The Colours of Our Skins

When someone accuses you of something widely thought disreputable, something you don’t believe you are guilty of, you deny it, instinctively. Unfortunately, this makes you subject to the Mandy Rice-Davies Manoeuvre: Well, he would, wouldn’t he? (Often abbreviated to MRDA: ‘Mandy Rice-Davis applies’.) And this is a manoeuvre to which neither Steven Ward’s defence counsel at the time of the ‘Profumo affair’, nor anybody since, has ever been able to find a counter. Furthermore, if it’s ‘racism’ you are accused of (or homophobia, Islamophobia, transphobia, misogyny or any other of the criminal feelings we know you are guilty of), then, in order to make sure that you can’t find a counter, the ‘anti-racists’ do what in American football is called “run pass protection”: they interpose between you and any conceivable counter the assertion that nothing better proves you to be a ‘racist’ than your denying it: I mean, what white person who wasn’t a ‘racist’ would deny it … unless he were one? QED.

But that’s merely the tactical advantage the ‘anti-racists’ have over you. The strategic advantage they have — an advantage your own denial helps to give them — is that, for them, however the term ‘racist’ is used, the more it’s used, the better. If they say you’re a ‘racist’ they score (“one more than you” — as Fat Les says in “Vindaloo”); if you say you’re not a ‘racist’, they score again (that’s two more than you). For, you see, the more the terms ‘racist’, ‘racism’ ‘anti-racist’, ‘not-a-racist’ etc. are used — it doesn’t matter whether in attack or defence — the more deeply they embed themselves in the language, the more deeply they embed themselves in people’s minds as realities, the harder it is to dislodge them. When you deny you are ‘racist’, you affirm that ‘racism’ is bad and wrong; and as ‘racism’ is always and only white ‘racism’ (What else could it be?), you encourage and embolden your accusers. Anything that might be thought black or brown ‘racism’ is, after all, just a form ‘anti-racism’ can take.

The ‘anti-racists’, it seems, can’t lose this debate and you can’t win it. You are talking, you see, in your enemy’s language, and by doing so validating it. You — and I — we’re in a trap that it’s difficult to see our way out of.

So, as inviting as it looks, the way out is not, I think, by the route Peter Harris recently took in these columns, by denying that Britain is  ‘institutionally racist’ and citing in evidence all those blacks and browns who are prominent in our white public life. And, as for asking what whites are correspondingly prominent in the public life of any black or brown nation, that won’t help either. If Mr and Mrs Badenoch were to move to Nigeria, our accusers know as well as we do what chance Mr Badenoch would stand of becoming Secretary of State for Something-or-Other there. (Poor, foreign, half-white Barack Obama couldn’t even get his luggage back without a local Big Man putting the squeeze on for him: p. 322, Dreams from my Father, Canongate Books, 2008.) But (to adapt a phrase of Conrad’s from Heart of Darkness) the gangsters of virtue don’t care: their purpose is not to be just, it is to denounce: J’accuse! À la lanterne!

Race need not matter and where it need not it ought not; and, in all those cases Mr Harris mentions and lots of others he might have mentioned — for us, apparently — it didn’t and doesn’t matter. In any individual case, it may well be, as Mr Harris says it generally is, nothing more than skin colour and melanin. I have no reason to think black Kemi Badenoch any less British than my white self (or perhaps, even, any less Scottish than her husband). We sometimes see on our television ‘Japanese’ or ‘Chinese’ Americans who are (I find them so) wonders of assimilation, as thoroughly, that is, as ordinarily American as the most red-necked, midwest red-neck or high-toned, Brooklyn Heights WASP. And I once had a close Indian friend who, after decades in London, went ‘home’ only to discover that it was home no longer, that he had become too deeply Anglicised ever to be at home there again. And the assimilation of such foreigners (foreign, in origin) is — who can doubt it? — nothing but benign. Who isn’t rather proud, as I think Mr Harris implies we ought to be, that such as Mrs Badenoch or Mr Sunak can rise to such prominence amongst us? Who would wish to be so provincial that such a thing were impossible? Doesn’t it distinguish us from Viktor Orbán’s Hungary (or Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s Nigeria) in a way the most conservative of us can be pleased by?

