To: Laurie Taylor at Thinking Allowed, BBC Radio 4
Re: Race and identity
Date: Thursday 27 October 05

Dear Laurie,
 
Your conversation with Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn was a very interesting contribution to an extremely important subject: race (relations) and identity.
 
We are in a state, at least of semi-denial as to just how important race is for most people's sense of identity. Americans are in official denial, of course, for reasons of national unity, and we in Britain are being forced, by a well-intentioned but misguided leftwing ideology and naive liberalism and humanism, allied with free-market capitalism's powerful desire for cheap, foreign labour, to follow their example.
 
Race matters! Pretending that it doesn't (or shouldn't) - which at the BBC has, it seems, the status of unquestionable church dogma - while silencing those who feel that it does with accusations of "racism", is a recipe for disaster.
 
We could do with a whole series of Thinking Allowed broadcasts dedicated to this subject alone.
 
We are dominated by an intellectual naiveté (tending towards arrogance) which assumes that the importance of race is rooted in ignorance, i.e. that the more knowledgeable we become the less race matters. However, I have found the very opposite to be true: the more I have learned about my ancestors and the history of Western Civilisation the more aware I have become of just how  "hideously white"  - as the former BBC Chairman, Greg Dyke, might put it - (i.e. European) they are, and how central this is to my own sense of identity. It is not about one race being superior or inferior to another, but about who my ancestors are, what my history is, and where I belong.
 
I am convinced that much so-called "racism" is really about "identity". When Spanish football fans chanted "racist" insults at black British players some weeks ago, it was, I suggest, because they expected Englishmen to be white (just as we expect the Japanese to look Japanese, rather than Scandinavian or African), not, as the entire media insisted, because they were racist. They should have been criticised for rudeness, not racism.
 
"Recipe for a get along scene" was a very good choice of song, by the way, because it celebrates the ideology of race not mattering (the sooner we are all of mixed race the better), which dominates modern western society by branding those who disagree as "racists". Apart from being understandable in people of mixed race, it is, I believe, fear of and a gross overreaction to genuine racism, as expressed in the insane and criminal ideology of the Nazis, and the less extreme but still inhumane and abnoxious Apartheid and Segregation laws of South Africa and the southern states of America.
 
Most of us are not of mixed race (at least, not noticeably so), and, if we are honest, don't want to be - or rather, don't want our grandchildren and descendents to be, because, vainly - and as an important, if not essential, aspect of our identity - we want them to look like ourselves, our parents, grandparents, etc, going back to the forebears we learn about in history, or whose bones are dug up at archaeological sites all over the country. Some will accuses me of "racism" for saying this, I know, but it has to be said, because it's the way that I and very many other people (probably most, if they come out of denial and are honest about it) feel. It is difficult, because no one wants to be offensive (or be called a racist), but, of course, some people are going to feel offended. I was offended when a Jewish girl once rejected me because I wasn't a Jew. But that is the price we have to pay if we wish to cultivate and maintain racial, ethnic and cultural diversity. Far from promoting diversity (except in the short-term) the ideology of multiracial and multicultural society is reducing (and will ultimately destroy) it. All human diversity (certainly racial, linguistic and cultural diversity) only came about because in the past human populations were isolated (for thousands - in the case of race, for 10's of thousands - of years). Now, if we don't maintain some essential aspects of that isolation artificially, such diversity will disappear. That is what the singers of "Recipe for a get along scene" are hoping for (Oh what a beautiful dream), but as much as I like the sentiment of love and good will, it is a dream I do not share; on the contrary, to me it would be a mono-mixed-race, mono-cultural nightmare.
 
How often have I heard even BBC broadcasters refer to "our ancestors" - who are virtually all white. How can black and Asian Britons not feel somewhat alienated when "we" talk about "our history", "our ancestors", and their , i.e. "our achievements"? We assume that they can (and want to) adopt "our history" (and national identity) in the same way that they have adopted our language and many aspects of "our (western) culture". I cannot speak for them, of course, but I certainly would not want to adopt someone else's history or identity - even if it were possible, which I some how doubt.
 
There is so much more to say on this subject. For example, that forcing multiracial and multicultural society on people who don't want them (and there are very many who don't) generates aggression, which is then mistakenly and dangerously dismissed and suppressed (politically, socially and psychologically) as racism; or that in America the vast majority of people are immigrants rather than natives, while in Europe and many other parts of the world the very opposite is true.  But for now this will have to do.
 

BBC Radio 4 - Thinking Allowed

www.spaceship-earth.org