‘Being racist doesn’t mean you’re racist’.
That’s not what I said.
John Barnes is quite good on this subject and puts across his point far better than I have done but what I’m getting at is that a lot of the time people who say or behave in a racist way don’t actually realise that it’s racist. The old adage of ‘I’m not racist but…’ is actually a fair reflection of a lot of society in that people don’t realise that their views are incorrect and completely unacceptable and thing that the accusation of prejudice applies to other people.
There is obviously a section of society of which there is no helping who are well aware of what their views represent and have no intention of ever changing, I think we all have an idea in our minds eye of the kind of people I’m talking about and the way to deal with those individuals is by harsh criminal punishment.
I would argue that a far greater problem is the much larger number of people who hold prejudicial opinion (whether it’s racist, xenophobic, sexist or whatever else,) who do so because of incorrect information which they’ve been fed, often by politicians who blame the inequality which they’ve created by right wing and capitalist policies on indiscriminate sections of society, people lap that up because it gives them an answer to their question and a target for their vitriol. It’s the classic ‘divide and conquer’ technique and it’s evident worldwide, I don’t think you need me to give you examples of that.
All I’m saying is that without meeting the lad it’s impossible to tell for sure which category he falls into and I’d rather believe it’s the category which has probably been misled by certain politicians rather than the former which I mentioned which is clearly beyond help. You may look at the situation and say ‘I’m not arsed whether it’s wilful or negligent prejudice, it’s his responsibility to educate himself and if he doesn’t it’s his problem’, and I’d have a large amount of sympathy with that view, but it probably isn’t how you elicit widespread change because people don’t tend to be particularly receptive to hostile responses, at best you drive the problem underground with threats of sanction but don’t actually change the prejudicial view that the person harbours which obviously ends up manifesting itself in particularly unpleasant ways.
Again, not saying anyone is ‘wrong’ for disliking him based on what are quite clearly disgusting tweets, I’m just making the point that, like most things in life, it isn’t necessarily black and white.
I’ll leave it there as I seem to be causing offence on this which wasn’t my intention in any way.