But it doesn’t follow that because race need not matter in some circumstances, it need not matter in any. If it were only ever skin deep, as Mr Harris says it is, it ought never to matter. But that view of race is false to experience (‘lived experience’?). If it were just a matter of skin colour why do members of the different races stick together as they do? Why do racial ghettoes form not by legal compulsion but naturally and spontaneously? Left to themselves people, do behave as if race mattered to them, as if it were something more than the colour of their skins. And that is because race is more than melanin. It is intimately linked to national identity, culture, ways of life, religion, manners — all sorts of things that make people at home with one another, things which they value and wish to foster and to protect, things they feel are threatened by the introduction into their midst of racially different communities or, equally, by the racially different community they have introduced themselves into.

It is only when we are considering individuals that race is something superficial. Then the colour of the skin may well matter no more than that of the hair or the shape of the nose. But that isn’t at all similarly true for communities, not ones that are large enough to be … large enough. Then race and culture may prove so mutually supportive that immigrants don’t need to assimilate — and if they don’t need to why would they? And then their presence may well be found, by their ‘hosts’, not benign at all. Native Fijians didn’t find being outnumbered by long-settled Indian immigrants (introduced by their British colonisers) benign. Which is why in the ‘eighties’ there were those military coups against democratically elected governments. The native Fijians were so atavistic they thought their rights, in what had been their own country (before the British made it partly someone else’s), took precedence over the rights — the democratic rights — of their racially different fellow citizens. (I don’t know that the Tyber foamed with blood but it certainly had the smell of diesel about it from all the tanks.) Poor, deluded Fijians, who couldn’t see that the head-count takes precedence over everything else. (Luckily, we could truthfully say, “Nothing to do with me, Your Honour. I wasn’t at the scene. I’d left earlier.”)

Mr Harris says race is just skin colour, without noticing, it seems to me, what a large concession to the gang of virtue he makes. It’s a concession with a particular bearing on immigration. If race is merely skin deep and has no connection with culture or a way of life, no race need be unwelcome anywhere, all races ought to be equally welcome everywhere. The migration of races from country to country, no matter on what scale, threatens no one and nothing. Let’s have a properly global equality. All, being equal, have an equal right to go, to be, wherever they choose to be (and can get). How many millions are there in Africa, Asia, South America, of a different race and a different culture from ourselves, who would like to be somewhere other than they are, preferably, where we are? It would be, as Powell said it would, national suicide, to allow it.

Or perhaps we shouldn’t be bothered by the thought of even the most radical transformation of the racial character of the inhabitants of the British Isles? Perhaps it ought to be a matter of complete indifference what the racial composition is of these or any other islands, Fiji for instance. Who cares how much melanin the British have in their bodies? If that’s all race is, why not welcome unlimited immigration — even if it doesn’t come from other parts of white, prosperous and orderly Europe but almost entirely from black-and-brown, poor and disorderly Africa, Asia and the Middle East? Especially when, we are told, ‘growth’ is in danger of being held back by a falling birth-rate?

And yet, what white, not in the gang of virtue, can be indifferent to changes in the racial character of the British Isles, changes that inevitably entail changes in the politics and culture? Would such a change entail no loss? Not loss absolute, of course, loss in the eyes of God or the Universe, (where for all we know, in either case, it might be accounted gain) but loss in our own eyes, loss relative to our own partial outlook on the world? Could we ever contemplate the disappearance or diminution of our own national identity, hitherto white  — the one that made us — with anything but an affected equanimity?

And how else can that identity be defended except by recovering the idea of race-and-nation as something valuable, rehabilitating it, after the injuries done it first by the land-und-volk murderers, then by those who, in reaction, deny that land and folk ought to be connected at all? The gang of virtue think race matters; so should we all.

Duke Maskell writes a Substack newsletter Reactionary Essays, which you might like to follow here.

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