The Light's on at Signpost (25 page)

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.

In the meantime, it might help if the understanding and tolerance expected of the white community towards the non-white were reciprocated. This never seems to crop up in discussions on race, but it is perhaps something for the black community, the young of all races, the politically correct, and those who work in race relations, to bear in mind. We old white crumblies grew up in a virtually all-white Britain, and adjustment to a society which has become about 12 per cent coloured in the past half-century, has not been a simple matter of course. In my childhood a black or brown face was a rarity; practically everyone, policemen, magistrates, politicians, teachers, bus conductors, footballers (excepting Frank Soo, a Chinese who played for Stoke), shopkeepers, soldiers, labourers, peers of the realm, etc., was white. I was about to add
doctors, until I remembered that in my native city of Carlisle there were four non-white GPs, referred to, without a suggestion of “racism”, as the Black Doctors, and highly regarded, but for the rest, black and brown people were unusual, distant, and rather exotic (Paul Robeson, Sabu, Joe Louis, Duke Ellington, West Indian cricketers, and all those talented black Hollywood comedians like Willie Best and Rochester who are now frowned on as the depths of political incorrectness).

It changed with the war, with black GIs and the Ink Spots and Lena Horne and the Rev. Henry (“Homicide Hank”) Armstrong, but the new racial mix in the population, which began with the Empire Windrush, has taken some getting used to, like television and mobile phones and e-mail and pizzas and yellow lines on the streets. We’ve had to get acclimatised, just as the immigrants have had to, as one does to all changes. We had to accept from the first that the old adage “When in Rome do as Rome does” was a dead letter, and that Rome was expected to adapt to suit the newcomers rather than the other way around. Integration was the watchword until it was seen that white resistance, and black reluctance based on a desire to hold on to ethnic cultures, militated against it, and that the best that could be hoped for was acceptance and tolerance by both sides. Perhaps it is happening at long last, and the old resistance and reluctance are fading away. They will vanish all the sooner if the race relations industry stop deliberately fomenting racial strife.

I conclude with a few points for which there was no convenient place in this piece, but which may be worth a moment’s thought.

1. The infantry section in which I served in Burma were, by today’s lights, racists to a man, in speech and deed and outlook. It is impossible to explain to the twenty-first century, with all its preconceptions resulting from revisionist propaganda, just what the British soldier’s attitude towards India and the Indians was, fifty—sixty years ago, but looking back I have the impression that it was
as much social as racial. For centuries the British had been masters of India, with inevitable consequences; they (we) considered themselves superior to the Indian civilians, but not only because of colour; the British swaddy, looking at the teeming slums of Bombay and Calcutta, at the beggars, at the half-clad natives in their shanties, the swarming crowds of the cities, and the primitive peasants of the countryside, couldn’t
help
feeling he was superior to
that
, and in this respect his views were exactly those of every Indian above the level of the Untouchables. And show me the Western liberal of today, faced with the squalor of the lower reaches of the subcontinent, who says he doesn’t feel superior, and I’ll show you a liar. But is his feeling racial or social? Let him work it out for himself.

But whatever superiority the swaddy may have felt, it stopped abruptly at the level of the Indian military. That, too, was inevitable; no one who had gone into action alongside the Baluch or the Gurkha or the Sikh could feel anything but unalloyed admiration, respect, and gratitude. I know I felt it, and no race relations expert need waste his time trying to find tell-tale traces of “superiority” in me and my comrades, because they aren’t there, mate. And that is why so many of us love the sub-continent and its people still, and feel only disgust and contempt for those who would try to stir up strife between us.

2. It was announced recently that the state of California no longer had a white majority. The Hispanics, it was said, now outnumbered them—which left me bewildered and asking of no one in particular: when in God’s name did Spaniards and Mexicans cease to be white?

3. Why should any trace of black ancestry automatically render a person black in the eyes of the world, even if most of his ancestors are white? Why should Muhammad Ali, who is obviously of European as well as African extraction, be considered black rather than white? I know it’s an elementary question, perhaps even a childish
one; I’d just like to hear it answered honestly. Which reminds me that when I was asked to write a piece for a national daily paper on Arthur Hailey’s celebrated account of his family’s transition from Africa to America,
Roots
, and I wondered why he had dealt only with his black ancestors, and neglected his white ones, that part of my article was carefully cut out. I still don’t know why; it seemed to me to be a not unimportant point.

4. I have made clear what I think of offensive racial epithets, and note the double standard under which I can be called a Scotch bastard, or some other choice noun (as has happened on occasion), without any outcry from the racially sensitive, who would run screaming in circles if a similar insult was offered to a coloured person. But this it seems is an acceptable inconsistency nowadays: a young journalist of my acquaintance actually told me that he felt it would be worse in him to call a black man a black bastard, than it would be for a black man to call him a white (or honky) bastard. I found this appalling and patronising, no doubt for the same reason that I think positive discrimination is abominable, and a sure recipe for race hatred.