I hear you’re a racist now Father!

I hear you’re a racist now Father?!

I was born and raised in Ireland and it has grown and changed even as I have. It is not the country I grew up in. It is hard to believe that fifty years ago we were a Third World country. Few nations on earth have experienced such a stellar evolution as the homeland of the Paddy and such a transition inevitably brings with it ‘stress cracks’ or ‘tears’ in the fabric of our culture. Our parents and their parent did not grow up in the same world as us and, therefore, were ill-equipped to prepare us for the challenges of the current age.

For example, growing up, in my case at least [and I was not alone] we were often so broke we went without food. In fact, such were the dire straits of my particular upbringing that we sometimes had no power and, therefore, were forced to cook what little we had on the fireplace. Good times! [Lest you miss my sarcasm, they were not good times - they were shit-est of times] When you live under such conditions you never have to worry about dieting – ever. You worry about where you’re next meal is going to come from. You wonder how many more meals you’ll this week but, one thing is certain, you will never, ever, ever, ask yourself – “Do I look big in this?” Gluttony was not a vice of that age: alcoholism, paedophilia, violence, and corruption were – but not gluttony. No one could afford gluttony, well – the one percent could but the food was so shite that few could muster the will to get fat.

They were the best of times and the worst of times. Unsurprisingly, I tended to measured everything in terms of poverty. Every movie I saw, every bible verse I heard, every song I listened to, all seemed to ring with one tone – the unquenchable yearning to overcome great obstacles, to emerge victorious after suffering rankest injustice. When I think of all the movies and songs, of the sheer quality of the cheese that was available to us back in those days: Dirty Dancing, talented poor kid lands upper class totty, Rocky – poor kid trains hard and fights his way to the top. For me everything was about the struggle between the “have’s and the have’s not” or perhaps, to be more specific, the challenges inherent in transitioning from a “have not” to a “have,” and that glorious dream of unqualified success, of a victory that no one could take from you.

I’ll never forget the shame of poverty. I’ll never forget the humiliation of having to beg for food. I’ll never forget the faces of those who made you squirm for it or who made the people I loved squirm for it. Nor will I forget the kindness of those who saw our plight and covered our shame – saints.

I always sided with the underdog, who doesn’t. It was this love for the underdog that drew my eye to the plight of the African American. I absolutely loved movies about African Americans, and was especially ripe for Hollywood’s propaganda drive on the evils of racism. To my young mind, being born black in America was structurally the same thing as being born poor in Ireland. The great African American comedian Reginald D. Hunter once quipped, ‘The class system is what white people do when they don’t have any black people to hate on.’ To me, there was no difference between black and white - we were the same in spirit.

Being poor was, and still is, dangerous. It was, and still is, synonymous with vulnerability, desperation, and ignorance, and all the ills and woes that trinity of evil can sire. Being born poor was not something you could help. You didn’t get a choice but you certainly had to deal with the consequences. When you came from the wrong side of the tracks the Law was considerably less forgiving. Young men from ‘poor backgrounds’ were much more likely to go to prison. I witnessed this countless times growing up. I saw kids from ‘well respected’ families do the same dumb shit every other kid did but when they got pulled up before the judge they got off with a stern warning, while my friends had to serve time. It was one law for Them and another law for Us. Years later, while in college, a lecturer once pointed out ‘if you want to know what’s important to a country, just look in its prisons:’ in America it’s race, in China it’s the Law, in England it was the Irish, in Ireland it is the poor.

In the Ireland of not too long ago being poor was a crime to be punished. Is it little wonder then my empathy for the injustices suffered by African Americans?

I was mightily moved by Martin Luther King Jnr.’s words, that our children should: ‘not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character,’ and I shed a tear of joy when Obama finally made it to the White House. It was the ultimate underdog story. Alas, by the end of his tenure my tears were for different reasons but that’s another matter.

It seemed only right to me that people should not be judged by where they’re from, for the accidental circumstances of their birth, but by what they aspire to be. It seemed fundamentally unfair to me that an individual should be punished for the accidental details of their birth like skin colour, class, or religion, and that a righteous or truly noble social order would endeavour in every way to facilitate the actualisation of the individual’s greatest potential regardless of incidentals. As far as I was concerned, a society or a person that failed in this had failed as a human being or failed as a nation.

In the Ireland I grew up in there was virtually no people of colour. The only time you would ever encounter them [outside of the telly] was in a hospital, they were doctors. I never met a black person that wasn’t a doctor. The Bill Cosby Show, which I loved, showed a black guy as a doctor and, but for the anti-racist propaganda coming out of Hollywood, I would have presumed that all black people were doctors. In the classic ‘Guess who’s coming to Dinner’, Sidney Poitier played a guy who came from the wrong side of the social and genetic tracks but who had managed to make something of himself – again, a doctor. I’ll never forget his monologues in that flick, they changed my life.

Over the years I’ve watched, genuinely thrilled, as our coloured brothers and sisters have landed on our shores. I thought, ‘Finally! Ireland’s going to be cool and cosmopolitan! It’ll be nice to have some colour to brighten up the endless sea of pasty face Paddys that trundle through our streets.’ I found it so cool to be strolling around, of a Sunday morning, and observe an African mother and her daughters waiting for the bus to bring them to church. Dressed up in those fabulous colours and outfits you’d only ever see on TV, and singing hymns getting their vocal chords warmed up for their church choir. It did my heart good. “Wonderful outfits, wonderful colours,” I thought, “wonderful singing, wonderful people,” and I smiled to myself thinking of how rich Irish culture would become thanks to the influx of this new blood.

