His government, he said, was rejuvenating the job market by getting people off benefits and into work: “Everyone should work who can.” It was the “saddest figure in Europe”, he said, that Hungary had the lowest employment rate in the EU.

For the long-term unemployed – a disproportionate number of whom are Roma – this means taking part in the government’s new public work programme. According to Jeno Setét, a Roma activist, between 70% and 80% of Hungary’s Roma population do not work (the rate for the whole population is around 10%). This scheme aims to get 300,000 people into work by 2014 via a sort of community service scheme for which participants are paid less than the national monthly minimum wage (around 80,000 HUF – £214 – for unskilled workers) but slightly more than they would receive in benefits.

Anyone unemployed for 90 days is offered a place on the programme, which administers projects cleaning streets or sewers, cutting down trees or building football stadiums or dams. Refusal to accept a placement will result in all social security benefits being stopped to the refusenik and family. Gyöngyöspata was chosen last year to run a pilot scheme. Unemployed locals – almost exclusively Roma – were deployed to cut down trees in a nearby wood.

For Setét, the public work scheme is a “smokescreen” that will do little to help Roma get “real” jobs and will reinforce their position at the bottom of Hungarian society. “If people on the scheme were paid properly and trained properly, I’d be all for it,” he added. “But they are not. Right now it’s a way of humiliating people and paying them a slave wage.”

While the system of “work for benefits” does not involve the obvious racism present in the Hungarian version, it does not even pay more than benefits and is not even in public services but consists of fake “work experience” schemes for large commercial organisations and also carries the threat of lost benefits. The US version is known to have pushed people into food banks and soup kitchens by withholding benefits in the absence of work; our other fellow-traveller in this is a notoriously racist country in eastern Europe which is becoming an undemocratic pariah state.

I saw this post after a friend on a social networking site posted a link to it. The author, who claims his blog is a means of practising his writing by writing 500 words a day on any subject he likes (it seems to be a he, anyway), claims that White American racism cannot be accounted for by tribalism or “even … by mere power since, like their cousins the Nazis, they exercise that power in sick and twisted ways not commonly seen in others”. He concludes:

There is something else at work. My best guess is that it is a psychological disorder caused by the way they bring up their children. What White Americans would quickly call a pathology if it were found in black people. Whatever it is, it makes them unaccepting of people who are different and gives them a need to look down on and dehumanize others in order to feel good about themselves.

The author, who goes by the pseudonym Julian Abagond, earlier claimed that “white people are born with the same hearts as black people but, because power corrupts, power has turned their hearts to stone”, but has since revised his position because of having read Greek, Roman and Chinese history. The Bible, and modern American history (so he says) makes it seem as if genocide is normal. The other history shows that it is in fact rare. He had quoted Jared Diamond who had suggested that if Africans had invented guns and large ships, they would have been the slave-owners rather than the Europeans; although it was the Chinese who invented “gunpowder and the compass”, it was Europeans who put them to deadly effect in North America.

The problem with this argument is that children were obviously raised very differently in the 19th century, let alone the 18th, than they have been since the late 20th century: they are less likely to be religious (so any talk of the Natives being “heathens” would have no meaning, or be offensive) and their living conditions and surroundings would be more hospitable: there are no new lands to be won and nobody is living a “pioneer” lifestyle. As far as race is concerned, they are less likely to have grown up hearing racial slurs and more likely to have heard someone correct someone else for using them. As for the suggestion that “Egypt, India, Mexico, New Zealand and South Africa, for example, would all be far whiter than they are if genocides were common, if White American levels of racism were simply a matter of human nature and advanced weaponry, of tribalism and technology”, the fact is that these countries were much more heavily populated when Europeans (or whichever nations conquered them) reached them than North America was, so another way had to be found of subjugating the populations. Some of the reduction in native population happened for the same reasons as in North America, including the introduction of diseases from the conquerors’ homelands. Genocide is the organised massacre of a population so as to eliminate it, in whole or in part; not every oppression, and not every bloody conquest, is genocide. What has happened in Palestine is not genocide, for example, even though there is oppression and there have been massacres.

