298. Return (III)
I suppose it was from CBBC, then broadcast once a day for a couple of hours, and Sesame Street that I took my early views on race; and those views were those to be found explicated by any boomer: we are all one people, one race the human race—and though, shucks, we might look a little different we can all get along and make it work. On television, even in the early 1990s, two of the news anchors on the premier news shows were black—even though blacks were then, perhaps, 1.6 per cent of the population, if that. What people call “woke” today has been in place since the post-war period began; and its general outlook predates the post-war order by decades. Those newsreaders were there to tell people what Britain was and would be; it is the preset, the default, we only discuss how fast or slow we move.
By the mid-1990s, at primary school, I gained a best friend from South Asia; he was not the normal immigrant case. His parents were an Oxford-employed mathematician and a geneticist. Previously, they worked out in San Francisco and so my friend looked down on and criticised everything British. I came to sympathise with him many years later when I visited San Francisco, it is such an astoundingly attractive place—so wealthy and technologically advanced—that Oxford, washed in rain, seemed totally lame, backward and unsophisticated.
To arrive in Oxford from San Francisco aged eleven was like a tumble from heaven. My friend was, really, a prototypical global elite—the “everywhere people” as sociologists say today—someone whose intelligence and superb education would mean that he could move to San Francisco or London or Beijing and be at home; he could work, in the computer industry, with similar international people. For him, everything high status was American-cosmopolitan, his America was progressive San Francisco and Apple products; everything low status was rooted, attached, and religious—he trusted the science.
For many years I interacted with him in the colour-blind way the BBC television shows commended; he was just another person to me—although sometimes resentment would bleed into his voice, references to being “brown”. The reality began to crystallise for me around the time there was a civil war in his native country. I relayed some news report from the BBC that noted that the govenrment forces—his ethnic group—had committed an atrocity against the minority rebels. He immediately hit the roof, it was all “propaganda and lies.”
He married a white girl from a similarly elite family and yet he complained that when they walked into a pub everyone would stare at them. The racial reality began to encroach on my consciousness: men have an innate disgust reaction when their women associate with other racial groups. You can beam as much pleasant propaganda as you like, but the sharp glances will never stop if you are in an interracial relationship; and it would be no better in his native country—not that he would return to such a low-status place—for the South Asians are no more tolerant, though there he would catch strife from the women and not the men.
Brexit brought it all to a head; for he ardently opposed Brexit, just as he ardently supported his co-ethnics when they massacred an ethnic minority that threatened them. By that time he had a business—propped up by UK government loans—but he preferred to import…South Asians to work with; although he professed liberal scientific values—San Francisco values—he wanted to work with his kind, to import more; and the EU facilitated his racial interest, so it was good—though not in the way the naïve liberal idiots think. So it was then I fully learned that blood is thicker than water; and all the sentimental propaganda on ITV and the BBC and in the university is composed of lies—lies created by those who hate white people, whoever they may be.