derb’s screed may have been (and it wasn’t totally: read it online and see for yourself), it was nowhere near as grotesque and nauseating as the spectacle of all those commentators (including many of Derbyshire’s conservative colleagues) vying about who could demonstrate him- or herself most thoroughly disgusted by the vile disgustingness of the Derb’s disgustingly vile racist words.
OK, you expect that kind of confected outrage from, say, Salon or Slate or the Guardian. But for a distinguished conservative publication like National Review to join in the righteousness parade is to make the fatal error of fighting your battle (indeed, in this case, surrendering your arms without a fight) on terrain of the enemy’s choosing.
If what the Derb wrote was wrong or untrue, the proper conservative response would have been to explain why it was wrong or untrue — not to allow the argument to be closed down by bullying hysteria. Much, if not most, of the racial tension we experience today has less to do with natural antipathy than it does with the idiot multiculturalist measures supposedly aimed at preventing it. We don’t talk about these things because cultural Marxism has very deliberately engineered a climate in which we are scared to do so. This is wrong. We need to talk about racial politics more frankly, less reverently. It’s the only way we’re ever going to get along.
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