In light of these experiences and insights I would never consider myself a racist. How can you be adversely biased against someone for whom you feeling genuine empathy and for whom you wish every victory? The media effected the same empathy in me for the gay community, as it did for people of colour. I personally feel that you have failed to live up to your potential as a human when you presume adversely against someone based on some one feature ‘X’.

People guilty of such foolishness could be termed an ‘X-ist’. An X-ist is a person that makes sweeping judgements about others based on ‘X’, i.e.: on some one accidental feature. My bug bear earlier was being see as ‘less than’ because of an accident of birth. I remember, with chagrin, my grandmother speaking to me about my ‘betters’ – that’s the sort of talk that makes people turn commie! I detested the idea of my ‘betters’ – that there was a class of people out there who were fundamentally better than I merely because they were born into the right class, religion, or skin colour. I always felt that it was deeply unfair to be thought less of merely because you happen to be born on the wrong side of the socially accepted and majority approved tracks.

I realise that you can’t judge individuals, individuals can always be exceptional, but groups -groups can be idiots, especially any group that held that I was somehow ‘less than’ because of things that were beyond my control. X-ists are unthinking idiots – everybody knows that, black or white, gay or straight, Christian or Jew – all fair minded people share a contempt for X-ists.

But if you cannot or, morally speaking, should not, make a negative presumption about a person due to accidental feature X, then are you justified in making a positive presumption? Can you assume that person is inherently good because of one feature? Is that not every bit as ridiculous as assuming the negative? Can you presume upon the intentions, good or bad, of an individual because of one feature? The answer, again, is no. That would be X-ist, that is you would have deluded yourself into believing the false notion [a generalisation] that all X is/are Y. That would be acting fundamentally against the great ideals of Dr. King: promoting a person based on one feature and not on the ‘content of their character’ – the body of work that comprises their lives.

We know that it is positively moronic to presume negatively upon someone based on any one feature X but it cannot be any less moronic to presume positively upon any one individual because of any one feature X. Therefore, while we certainly should not judge a person according to their skin, religion, class, or whatever ‘X’ is, neither should the very sight of feature X lead us to switch off our critical faculties and blithely assume that ‘X’ equals sainthood. It would seem logical, then, to treat everyone the same, that ‘by their fruits, and not by their roots, will you know them.’

Initiatives like Affirmative Action or any policy that ‘enforces’ diversity drives the very thing that it claims to eradicate: X-ism. Such policies seek to give preferential treatment to anyone that has feature ‘X’ and thereby must inevitably treat adversely all those who are not endowed with feature X. Besides merely being morally repugnant, spiritual laws teach us that we reap as we sow – that evil begets evil, and evil policy begets a society distorted and twisted by injustice and such conditions cannot be long endured.

Those that would attempt to silence critics of such morally bankrupt and socially retarding policies are guilty of either malignant ignorance or malfeasance.

I always considered the institutions that maintained the status quo, that have always sought to preserve the systemic inequalities – to preserve the advantages of the few over the many, especially heinous. The two great offenders are, and have always been, the judiciary and the media. These are the mighty institutional instruments of fear and intimidation wielded viciously against those who would dare question the legitimacy of the status quo. They are the appointed courts and executioners. Their hands are ever stained with the blood of the prophets.

As we mature, as individuals and a society, we come to question the status quo. The inequalities and injustices that are the fruit of an imperfect system run by corrupt people become more and more apparent, more and more difficult for the conscience to ignore, until they move from being merely unpalatable to being completely unacceptable. Finally, enraged, society is driven to destroy the unjust system and replace it with a better – fairer – one and so we evolve, dragging our institutions kicking and screaming behind us, led always by our prophets – our sincerest critics, those who love us more than anyone but who dare judge us by our highest ideals and hold us to account, into the future of a more equitable society.

Those who would silence questions and demonise those who might raise valid concerns about ineptitude, ignorance, and malfeasance are, as Obama so eloquently put it, “on the wrong side of history.” Their lies, subterfuge, and agenda will eventually be exposed to the light and they will have nowhere to hide their shame. There is a remarkable hypocrisy in the actions of those who claim to be the moral guardians of society and yet judge and punish her prophets – but who consider themselves immune to judgement and beyond punishment.

We all improve through constructive criticism, both the citizen and the state. Without it we stagnate and die, or worse. Criticism and questioning are not symptoms of hate but symptoms of love, symptoms of genuine concern, of the hunger for truth, a desire to understand and to know and through understanding and knowledge make things better for everyone. Without truth we are careening blindly through life and no good can possibly come from that! Those who would seek to prevent us from accessing truth, or highlighting truth, wish to keep us blindfolded and lead us to we know not where.

Would you trust a stranger to blindfold you and lead you somewhere you don’t know? Even if they said that by refusing to wear the blindfold means you are an X-ist? Would you allow a bully to shame you into submission? Would you trust such a person or institution? Isn’t it an interesting irony that the very people that accuse others of X-ism and who seek to promote policies that they allege will eliminate this bogey-man are in fact and truth the most reprehensible X-ists of all?!

Consequently, when people we don’t know suddenly invite strangers into our home, into our homeland – isn’t it fair and right to ask questions about this? And what would you consider might be the intentions of someone that sought to discourage questions or even made it illegal to criticise such behaviour? No matter how you slice it, there is no way that such facilitators have our best interests at heart.