It’s been years since I Blogged. Once upon a time I had a fair-sized audience for my previous platform, and on a handful of occasions was quoted in national newspapers, which apparently have the occasional tendency to mine random Blogs for quotes on the Events of the Day. Once I ended up in an article about single parent Bloggers, and apparently was clearly an angry American – who knew? I always thought I was a London boy born, bred, and escaped from at the earliest opportunity, but clearly there’s something my dear mother hasn’t told me.
Since the last time my toes were in the waters of political Blogging, much has changed. Myself most of all, perhaps. I have learned some vital lessons about essentialising, which for the uninitiated means lumping every single member of a cultural, ethnic, national or even similarly coloured group together as if they have a shared set of essential characteristics which may be used as predictors of behaviour. Or designations of victimhood.
What I learned about essentialising is that it’s both monumentally stupid, and also more than a little bit evil. Part of the journey involved the sudden realisation that for a very long time I haven’t believed in the concept of ‘Race’. At all. Period. It’s just…nonsense. And a lot more than a little bit evil.
This is why I am a Race-Rejectionist. It’s my own term, I have vague hopes it will catch on and endlessly annoy those who have such enormously deep and embedded vested interests in keeping the concept of ‘racial differences’ going, like Neo-Nazis, capital-L Liberals and other such racists and race-obsessives. Please do unite and hate me! I could do with a laugh.
What does Race-Rejectionism entail? It means two things, personal and political. The personal part is the easy one. You become colourblind – not cultureblind or nationalityblind, mind – but just stop seeing anyone at all in terms of their imaginary ‘race’, which may or may not be perceived to be different from your own. For example, I’m supposedly a ‘white’ boy, with some Sikh blood way, way back in the gene pool. That means that according to different people, I am to be regarded in different ways. Some would view me, Elizabeth Warren style, as some kind of ‘mixed race’ to be given certain special considerations despite the face that visually I’m just another ‘white’ boy. They would think I should be tiptoed around whenever Sikhism or any aspects of it are mentioned, as if my distant ancestry automatically grants me a mystical commonality with Sikhism and all those who are connected with it. So if someone is negative about it in my presence, I must automatically be offended because I have an ancestor who lived in India and was part of the same religion.
I’m not a Sikh. I have no connection with it beyond some teenage memories of seeing a bloody great swastika at the top of a Sikh friend’s stairwell and feeling my jaw hit the floor before he casually explained to me that actually, they had it first long before Hitler did and, to paraphrase what Nigel Farage said recently about the ‘stolen BNP slogan’, to hell with the Nazis. But for a certain section of society – in terms of numbers about 95% on the ‘Progressive Left’ and about 5% BNP/NF types – I am a Sikh, purely because a male ancestor of mine got together with a chap in a turban a century or so ago and through a complicated genetic chain I was one of the results.
It’s just…absurd. I am me, my intrinsic behaviours and personality are formed by a mixture of upbringing, environment and mostly personal conviction. They aren’t the slightest bit informed by ‘being a Sikh’ to lend me a commonality with a Punjabi nationalist any more than my ‘white’ genes give me some form of commonality with a Surfboy from Sydney, an Aryan from Aachen or a Furtrapper from Finland. It’s bull. I have nothing in common with any of those people, we lead different lives inside different cultures. And, more importantly, two Surfboys from Sydney living next door to each other don’t have that commonality either. So I won’t ever look at someone differently, treat them differently, or assume some form of essential ‘whiteness’ or ‘blackness’ or any other sort of ‘-ness’ attached to them worthy of discussion, mention or consideration in any way whatsoever.
That’s the personal level. The easy one. Where it gets messy is when you extend the concept outwards from the personal level to the political. Because most people love to pay lip-service to the idea that on the personal level, they are *all* Race-Rejectionists in their souls. Treat someone differently because of the colour of their skin? Perish the thought, guv’nor.
Once the outraged protestations at the very idea die down, ask them if they think all forms of racial monitoring and discrimination by the State should be outlawed immediately. If they answer ‘yes’ then they actually meant what they said. If they don’t, they didn’t.
