WALKING down the fictional Bigots Alley, I recently discovered the Diary of a Certified Racist. The dog-eared bitter little book told the tale of a far-right extremist, frustrated at the increasingly tolerant nature of the UK.
Sadly, the intolerant author expressed outraged that 93 percent of Britons said you don’t have to be white to be British. Worryingly, he was even more disturbed by the fact that 89 percent said they’d be happy for their child to marry someone from a different ethnic group. In response, this racist dreamt up a plan about how to encourage racial tensions in the UK.
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His idea was to use the anti-racism sentiment, the quasi-religious outlook and attitude that had become part and parcel of every British institution. “If only we could encourage a new caricature of black people,” he wrote. “Paint them all as vulnerable and in need of our protection, make them all seem different to us”.
It would just take one incident, he believed, something to get people on the streets to protest against racism. “Hopefully there’ll be mass crowds,” he wrote, “The media won’t say anything. The police won’t know what to do. This could generate strong reactions with calls for bans on everything. Pick old favourite TV shows and get them banned. The climate would promote the idea that everyone is guilty, everyone is racist, teach the plebs that they’re to blame, blame history, tear down statues, they’re all white, it’s your whiteness, shame on you”.
This mad plan was coupled with a presumed reaction, that people would feel aggrieved at being labelled racist.
He hoped a football player might not want to bow down, or that a sports presenter may not want to wear their anti-racist badge, which he was sure would become a must if you wanted to keep your job. “Watch as Twitter, followed by politicians and then the police, tear this 'racist' apart”.
“Let’s create a conformity,” he wrote, “a fear”. He hoped for a reaction from white people, hoped they would feel they were being unfairly labelled as “far-right”, as “racists” who once dared to laugh at old TV programmes, who felt some pride in their past who, increasingly, after having had it shouted at them time and again, started to think this is what defined them as white.
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Let us hope that this imagined bigot fails, that the tolerance of the British people continues to grow and that people refuse to judge themselves or others based on the colour of their skin.
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