Or, why contempt is often justified
Let me make something plain to you all. Since coming to America my experience here has taught me that Racism is justified.
I was at one time a European, and in this context that means that I believed that there was absolutely no basis for racial prejudice. I grew up in Great Britain, one of the most ethnically diverse nations on Earth. The Blacks that I knew, all of whom came from Jamaica, the West Indies (a great cricketing Nation), and Africa, all thought of themselves as British before they thought of themselves as Black. Their complaints, which were justified, had everything to do with the fact that British society as a whole failed to recognise just how British they actually were, rather than with any failure to respect their Blackness. I went to a school which had a population of 2000 students, 99% of whom were Black. I bought ganga (marijuana) from the Black kids in the school corridors. I went to their homes, as they came to mine, and ate their foods. I associated with Black kids at every turn, I spoke Black British Jamaican patois. I listened to bootleg imports of Jamaican Reggae (Bob Marley is a poor substitute for real Jamaican Reggae) and thought of those children as my friends, my equals, and my co-countrymen.
They were as British as I was, and the color of their skin had nothing whatever to do with the issue of whether they were British or not. Black, White, they were born in my country and that made them co-citizens with myself. They spoke of themselves as British. They followed the same Cricket and Soccer teams that I did. Their interests and my interests were the same.
Which is why I was fundamentally opposed to racial prejudice. Had you called a Black friend of mine a nigger I would have beaten your ass into the ground and stomped your face afterwards. My mother has had more than one Black lover: they were all decent hard-working men who did their best by her, and tried, to the best of their ability, to deal with her two weird children. Most failed, as did the White men she has also known. But in each case, the weirdness of her children, and the subsequent difficulties she experienced, had nothing to do with the color of the skin of her lovers.
I remember an infamous instance in which my sister, Sarah, ferociously rebuked a Pakistani taxi-driver who had spent the entire journey condemning Blacks (and Jamaicans in particular) simply for being Black and Jamaican. She beat the little shit down (on completion of the journey - my sister was never a fool) and did so deservedly and properly. Jamaicans are wonderful people (and they grow stunning dope lol).
Though both she, I, and my mother, are undeniably prejudiced against Pakistanis, and Bangladeshis in particular, none of us would have dreamed of deliberately abusing them in public, nor of working against their interests. Why? Because, Bangladeshi or not, they were still British.
'British' is not an ethnicity. There are the English, the Scots, the Irish, and the Welsh (in order of racial importance). The terms 'Britain' and 'the British' did not enter popular usage until the 18th century (along with the use of the Union Jack as our Flag). Prior to that point there were separate racial and political identities that amalgamated as a result of political accommodations among the dynastic ruling classes associated with European aristocratic bloodlines. But among the common people there was, and to some extent is, only allegiance to the Flag and to the Throne. The rest was an irrelevance. If you served Queen and Country, you were British, and it made no real difference what color your skin was.
Certainly there were racial differences, and racial prejudice, among British peoples. One of my closest friends in Nottinghamshire, where I lived immediately before my departure for America, was notorious in the communities in which we both lived for having torched a house full of Pakistanis, killing all six of them. But he was the exception, rather than the rule. The majority of all British, no matter their ancestry or their skin color, want only to live peaceably with their neighbors - given the chance. And they want to do so on the basis of a shared identity as British - which is why the recent upsurge in Islamist violence has caused such scandal, offence and consternation in Britain.
The recent subway attacks have caused such infuriated disbelief, and such sudden suspicion of anyone seeming to be of Muslim beliefs and practice, precisely because they were so utterly alien to the British mindset. We were all of one kind, no matter our skin color. The transcendent horror, the disbelief and suspicion now associated with Muslims and their motivations in Britain, is caused by the inability to grasp why and how our own could have turned against us.
Britain was once closely involved in the slave trade. Hull, the town I love above any other place on Earth, Bristol and Liverpool, were all once heavily involved in the importation of African and West Indian slaves. But Blacks who live in those places think of themselves as British before they think of themselves as Jamaican or African, and the majority of them do not hold their contemporary fellow-Britains as either responsible for, or culpable in relation to, the injustices perpetrated by their forebears. Yes, there are certain Blacks who argue that Britain should make financial reparation for the horrors of the slave trade - but there are far more who believe that the past is the past and that the present should not be held hostage to what was done two hundred or more years ago.
They argue, rightly, that the effects of prejudice should be combatted now, because it is now that they and theirs suffer, and that the means taken to address that prejudice should be related to the problem of race relations as they are experienced now. And I could not agree with them more. Because the terms in which that debate is phrased are the terms of citizenship (or, in the case of Britain, the rights of subjects equal before the law).
I don't care if you are Black, Orange, Grey or Blue. I don't care if you are straight or gay. I don't care if you are Republican, Democrat, or radical Anarcho-Syndicalist. If you are a citizen then you are afforded the rights, privileges, duties and obligations that are mandated by the Constitution of the United States of America. And anyone who seeks to interfere with or deny to you those rights, obligations, privileges and duties is a criminal who ought properly to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
Since Americans are so infernally obsessed by whom an individual has sex with, let me reiterate: straight or gay, Master or slave, fetishist or otherwise, none of these categories are relevant to your rights and duties under the Constitution and are utterly irrelevant to what is due to you as a citizen - and anyone who seeks to interfere with or deny to you your due under the Constitution is a criminal.
Now you know where I stand.
