`Coloureds breed like rabbits. They have filthy mouths. They will not behave properly in a hundred years. It's difficult to do anything about them because they are the majority. If they want to be part of the 'in crowd', \i.e. whites they must behave," Yvonne Woods, a Democratic Party councillor in South Africa's Western Cape, said recently. For mouthing such filth, the whitish-pink-coloured Woods has been expelled from the party, but her dark opinions, albeit with variations in specifics and intensity, persist in millions of minds.
In 42 words, Yvonne Woods, who may be just an idiotic South African Hyacinth Bucket, a full-blown KKK-like monster or an unfortunate whose racist opinions have been coloured by traumatic personal experience, said it all. Breeding "like rabbits", darker-skinned people are slaves to animal instinct. If they want to be treated as proper people, they had better behave like Woods and the rest of the white sophisticates. Mind you, if the "coloureds" weren't "the majority", much, it seems, could be "done" about them and their improper behaviour. No doubt it could, Woods, no doubt at all.
Racism is the hot media topic at present. Reparation for slavery is now the most contentious issue in US politics. Last week, 12,000 delegates from 150 countries attended Durban's UN World Conference Against Racism, as worldwide televisions screened murderous race hatred in the Middle East and Australia played callous race politics with 434 asylum-seekers stranded on a freighter in the Indian Ocean. This summer Britain had its worst race riots in 15 years and here in Ireland racism and xenophobia thrive on both sides of the Border.
Given the historical and continuing contribution of so much of the media to fostering and sustaining racist attitudes, there's an alarming hypocrisy in the current "hotness". It's not only the media, of course. Business, politics, religion, the professions, academia, all the traditional power centres really, remain stained by racism. The financially wealthy world, of which we are now conspicuously a part, has made a great deal of its wealth through subjugating and exploiting less militarily able parts of the planet.
It still does. Business seeks cheap, even slave, labour. Politics does the bidding of business. Western religions seek to colonise the minds and spirits of the so-called Third World. The masonic exclusivity of the professions favours the financially and culturally advantaged, who are most likely to be white. Academia, even in our own time, produced the classicist Enoch Powell, who, as Roy Hattersley observed, "was Bernard Manning with a commission and a first-class honours degree". No Latin tag or Hellenic aphorism could disguise the fact that Prof Powell was a racist.
So, racism is not confined to the uneducated or to those who, with reason, fear wage erosion due to competing against cheap labour. Rather, even as the institutionalised varieties backed up by law - South African apartheid, the Jim Crow laws of the southern US, unionist Stormont and all the rest - have been abolished, private, interpersonal and cultural strains of racism continue to thrive. Racism is part of what we are and it hasn't gone away, you know. Nor will it, without better education and better media.
Here, in western Europe, as in North America, Australasia and other parts of the wealthy world, we are all material beneficiaries of racism. Sure, it's absurd to blame every individual, but collectively we know that we can maintain our living standards only because so many of the world's workers are grossly underpaid and exploited. In order to justify obscene disparities, it's difficult to avoid doing an Yvonne Woods: we deserve our colossally greater material success because, well, we deserve it . . . we have the technology . . . we're racially superior . . . we're white.
Consider film and television. In the early years of Hollywood, black people were invariably depicted as slaves and if a film had a black role of consequence, it was usually played by a white person in black face. Even when blacks graduated from being slaves to being servants, the most benign depictions were scurrilously patronising. Most were thoroughly humiliating.
It wasn't until the 1960s and the emergence of Sidney Poitier that a black Hollywood actor could play a straight role utterly unrelated to his colour. By 1972, Shaft, a violent private-eye thriller with an all-black cast, was possible. And in 1977, television screened Alex Haley's Roots.
Still, the 1980s had its revenge. US television's most popular programme during that decade was The Cosby Show, in which a millionaire black professional family behaved like the "in-crowd" of Yvonne Woods's imagining. At a time when black ghettos were especially devastated by drugs, crime and a hostile white context, the whitewashing (if you'll pardon the term) promoted by The Cosby Show was vile.