I am not sure why he thinks white Americans have anything more to feel guilty about than any of the nations which have invaded or conquered another in recent decades: the Japanese in China, the Chinese in Tibet, the Indonesians in East Timor, the Germans in almost all their occupations (without even considering the genocide of the Jews), the Russians in the Baltic states, in the Ukraine in the 1930s and during their occupation of Germany, the Israelis in their dealings with the native people at any time in the country’s history. Frankly anyone who can say that American dealing with Blacks today shows that there is something particularly special and virulent about white American racism cannot be reading their recent history (never mind ancient Greek ones) very closely. They are not barred from testifying against whites, or forced to live in separate areas, or denied citizenship; they are not having their villages gassed or bombed, or being attacked by mobs with machetes, or their farms and homes deprived of water so that the dominant population can have it. As for the example of the police killing a young girl while raiding her home, one cannot judge entire populations by their police or their army: in most parts of the world if not everywhere, there is police corruption and where the army is involved, there is brutality by them as well.

What distinguishes racism by the police in America (and Britain and other western countries) from third-world police and army brutality is that in a third-world country, nobody trusts the state and the army: traffic laws are disregarded (I saw this at first hand in Egypt), people expect to have to bribe officials (or refer to their connections to high places) to get things done or to get them off their backs. In Britain and America, white people (and especially white middle-class people) trust the police, and although they may accept that Black people suffer undue harassment from them, they do not accept that the police are wilfully corrupt. They will make excuses, not only for this kind of behaviour but also for police who extract confessions from vulnerable people (often those with intellectual disabilities) when there is a high-profile murder to solve, saying they are under pressure or some such thing. This has happened numerous times in the UK, with the victims spending many years in prison for a crime the authorities knew they did not commit, but found it embarrassing to put right until the evidence became overwhelming. In some places, judges flatly refuse to consider accusations that police used brutality to extract confessions: the establishment protects its own, whether it be the police, the prison service or whoever. White middle-class people see no reason to fear this kind of behaviour from the police, and schools will often invite them in to talk to children and present them as a benign force (“Officer Friendly”), when they are often exceedingly unfriendly when dealing with Blacks, including children ([1], [2]) and those with a disability.

The vast majority of ordinary white people have nothing to do with any of this, other than being less than fully aware of their advantage and having inherited the fruits of previous generations’ warmongering and land-grabbing (this is true in most English-speaking countries except the UK and Ireland). In the UK (this may be true elsewhere as well), the worst daily harassment (from ordinary people) is suffered by those with apparent cognitive disabilities of any race (a scene like the lynching in the picture accompanying his article is actually much more likely to involve such a person than any pair of unimpaired Black men). I do not have any truck with the idea of “white guilt”. White privilege is a reality, but a large proportion of us were not raised to be racist (quite the opposite, in fact) and the majority of us are not individually powerful. Individual white people’s power runs from that of Donald Trump to that of a Romanian orphan, or that of some of my bed-bound friends who have suffered enormously because of perceptions of their illness as some sort of luxury for lazy middle-class white people. Nobody who has experience of the UK’s special education system, or its mental health system, let alone its prison system or the way our health system deals with chronic illnesses that doctors cannot understand (and the rest of the English-speaking world is no different in any of these areas), need accept lectures about “white power” or “white privilege” from any middle-class Black person who has not experienced any of this for themselves.

The title of this post comes from a Nanci Griffith song (link to music video), but the tone of Abagond’s post reminded me of a story about the prophet Muhammad in which one of his companions (this is a term used to mean any Muslim who ever met him) told him he had killed someone he had been fighting in battle after he pretended to have accepted Islam — clearly, he judged, just to save his own skin. The Muslims at that time were fighting attempts by the pagans in Mecca to destroy their city (Medina) and community, and it was common to kill an enemy fighter on capture but there was a rule that anyone who became Muslim was not to be killed. The Prophet asked this companion, whose name was Usama bin Zaid: “did you cut open his heart to find out what was inside?”. Nobody can presume to judge what is in the heart of anyone else and then extend this to an entire racial group or to a population of tens or hundreds, of millions. There is nothing elevating his generalisation about “the hearts of white people” above any racial generalisation by whites, or anyone else, about any other group. And it is not an expression of frustration at an injustice; it is a considered ideological statement. Regardless of whether you define racism so as to exclude prejudices held against whites, this makes him no less of a bigot than any white person who would come out with such nonsense about any other group.

