A certain reader was kind enough to send me a copy of "Exploring Masculinities" some time ago; and, as with most things that are sent my way, I did nothing with it until I fell over it the other day. It's a big book, and the surprising thing is that I hadn't fallen over it before. Indeed, as an obstacle of any kind I could recommend it heartily; and you would not need too many to make a decent-sized wall from it, writes Kevin Myers.
That's just about where its usefulness begins and ends. There is at least the consolation that, although this farrago of multicultural, politically correct drivel is being served out in our schools, we know from history that ideological educationists invariably fail to create the attitudes among their pupils that they want. If it provides no other lesson, at least Yugoslavia is good for that.
Labelling theory
By happy chance, my vast purple tome fell open at what is called the labelling theory. This is multiculturalism at its most ideological and its most cretinously self-contradictory. "When someone is named, for example, as a nigger or a queer," it witters witlessly, "what is happening is that they are being labelled." So what does EM then do in its campaign against labelling? Why, it simply labels. Under the term, "Objective", EM tells us that students may explore the key question: "What do I admire about Black Culture and Black people's lives?"
What is this thing, Black Culture, please? Does it equally encompass an Australian Aborigine, an East African doctor, a pygmy in the Congo rain forests, a Tory MP from the shires, and a nuclear scientist at Harvard? There is no such thing as "Black Culture" any more than there is such a thing as "White Culture". The colour of your skin no more offers you entry to a culture than it enables you to speak a particular language. However, such racist mumbo-jumbo would be perfectly understood by the ideologists of Die Sturmer and the Broderbond; how interesting to see the ideological multiculturalists embracing the same epidermal frivolity.
Unsurprisingly, multiculturalists have added a new spin to the word black. It doesn't just mean people with some African blood in them, but it now means not just anyone who is not white, but also anyone supposedly without power. In some funny, fuzzy way, black transmutes into whatever you want it to mean.
So, in the list of people students are asked to compile as guests for a theoretical dinner party, the following are included as "black" guests: Tiger Woods, Kahlil Gibran, Julius Nyerere, Arundhati Roy, Mahatma Ghandi, Chaim Herzog, Rigoberto Mecnu, and Ken Saro-Wiwa. Famous people not on the list may be chosen, provided they are not white: and for this purpose, white also means white Christian. Presumably, a practising Jew may be invited; his Catholic brother may not.
African American
Tiger Woods is said to be an African American. His mother is Vietnamese, which is not very African. So why does the African part predominate? Or would the authors of South Africa's pass-laws, and the Nazi definitions of Jewishness give us a few helpful tips here? Khalil Gibran was a Lebanese poet, and was as African and black as Adolf Hitler. Julius Nyerere - "the wise old man of Africa," is how EM terms him - nearly bankrupted his country with his absurd socialism and his forcible tribal translocations. Any European responsible for comparable follies in Africa would be rightly vilified by educationists. To hold up such a man as a sort of hero because he is "black" is inverse racism at its most condescending.
Arundhati Roy is a high-born Indian who has invented a poverty-stricken past for herself. She is about as black as Jean Marie le Pen. But listen, EM-people: if you want to know whether Hindus are black or not, why don't you pop into a gathering of Bombay Brahmins and tell them they share the same culture as the people of Rwanda? The Irish Jew Chaim Herzog, who went to become President of Israel, is also on the list of blacks and sort-of blacks: welcome to negritude, Chaim. The same surprising discovery might be made by Rigoberto Menchu, an ethnic Mayan from Guatemala.
At least Ken Saro-Wiwa was African. His execution "resulted from his campaign for the protection of the rights of the Ogoni people and against the environmental exploitation of the lands of the Ogoni people by a major oil producing company," declares EM.
Actually, Ken Saro-Wiwa was executed for his role in the murder of four of his Ogoni opponents who were hacked to pieces and burnt to death by a mob, some of whose members even ate their victims' body parts. Despite this colourful little episode, BP petitioned the Nigerian government for clemency for him.
Idi Amin
And still on this subject of Saro-Wiwa: were his executioners representatives of "Black Culture"? Were Idi Amin and Emperor Bokassa? And are Halle Berry or Colin Powell to be called African-American, when her mother is pure white, and he is considerably paler than I am during a good summer (meaning, not right now).
The dismal experiences of imperialism, Nazism and apartheid have shown that it is useless to categorise people politically, culturally or artistically by race or tribe. That way leads, at worst, to evil - and usually - unworkable laws, at best to fatuous rules and absurd categorisations, which intelligent students will see right through. They'll certainly see through the risible rules of the EM programme. That's the truth about ideologies that ideologists never learn: intellectually, they inevitably disprove themselves.