ITERATION THE NINTH: My Name Is Jon And I Am A Racist

There. I’ve said it. It’s out at last. It’s one of those things, your own personal racism, that you hope will stay hidden. In the same way that revealed members of BNP have understandably shown themselves to be ashamed of their affiliation, I am certainly ashamed to be revealed as a bigot, as a Mosley, an Irving , a Griffin. What surprised me most was not that my shame was revealed when the list of BNP members came to light - I am not and never have been a member of that organisation and Satan will ski to work before I join – but when I read of it in a Sunday paper. And do you know what else came to light? It turns out that you, my friend and neighbour, are also a racist. Look here:

...outside London and the more evolved large cities, the traditional view is that

black or brown people are all very well in their known place – driving a bus, cleaning a lavatory, being good at maths, medicine or singing. But a brown or black person who earns much more than you? Whose employee you might be? Whose house is much bigger and whose lifestyle you envy? That’s too much; that can’t be borne.

Now just who can Ms India Knight, for it is she, in the Sunday Times, ( November 9, page 22 should you care to check) be talking about? Shall we ask ourselves just where is the smallest city in the United Queendom? Could it be, with a population of 10,406, according to the census of 2001, our own small but perfectly formed City of Wells?

By Ms Knight’s lights, only in the larger conurbations can people be evolved and sophisticated enough to eschew racism and Wells can’t qualify on those grounds. And as for those of us living in tiny villages found at the end of muddy, crumbling roads... well, we must certainly inhabit some hell-hole to the right of disgraced TalkSport presenters.

Ms Knight is being, to use her own phrase, thoughtless rather than wicked. The thrust of her thesis is that, as someone who is –her words again – cafe au lait, she still endures the casual racism of certain people: in the case she cites in her article, her hostess passes a remark about a ‘dirty Paki’. Where she demonstrates her own thoughtlessness is in her suggestion that this sort of thing is only to be expected in certain places. Newcastle, say, where her example took place (Newcastle has no BNP councillors), but not presumably in enlightened London (which has a disgusting number of the creatures. More than none, that is).

It’s a depressingly common attitude, is India’s. She is rightly horrified by her thoughtless hostess and then goes on to demonstrate an incontrovertible and equivalent thoughtlessness of her very own.

I honestly believe racism to be on the way out. Not this week or even this century will the last bigot finally rot away like the excrement of dinosaurs, but it’s un-evolved adherents are now more inclined to remain in the stinking holes which they inhabit. The reaction to the publication of the BNP membership list proves this. And was I the only person to laugh out loud when the ridiculous Nick Griffin squealed that this exposure was in violation of the European Human Rights Act? How delicious that he who would have us widen the English Channel by 1,000 miles (not kilometres) if he could, now goes blubbing his pain to the very people he purports to despise.

Sooner or later, grown up people will judge each other on important things, not where they came from or the amount of melanin in their skin. I hope people like India Knight will help the process by being less thoughtless with their casual remarks. They be quite hurtful.