I was shocked that a radio presenter is even asking whether protecting someone from being raped, murdered or otherwise physically harmed is “worth the money”. Mind you, the BBC did air a pre-recorded joke about the possibility of George Michael being raped when he was sent to prison last year (and when I complained, I was told they had to consider everyone’s tastes). One reason they protect vulnerable prisoners is that it is a simple matter of preventing crime, and attacks by self-righteous lags on unpopular prisoners is just as much crime as the act that prompted the victims’ imprisonment. It is not supposed to be a perk of being imprisoned for some crimes (like holding up terrified bank workers or householders with a sawn-off shotgun, for example) that you get to victimise those guilty of lower-class offences.

But another reason is that some people who are sent to prison for sex murders, acts of terrorism and the like are in fact innocent, and it is well-known that some of them have faced the same treatment some members of the public would like to see meted out to Norris and Dobson. These include people like Stephan Kiszko and Stephen Downing, both of whom were now known to be innocent but at the time were believed to be every bit as guilty as Norris and Dobson are. Even prisoners with developmental delay have faced extreme abuse from other prisoners, with one such young woman (featured in an inside-prison TV programme a few years ago) committing suicide because of it.

Of course, some might argue that if we still had the death penalty, we would not need to house men like these at all (although when we did have it, it did not apply to people who were the age Norris and Dobson were at the time of Stephen Lawrence’s murder). However, we would also have put to death people like Kiszko, Downing, the Guildford Four and others who had been framed by unscrupulous police and are now known to be innocent. If we allowed other prisoners to murder the unpopular inmates, prison would become tantamount to the death penalty. I question whether the protection afforded by segregation is significantly more costly than keeping in someone in prison in general: the safety is mostly afforded by spending more time alone under lock and key, and it must be a pretty lonely existence. While it is to be expected that someone might suggest that their protection is not worth the money on a radio phone-in, it is quite unacceptable for the presenter to be suggesting it to their listeners.

This programme was on BBC1 last night (you can watch it until next Thursday, if you are in the UK) and is the result of six years of filming at a Gypsy site near Basildon, Essex, and the nearby village. The Dale Farm site is an illegal Gypsy and traveller encampment, built on land the occupiers own but which is “green belt” land, i.e. it’s not supposed to be built or lived on. The council voted to evict them in 2005, but since then the travellers have fought a long legal battle but have exhausted all their legal avenues and a final, 28-day notice to quit has been issued. The travellers have placed gas canisters at the entrance and insist that they will fight any attempted eviction.

Towards the end of yesterday’s programme, it was noted that Basildon district council had voted to spend some £8million on the eviction, which amounted to a third of its annual budget. The presenter did not question where this money would come from and whether the council had more or less money to spend in general than any other council. At a time when services such as libraries, social services and home care for the elderly and disabled, are being cut (the county council, for example, plan to close all of their children’s homes), £8m is a colossal amount of money to spend on moving a group of people who have nowhere else to go, and who would almost certainly settle (illegally) somewhere else, quite possibly very nearby.

I have heard accusations that the travellers are lawless and violent, and have in the past defaced the building with excrement, but this matter was not raised in the programme other than showing footage of a nearby landowner, Len Gridley, reading an anonymous poem in a pub about how the law doesn’t seem to apply to the “pikey bloke”. They claimed that no locals were willing to talk on camera except for him; meanwhile, the only travellers who were willing to appear were women (the men refused, claiming it would jeopardise their chances of getting work). The fear may be real, or it may be a trick to paint the travellers in a negative light. So, we got the impression of a community of very religious Irish women and a group of bigoted locals concerned that their property prices were being lowered. (Ewan MacColl’s Moving On Song, also known as Go, Move, Shift!, notes that the same thing was said to gypsies when moving them on in the fifties and earlier.)