Under most circumstances, here in America, I would not be thought of as a Racist. With my European friends, those I've been unwary enough to discuss these matters with at any rate, it's a different matter. Those I think of as dear friends, who for my part are still dear friends, are no longer willing to talk to me. Why? Because I've been forward enough to say that the American Black, in the majority, is not fit to be associated with. That the American Black is a creature unique in history, both mentally and spiritually unequal to its co-countrymen (except that the majority of American Blacks deny that they are American, preferring the periphrasisis 'Afro-American'), a creature so traitorous that it must emphasise some spurious and entirely mythical allegiance to Africa before allegiance to the country of its birth.
As an aside, let me tell you that I frequently amuse myself by imagining the likely careers and fate of some of the 'Afro-Americans' of my acquaintance (and living and working where I do I know more than a few) if they were somehow magically to be transported to Africa. Bear in mind that I have known Nigerian Princes, Ethiopian peasants, and more than a few well-educated and successful true Africans, in my time in Europe. These so-called ghetto Africans would not last thirty seconds in the country they claim to prefer before the country of their birth - not thirty seconds. Their African-ness is as fake as their American-ness, and for the same reason - they have no connection to the fundamental values and realities of the truth of what they profess to be. It would delight me beyond measure to drop some of these nigger 'Africans' into the middle of the Kalahari, or into the heart of Pretoria or Mogadishu, and watch them squirm as real Africans treated them for the nigger wannabes that they are.
I know more about how to live among real Africans than they do - and I know nothing at all.
What is the great difference between these nigger 'Afro-Americans' and the Jamaicans, West Indians, Ghanaians, Nigerians, and other African peoples that I knew as I grew up in Great Britain? None of them were characterized by resentment - though they rightfully and properly resented the prejudice they experienced. None of them were characterized by the wilfull failure to respect the conventions and social practices of the nation to which they had immigrated - although all of them lived the lives of their native cultures within the life and practices of their host nation as private citizens (or subjects).
Contrast with this the behaviour of even the most decent, the most respectable, the most worthy of American Blacks. At every turn, there is the demand that White culture give way to American Black culture. There is the demand that every White citizen give precedence to Black citizens (even in the matter of seating arrangements in restaurants and planes) simply because one is Black and the other is White.
At every turn, there is the demand that Blacks be given preferential treatment - because their ancestors were slaves and mine were not. To which the short, and correct, answer (always bearing in mind that the Black in question is armed and predisposed to violence) is Fuck You, Nigger. Or would be, had not real Americans become so unsure of themselves that they have left themselves no answer to the moral blackmail of the niggers among them than 'Yes, sir'.
I'm forced to ask myself 'What has become of the White Man in America?' Why, exactly, is it that this contemptible deference to those who are so palpably and grotesquely our inferiors has become so widespread? And the answer, blindingly obvious to myself (not an American and therefore less susceptible to the base prejudices of the day) is this: America's prejudices, whether in favor of or against the Blacks amongst us, is determined by the unthinking Protestant morality upon which she was founded. A Protestant morality that unequivocally denied that there was any difference between the light of conscience in one man as opposed to that same light in any other man.
The American Black does not share that vision of equality. Instead, he views anyone with whom he is in competition to be just that. Hence the distinction between the mentality of the 'house nigger' and that of the 'field hand'. Any house nigger would willingly have sold into torment any field hand because the house nigger knew where his advantage lay - in service to the White Man. The field hand was a creature not capable of serving the White Man except through brute labor, and in no way the equal of the house nigger, and something to be oppressed and kept down at every turn. The only sense of community, of reciprocity, of equality and proper division the American Nigger has is in the community of mutual self-interest. Anything beyond that is not only anathema to him but, once explained, is nonsense on stilts.
White Americans believe that it is a sin to deny the equality of Black Americans, and are paralyzed by guilt whenever, despite their best intentions, they find themselves thinking (correctly) 'goddamn nigger'. Nothing could be further from the truth. In nine cases out of ten, so I've found, the only appropriate description of most American Blacks is 'goddamn nigger'. In nine cases out of ten. The tenth case is that of the American Negro. Even these, few as they are, are not the equal of the Black men and women I knew in Europe, with whom I happily associated and whom, rightly, I believed to be my equals.
The American Negro is hard working. He no more wants the support of the State in his day to day activities than I do. He prefers his independence to the recognition of his fellow Blacks - much as I prefer my independence to the recognition of anybody else. I live my life, I pay my taxes, I obey the law - as for the rest, fuck you. Mind your own goddamn business. But what the American Negro is willing to do is play the race card at every turn; what the American Negro is willing to do is to refuse to accept the demands of civility and to portray everyone else as culpable of heinous prejudice, wherever such an accusation is remotely tenable, because the American Negro is only one step removed from the American nigger - and the American nigger is resentment and self-pity personified.
Is the White Man virtue and self-respect personified? No. Not judging by my recent visit to a White-trash trailer park, populated by what I can only call White niggers. As I've said elsewhere, niggerdom is not predicated by skin color. But the majority of niggers in America are Black, and the defining characteristic of niggerdom is resentment.
Resentment is the realm of the incapable and the impotent. I have no interest in why niggers, of any skin color, feel resentful or are impotent. The fact is, that the nigger of any skin color is both - and it's long past time time to stop pandering to that sense of resentment, to stop pandering to the self-perceived inability of others to improve their lives.
I don't care how many niggers, White or Black, starve in the gutter. It's time that the rest of us made sure these parasitic swine got off their asses and made a contribution to the good of the whole, rather than feeling guilty for not being nice to their ancestors.
Fuck their ancestors, and fuck them too. If you want to be a part of America then contribute to America. I do, and I am, notwithstanding the fact that I'm a gimp.
If I can, so can you - whatever the color of your skin. And if you can then you ought to, for the sake of the respect you owe yourself as a human being and as a member of a polity - in this case case, the American polity.
Unless, of course, you'd rather be thought of as a nigger.