Usually, they don’t. Because all ‘black’ people are discriminated against by society, dont’cha know. All of them, at the same time, need to be the beneficiaries of job quotas and the sweetly euphemistic ‘positive discrimination’, which is of course nothing more than bad old-fashioned racial discrimination dressed up in a pretty pink bow marked Social Justice. Because to discriminate for someone, you have to discriminate against everyone else. For every quota met, every box ticked on one of the monitoring forms whose guidelines state explicitly that the boxes you should be ticking to prostrate yourself before the altar of diversity are about skin colour and not nationality, culture and the like, someone suffers actual direct, measurable discrimination. Not the nebulous kind which is supposedly suffered by this Designated Victimhood Group and that, despite legal provision after legal provision which would make it a tremendous risk for any employer to practice such discrimination. But actual, genuine and empirically observable discrimination on the grounds of imaginary race, of gender, or even of sexual orientation.
Public Sector employers and private sector ones mad enough to buy into it all certainly don’t have any interest in the ‘content of your character’ when making decisions about whether or not they have met the correct quota of people with the right colour skin, using the forms which absolutely will only be used for monitoring purposes. But how does an employer arrive at the conclusion that its workforce is too this, or too that? Ah. Yes. That would be those forms for monitoring only, wouldn’t it…and so those with the wrong colour skin have their applications monitored all the way into the bin without interview if their predecessor interviewees ticked the wrong boxes, until the desired ratios are met.
Ho hum.
Going Godwin for a moment, Hitler maintained the Nuremberg Laws were necessary to redress an intrinsic discrimination being suffered by ‘white’ people in Germany, but the evil old psychopath had nothing on today’s Progressives for sheer Machiavellian ingenuity. They not only promulgate multiple discriminatory employment laws but have also managed to persuade a very large number of those in the modern position once occupied by Germany’s Jews who are on the receiving end of the resulting State discrimination against them that its a damn good thing that they are being discriminated against – the Progressive concept of Privilege, which is to all intents and purposes the Christian concept of Original Sin dressed up in an atheistic bow. There is nothing new under the sun, as they say. At least the Nazis never made the Jews feel guilty about it when they were discriminated against. And no, before the hard of thinking seize the moment and get their outrage on, I am not suggesting for one moment that positive discrimination is the same or even anywhere near as immoral as the Nuremberg Laws, I am merely pointing out the fairly strong parallels behind the concepts which are used to justify them. So unclutch those pearls before you do yourselves an injury.
Yay, I double Godwinned! There should be a prize for that.
So that’s what Race-Rejectionism means. It means actually working towards genuine equality in terms of treatment by the State, as well as on a personal level. Its not comfortable to make it clear to someone who thinks that they have a ‘racial identity’ that you disagree with them about the concept, that’s for damn sure. Like I said earlier, 95% of those who think that the promotion and emphasis of imaginary racial difference is tremendously crucial to our psyche and culture are ‘of the Left’, and they will call you a racist just for denying their belief in that racial difference and the desirability of the racial discrimination that goes with it. Without hesitation. Because if there is one characteristic which defines the modern Progressive/Liberal, it is his or her tremendous narcissism, and no single action tweaks the special place of a Liberal like expressing their belief that everyone who rejects the idea of racial differences and racial discrimination must actually be a racist. It feeds that tremendous, unshakeable Narcissism in the most primal way – racism (which once upon a time was actually defined as the whole discrimination and ‘othering’ thing before the Progressives stole the term and completely turned it on its head) is the ultimate evil, this person is a racist because I said so, therefore I am the Goodest of Good Guys because I am fighting him and therefore racism. Oooh, my special place, it tingles!
Earlier I drew an analogy between the concepts of Original Sin and Privilege, and there’s another clear comparison to be made in that respect too – the Holy Trinity of Progressivism, invoked in the same reverent manner by all Progressives everywhere to shut down opposition to anything that challenges their worldview.
Racism, Sexism, Homophobia. The unbeatable accusations which can never be denied. There’s even a song.
So anyway, there you have it. I’m back in the Blogosphere, not that many likely readers know who I was in my previous incarnation. I have been wanting to expound the Race-Rejectionism concept properly in black and white for some time, but just hadn’t ever tried to fully set it out in a formal manner. Now I have, it feels curiously cathartic.
There is definitely a post about the Ukraine bubbling around in my head, so that will probably be next after tomorrow’s morning job search. For now, goodnight and sweet dreams to the Internet, and I hope you enjoy this first post.
(Update: It has been pointed out that I have described ‘a male ancestor of mine getting together with a chap in a turban’, which is clearly incorrect. But I find the error more than amusing enough to let it stand 😉 )
thedirtymindedfool 