Surely, if there was such a major problem with criminality emanating from the gypsy site, they would have found some evidence of it, such as newspaper reports, or an interview with someone from the local paper, or any concrete accusation of a serious crime, beyond littering, even from Gridley — but there was not. It is also nearly certain that any eviction will result in disruption to the children’s education, as being there a long time will have given at least some of them a chance to be in school for some time, which is impossible when on the road (one went to college, but has since died in an accident).

The programme did not feature any interview with anyone from the council, and thus we did not really find out whether the issue was purely about the illegal occupation of green-belt land combined with prejudice or whether the travellers really are a menace to the local population. If the former, then the eviction is an act of persecution against a minority population which have been part of the fabric of this country for centuries; if the latter, the guilty parties need to be brought to book and locked up, rather than turned out onto the road so that they can become someone else’s problem. In any case, at a time when budgets are being cut to the bone, for a local council to be spending millions on destroying a village seems like an awful waste of money.

Others have commented on the crudeness of the survey and how it was based on asking Americans to vote on which person they found most physically attractive in photographs. The problem is that what someone finds attractive or otherwise in a photograph may appear totally differently when one sees someone in the flesh, and so one may react totally differently to them. Photos can be manipulated in any number of ways both before and after the shoot — the angle and light, the pose, through to how it is developed and digital manipulation. Flash photography, in particular, often lightens someone’s colour.

Whatever is conventionally regarded as beautiful in any society, what an individual finds beautiful is particular to them, otherwise only a small percentage of the population would ever find a partner. If “attractiveness” concerns the opposite sex, men know what is attractive to them in a woman and they know it when they see it or encounter it regardless of whether that individual would make the front page of any fashion magazine, and although many people harbour some degree of prejudice, men who are not totally blinded by prejudice are able to appreciate beauty in a woman of any race if her characteristics are those he finds attractive. I would imagine the same is true for women, although I don’t have personal experience there.

Of course, this does not take into account the fact that love comes into forming relationships too, as well as the fact that couples do not just know how each other look but how they behave, and there may be things about someone other than looks that perhaps make up for less than (their idea of) ideal looks. So, the survey is quite ridiculous, presuming that physical attractiveness is all that matters in forming relationships, rather than one of many important factors. (And if it is not about relationship forming, then does he mean that Black women are of less value as living, walking ornaments? I’ll remember that next time I need someone to brighten up my living room.)

The Daily Mail article notes that several commenters have pointed out how unrealistic Midsomer Murders is, with or without ethnic minorities — English villages do not generally have such a stupidly high murder rate. I once heard it said on the radio that urban French do not have a very high opinion of the countryside, regarding it as a place where “everybody’s mother is also their sister”. Midsomer Murders (or Midsomer Massacres as we call it, given the large numbers who come to a sticky end) seems to take a very French view of the countryside, a place of inward-looking groups of people with vicious grudges that frequently lead to multiple murder. It’s a very unflattering portrait of the English village and one which ethnic minorities might feel more comfortable left out of.

I’ve always thought Midsomer was meant to be somewhere in the south-west, given that there is a place called Midsomer Norton, in north Somerset, but it’s actually set in south Buckinghamshire where there is actually a substantial ethnic minority (particularly Asian) population. There are substantial Asian populations in Slough, Chesham and Aylesbury, the latter two being very close to Great Missenden. If there is such a thing, the typical English village is not to be found anywhere in the Chilterns any more than it is to be found in the North Downs or anywhere else in the London commuter belt — a fairly substantial proportion of residents are people who commute by car to Aylesbury or Reading, or by train to London. I very much doubt that these people would relocate to the countryside if it really was the near-war zone portrayed in this series.

This story is about an incident in which two supply teachers decided to show a film called The Middle Passage, about the trans-Atlantic slave trade, to a group of fourth graders (minimum age: 9). Three parents complained to the school board as their children were distressed by the content, which included references to suicide (and of the decapitation of their bodies) and rape. The author contends that “a Black parent cannot afford to wait to teach their child about racism, because their innocence will not protect them against those that are determined to either see them fail, or have them grow with an understanding that they are less than human”.

