Positive racism

A congressman in the US called President Barack Obama a liar and dragged the skeleton out of the cupboard with a vengeance.

The skeleton was the one that wears the badge of racism.

According to some commentators, the slur on President Obama's character was racist in nature and its use shed light on the inherent racism that pervades the United States.

That there is a racist tendency in the US is hardly a notion that is likely to surprise anyone. If you take a look at the comments section of the virtual edition of this paper, you'll notice that some of the more inane remarks with a racist tinge come from the Land of the Free and the Brave and it was only a few decades ago that members of the darker nation (it's a phrase used in a novel I'm reading at the moment, not one of my own) used to have to sit at the back of the bus and use different facilities.

It's not that America is alone in having racist tendencies, of course. This cradle of Christianity has its own specimens of KKK-wannabes, as does every other country of the world. It's not even a phenomenon that is confined to whites, to use a simplistic label, as we all know. Blacks can be biased against whites, browns, other blacks and every other hue in between and every other section of humanity can demonstrate hatred of every other, other section.

I suppose it's an element of the human condition, though this doesn't make it any less abominable and the fact that so many people are racist doesn't make each and every one of them any less despicable.

This having been said, I get pretty irritated when any insult directed at, or slight felt by, a person of a different colour, race, sex or creed is characterised as evidence of racism or one of those other disgusting -isms.

The congressman who called Mr Obama a liar was not (necessarily) doing so because Mr Obama is an African-American. He was being rude, unparliamentary or whatever, but merely calling a black man a liar doesn't mean you're being racist. If that were to be the case then every black man who called George W. Bush an idiot was being racist himself, which is pretty ludicrous.

I'm not implying that Mr Bush wasn't an idiot, just for the record: I'm just saying that calling him that isn't evidence of anti-white racism.

Saying otherwise is the same as a woman coming over all hoity-toity because she isn't selected for some position or other. It could just be that the woman concerned was about as cut out for the job, whatever it may be, as I am to be a sprinter or a marathon runner (or any function that requires physical fitness, anyway). Sexism exists, it would be stupid to assert otherwise, but the simple fact that a woman fails at something is not, in and of itself, evidence that sexism exists: it could just be evidence that there were others, who might even have been all men, shock horror, who were better than her for the job concerned.

The reverse applies: just because someone is a woman (or gay or disabled or Muslim or black) does not, again in and of itself, make her (or him) better qualified for consideration for a position or a benefit. I've always found it difficult to understand how women's groups lobby so hard for positive discrimination and other such abominations.

Isn't it a corollary of being given special treatment a nagging feeling that you've been chosen not because you're the best but because your bits and bobs are arranged differently to the nearest male? Perhaps you don't care that you only got the job because you're female, or gay, or whatever, but in the privacy of your own home, alone in bed of a night, wouldn't you feel just a bit disappointed with yourself?

It's quite a dilemma, that on which we find ourselves impaled: do we need to make up for lost ground and make sure that the previously-downtrodden are given a fair crack of the whip and allowed some leeway to make up lost ground?

Or is it time to treat everyone the same, genuinely the same, and not make allowances for factors that in the bad old days held people back.

Is positive discrimination the new racism, in other words?

imbocca@gmail.com

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