Racism - it ain't what it used to be
Edward Pearce
Indignation at the viperings of idiot celebrities on an idiot TV programme is well enough, but most of the reaction so far has lacked perspective and, like so many contemporary debates, lacked history. Referring several times to the Indian actress as "the Indian" can be called "racialism" (in Jade Goody's term), but everything said on the show, when compared with a tradition of contempt and hatred, open and tolerated in this country until the late 1960s, is so much watered water.
The Birmingham Gazette, comparing native Irishmen with the Ulster stock in 1887, tells us that "the northern Irishman is worth two from any other point of the compass, will actually perform double the amount of work, and is besides incomparably superior in brains and general ability."
Or take James Anthony Froude, major Victorian historian in The English in Ireland 1881. "The Scots," he said, were "a race of men who had been hammered to a temper which made them more valuable than mountains of gold", adding instructively that "the Lowland Scots were Teutons." The, Irish by contrast, had provoked the English by their sneaking resentful ways "... till it seemed, at last, as if no solution was possible save the expulsion or destruction of a race which appeared incurable."
The contemplation of a final solution in Ireland makes those job advertisements, familiar well into the 1940s, "No Irish need apply", seem quite temperate.
Froude was a highly educated man, offering his prejudices top-down. Even more educated, devoted to the highest of high cultures and all-round western civilisation, was TS Eliot, exalted modernist poet and avowed Christian whose verse is scattered, as Anthony Julius has pointed out, with:
"But this or such was Bleistein's way A saggy bending of the knees And elbows, with the palms turned out, Chicago semite Viennese."
Eliot can be less delicate, in fact: "The rats are underneath the piles. The jew is underneath the lot."
One can quote on and on, but might more usefully contrast the scholar-poet's statement of an alien threat - "The red-eyed scavengers are creeping / From Kentish Town to Golders Green" - with the Mosleyite chant - "The Yids, theYids, / We've got to get rid of the Yids." Style, vocabulary and figure of speech are incomparably finer, but the essential message?
Virulent racism was around for a long time, and not just in words. At the height of the second world war, at the request of the commander of American forces, the Stockport dance hall of Nathan Buchbinder was closed down by the Home Office - closed down for failure to practise a colour bar. The old southern horror of white women dancing with racial inferiors was strong in the US forces - and we were our usual compliant selves.
Real racism of this sort - brutal and offensive words, menaces, hatred ridicule and contempt - went into abrupt retreat in the sixties. There had been general talk of "Wogs" during the 1956 Suez invasion. Tony Benn's diary notes: "Awful old Hugh Dalton shouting about Wogs in the lobbies at midnight."
Many things contributed to washing out mouths and minds: the slow percolation of what Hitler had done, the example of the civil rights campaign, of Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks, not to overlook an equally potent example - white policemen with cattle prods.
But while so much contemporary moral legislation is as futile as tiresome, the laws passed by the too much-denigrated Wilson government which boldly made racial malice, discrimination and insult, criminal, were not. They worked.
They were helped to work because another unfashionable politician, Edward Heath, offered comprehensive Conservative support. The same Mr Heath, would, as prime minister, allow the Asian refugees from Uganda to come straightforwardly into this country. The politicians actually gave a lead, actually set an example. Don't knock it.
Silly, spiteful remarks with a racial tinge made by dim, chattering sub-celebs are still objectionable, but there is "racialism" and "racialism" and we should acknowledge the difference.