As a child I learned about the slave trade; I did learn about it in school but I got most of my knowledge about the subject from a children’s book entitled “The Slave Trade”, which had the stuff about people being kept chained up in the hold (complete with the top-down diagram) but left out the rape stuff, because presumably the authors thought their audience didn’t know about that kind of thing, and perhaps their parents wouldn’t want them mentioning it to their kids before they had, or before they were sure they were quite able to handle it. If they had, the book would have been unlikely to end up in a school library.

Renee alleges that “unlike White children, childhood is short lived for children of colour. Before their 10th birthday, it is almost assured that a racial act will occur that will burst the precious bubble of innocence”. So, because a child of colour is likely to experience “a racial act”, which is very unlikely to be rape, or anything else as serious as what is depicted in The Middle Passage, a parent has no right to object when material that is not age-appropriate, in his opinion, but has a racial subject (and not one that resembles anything that is happening to anyone today), is shown to his child without any prior discussion. (As if nothing might happen to a white child that might force them to grow up quicker than might have been expected.) True, the children in this school live a relatively sheltered lives (the place where it happened - Winnetka, Illinois, is one of the wealthiest communities in the USA with a median household income of over $160,000) but that still does not mean the families have no right to object to their pre-teen children being shown this kind of material.

A commenter called Katie Mariie alleged that the father’s concern to protect his daughter from stories about rape showed him to be “naive and privileged” because the “‘safety tips’ of rape culture are taught to girls as soon as they can walk. Adults might think they’re clever by masking it in phrases like ‘stranger danger’ and ‘someone might grab you,’ but little girls get the message that sexual violence is a constant threat”. I was actually taught about “stranger danger” as a child in infant school myself — the girls and boys watched the video together — but although the video we watched, from an adult perspective, clearly gave the message that the girl could have been raped (and perhaps if it was shown to older children, that is the message they would have got), the message of not talking to or taking sweets from strangers was given to girls and boys alike, because all children are at risk. And they certainly didn’t use the word ‘rape’. All we needed to know is that we could “go missing” and that something awful could happen to us.

The problem with this incident was that the video was shown without any discussion with the parents by a supply teacher who either was on a mission of his or her own, or was just stuck for something to do, or did not consider the audience and whether it was appropriate. It had not been approved by the school board and presumably had not been discussed with the school staff or the parents either; as this report notes, it was shown by the supply teachers at the direction of one permanent teacher, while the latter was elsewhere in the district. As was mentioned in the comments, some of the children could already have suffered abuse, something the teachers apparently did not consider. There are so many ways children can learn about the slave trade, but there is a lot that children have to learn (about things that are happening today) but we find appropriate ways to teach them when they are that age.

I’m not sure if social engineering refers to the genocide being an attempt at socially engineering the Cambodian population, or the engineering required to motivate so many people to kill so many people. However, it was not like any of the other genocides which were aimed at eliminating a group for reasons that were against racially-defined groups, rather than an ill-defined ruling class. However, the Nuremberg and German Blood laws were not the only examples of races being targeted by specific laws restricting their movements and dictating who they could marry. Similar laws existed in Tsarist Russia, confining Jews to increasingly smaller pockets of the former Polish empire; laws banning intermarriage (mainly against blacks) existed in South Africa under Apartheid (after the fall of Nazism) and in the USA before, during and after World War II.

The other genocides included ordinary people to a far greater extent than the Nazi Holocaust did. Granted, people worked in industries that were intended to facilitate the concentration camp and murder complex, but not everyone had to know that the Jews being transported to the camps were being murdered and various myths were circulated such as “evacuation to the East”. Even the collaborationist regimes in eastern Europe stopped sending Jews to Poland when they learned that they were, in fact, being massacred. By contrast, in Rwanda ordinary people killed others, and betrayed friends to the killing gangs; in Bosnia, people also turned on their friends and neighbours who had assumed that there was no real difference and certainly no enmity between them until months earlier. Bosnia involved people that were probably just as well-educated as the Germans of the late 1930s and there were actually schools in Rwanda as well (some of the elite had, no doubt, been educated in France or Belgium).