Yet to say so was to invite accusations of being po-faced or a bleeding-heart liberal or even an ungrateful whinger. But only a goon could argue against the fact that the racist legacy of slavery poisons most US inner cities and most exchanges between American blacks and whites.
Likewise, the legacy of Europe's murderous plunder of Africa. All sane people know that the enslavement of other races - treating people like livestock - is disgusting. But individual impotence makes it difficult to know what to do individually. Isn't a great part of the problem the fact that, individually, almost all of us can, quite reasonably too, assuage any guilt? We don't mistreat or exploit other races. In fact, we contribute to charities for their welfare.
If somebody was paid 50p for manufacturing the £80 trainers you're wearing, well, it's not exactly your fault, is it? We can't, as individuals, be responsible for the world economic order. And so it goes. We can decry political and economic imperialism and yet benefit from them. That's life, eh?
Oh, of course we can deplore racist remarks and sentiments. Few of us may be as gauche as Yvonne Woods and our motives need not be racist. But the results are another matter: collectively, we get richer and they risk their lives to get even the most menial work in the West. It's not as though racism is confined to white people, because practically all cultures have the germ in varying degrees. But passivity or tokenism, as in guilt assuaged by contributions to charity, are clearly too little and too late. While we are perpetually hearing about the new century's global economic context, we hear little of the global context of racism.
In that, we perpetuate a massive hypocrisy comparable to the political and religious hypocrisies that sustained colonialism through centuries of political imperialism. Now, of course, the power is economic, but it can be backed militarily whenever any of the "natives" become stroppy. Certainly, it is obscene to hear the clamour for the free movement of capital while the free movement of labour is not only prohibited but made to sound morally and medically ("They have so many diseases!") impossible.
Still, undoing racism, even lessening it, will take generations. Even though the institutional variety is now an embarrassment within wealthy countries, the problem is that the cultural variety remains strong, reinforced as it is through custom, language and inculcated attitudes. So long as this is so, we can expect little change. In teaching history, for instance, are the millions who were enslaved, tortured and massacred by "glorious" European "expansion" ever considered? It's not enough to argue that "that was then" because it's still happening, albeit less flagrantly, now.
Some people argue that the Holocaust of the second World War and the massacres perpetrated in Stalin's USSR were imperialism's chickens coming home to roost. This is certainly plausible. Imperialism necessitated racism as the only possible excuse for its deeds. After all, if some people were less human than others, then they could, even for their own sakes, be treated as livestock. The Holocaust image of people being transported across Europe's rail network in cattle and goods wagons makes the point.
Anyway, it may be that racism is so deeply buried in human consciousness that it lies closer to instinct than we wish to believe. White Europeans weren't the first racists, but it is that legacy which now most obviously smears the world. Mind you, if racism is not merely learned and acquired through socialisation in racist cultures, then people like Yvonne Woods must be born with filthy mouths. Education and an enlightened media, dedicated, unlike imperialists, to more than profit at all costs, might yet teach them how to behave.
It will be a difficult process though and chances are that racists will not be behaving properly in 100 years' time. In a world in which power is always capable of justifying its actions, the powerful, so-called First World, not only sends in the bombers but calls the shots in rationalising why such actions are "necessary" to maintain "world peace". If black or yellow or brown people controlled most of the world's resources, would it be your duty to accept the situation, to put up and shut up? They might well believe that God had ordained it so. Certainly they would be told as much and would pass it on to the rest of us. But if you wouldn't believe their justifications, why should they believe what we tell them?
Perhaps the best thing we could do right now is to listen, not to the headline-grabbing likes of Yvonne Woods or Enoch Powell, but to the people who suffer the results of racism. This is one debate which needs to be led by the victims while, for a change, the powerful put up and shut up.