Just read a fascinating article on the Guardian website, to promote a book - How to Argue With a Racist - by Adam Rutherford (to be published on Feb 6, and available to read on my Kindle soon after). The more intently we look at race, the less there is to see. One by one, our blithe, knee-jerk assumptions - mostly based on skin colour - are revealed to be nothing more than social constructs. Mostly concocted over the last three hundred years, our ideas about ‘pure blood’ and indigeneity (“England for the English”, “Send them back to where they came from”, etc) were designed to create a hierarchy of races… with, of course, white Europeans at the top.
Britain has been colonised and invaded so many times that a term like ‘English’ makes no objective sense whatsoever. There are no ‘purebred’ humans; we are all mongrels. And yet I only have to wander into the public bar of the village pub to hear racist banter…
No comments:
Post a Comment