"Brixton is truly enriched by having a mixed population Africans, West Indians, Asians, Irish, `natives' and many others. My life and that of my son is expanded by meeting and being educated alongside people of different cultures. Any racism encountered is usually from the `establishment' - the Metropolitan Police, the judiciary, the education system, the immigration laws, the media - not from individuals who get along as well as can be expected in a densely populated area."
Thus Fiona Connell wrote to this newspaper from Brixton, London in reply to a recent column about the inevitability of both immigration and racial prejudice arriving on pretty much the same boat in this country. I am deeply grateful for her observations. As an example of proclamatory non-racist virtue-mongering her letter could hardly be bettered. Apparently, the multicultural paradise that is Brixton has no indigenous racists at all. Racism, we may conclude, is a creation of the police, the judges, teachers, immigration laws and us journalists, but not of the individual human beings of Brixton, and presumably, the rest of London.
Tribe of racists
Accepting for the moment - and I don't - that her assessment of racism is London is correct, that it is the preserve of bobbies, beaks, journos, and so on, might we not ask where these virulent and unrepresentative characters were conjured out of? Were they beamed down from some planet which specialises in breeding a special tribe of racists, or were they volunteers who were all put through a special government-backed racism-indoctrination course in order to qualify them for the important positions they were to hold within Brixton life?
Wherever they came from, they apparently are the racist fly in the otherwise racism-free and Elysian ointment which is Brixton. One must presume that Brixton did not receive some special dispensation either from the Lord or Fiona Campbell, and that the other boroughs of London - oh, such as Eltham, say, also south of the river and only a couple of miles away - are equally racism-free, but for the meddlings of the coppers, the press, the lads on the bench, teachers et alia.
So is Combat 18, the group which exploded two bombs in immigrant areas of London, drawn from the ranks of the Establishment? And who murdered Stephen Lawrence? Was it a gang of judges out on one of their nightly nigger-hunts which make life is so many parts of London so very unpredictable for people of colour? Was it a group of off-duty policemen looking for a Paki to bash or a wog to knife? Was it an active service unit of journalists and teachers who spend their free night hours cruising the streets looking for darkies to stiff?
Shouting abuse
Or was it a gang of very nasty white youths who, far from being unrepresentative of their peers, are in their appetite for violence and in their racism really quite representative of an entire sub-stratum of London life? Fiona is probably too busy a mum to go to Millwall or Chelsea or whatever her nearest football club might be, but if she wants proof of the unbelievable scale of racism in London society, maybe she should take an afternoon off and pop down to The Den or Stamford Bridge. Hold on. On second thoughts, maybe those gangs of white youths shouting racist abuse at black players and imitating monkeys are merely judges letting their wigs down.
One major problem in dealing with discussing the deplorable realities of racism is that any conversation immediately leaves the rails once people enter a piety competition in which the winner is the person who proves to have the most powerful anti-racist credentials. Bonus marks go to anyone who is able to show that racism is a conspiracy of something called the Establishment; this has the highly desirable effect of acquitting plain working-class people of guilt for whatever racist tendencies they might on occasion exhibit.
And another major problem is that in times of mounting racist stress, self-appointed antiracism prefects emerge, detecting racist implications in the most innocent observations. Step forward, Fiona. "For many years the Irish immigrant population under-achieved. Is that, as Mr Myers implies, a genetically inherited trait, or a result of prejudice?"
This sort or right-on rubbish makes any conversation about race and racism impossible. I did not imply that genetically inherited traits were behind the under-achievement of Irish people in Britain because I think no such thing. Moreover, the reasons why one group prospers in a society and another doesn't are not simply ones of victim-hood or genetic disorder; vastly complex factors are at work. However, this I assure you: if you are determined to find racist implications wherever you look, in the telephone directory or on a packet of birdseed, you unquestionably will be successful.
Dublin life
As things stand, and even with the relatively small number of immigrants we have here, racism is appallingly evident throughout Dublin life. Bosnians who met a universal welcome here six years ago have recently detected a distinct cultural change towards outsiders. Last Monday Dominic Harkins reported on this page how a young man was called "Nigger, nigger" to his face outside Trinity. A friend reported a recent incident in McDonalds, where a black security guard was similarly abused. In neither case did the racist appear to be a judge or a garda, though it is hard to rule out the possibility that they were teachers or even journalists. Hard to tell, these journalists; they so often look like ordinary individuals.
To judge someone by their colour or their tongue is the mark of a moral and intellectual primitive; but mankind is never far from primitivism. Soon entire districts of Dublin will be changed by the arrival of immigrants, and racism will intensify. We can blame judges and journalists for this, or we can face the complex realities of a mono-racial, mono-religious society being transformed overnight into a multiracial society with the lessons learnt elsewhere. Take your pick.