Some of the more recent genocides include a further factor: an international community that stood aside and did next to nothing while people were massacred under their noses. It’s true that the western powers, such as the USA, turned back shiploads of refugees and expected some to settle in places which were vulnerable to invasion by Germany, but they were not in a position to actually stop the Holocaust taking place. In Rwanda and Bosnia, the UN stood by and in one case allowed the Serbs to seize men and boys from a town they had captured, who were subsequently massacred; at international conferences, people procrastinated by quibbling over terminology, using “acts of genocide” rather than simply saying “genocide” (which would have automatically mandated action), and designating “safe areas” rather than protected “safe havens”, which proved not to be safe at all. The UN could not stop every incident of genocide or mass murder, of course, but at that time, there was enormous popular support for military action to stop the killing but nothing happened until it had been going on for four years (in contrast to 2003, when there was an invasion of Iraq in the face of massive popular opposition in this country).

I also believe that Holocaust Memorial Day should be about all recent genocides and not just the Holocaust. We were actually fighting the Germans at the time they were carrying out the Holocaust; when Rwanda and Bosnia were in flames, we wrung our hands and pulled up the drawbridge and quibbled about words. I have some suspicion that this is, in fact, why we concentrate on the Holocaust: because there is no guilt on our part or our political classes’ part. As well as this, Holocaust memorialising is often linked to advocacy for Israel at a time when it is the perpetrator of injustice, and has a noisy international propaganda machine and influential supporters in most western capitals. We should not be reinforcing myths about the Jews being the most persecuted race ever when they are, in fact, a privileged minority in modern British society. Rather, we should be using the opportunity to look at how we treat downtrodden people, refugees and so on, and expose “acceptable” prejudices and the way our media fosters them, because these are the things that laid the foundations for the genocides of the past. The event should not just be about patting ourselves on the back for something our grandparents did more than sixty years ago.

(Image source: Wikimedia.)

We need to get the Pakistani community to think much more clearly about why this is going on and to be more open about the problems that are leading to a number of Pakistani heritage men thinking it is OK to target white girls in this way.

These young men are in a western society, in any event, they act like any other young men, they’re fizzing and popping with testosterone, they want some outlet for that, but Pakistani heritage girls are off-limits and they are expected to marry a Pakistani girl from Pakistan, typically.

So they then seek other avenues and they see these young women, white girls who are vulnerable, some of them in care… who they think are easy meat.

As mentioned in a previous entry, the situation is a little more complicated than just Pakistani men grooming white girls anyway (as the authors of the original report — PDF here — have said publically), but the idea that a whole culture is contributing to the activities of these gangs seems somewhat dubious. It’s not whole communities, it’s particular gangs of men who are involved in other crime besides this kind of grooming, and when young men are “buzzing with testosterone”, they do not form organised gangs of this kind of structure. A young woman who had been targeted in this way spoke on a BBC panel discussion programme this morning, and said that she was initially befriended by younger teenage boys, and got passed up via a group of older teenagers to the men in their late 20s and early 30s who carried out the sexual assaults. So, the guys who are “buzzing” don’t get the sex. They act as apprentices and dogsbodies, much as younger recruits do in gangs the world over.

It may be true that there are men in these communities who are seeking sexual encounters with young white girls because they cannot conduct relationships with those of their own background, because the girls are unavailable and they themselves are promised in marriage to someone from the village back home (although this is less true now than it used to be, and people are more willing to insist on finding a spouse themselves, particularly if they go to college). Even if one may object to the attitude that the young white girls are “easy” compared to Pakistani ones, it is still not the same as forming gangs to groom and rape girls.

Also mentioned on the panel discussion was that Jack Straw might have been trying to influence a by-election in Oldham where there are a lot of Bangladeshis. What was left out was the resonance that portraying Pakistani men as sexual predators might have for Bangladeshi voters (in short, during the Bangladesh war of independence, a huge number of women in what was to become Bangladesh were raped by Pakistani soldiers). Straw’s last pronouncement on issues related to Muslims were disastrous, leading to a huge press campaign against Muslim women who wear the niqaab. Neither his voting record with regard to Bush and Blair’s wars, nor that incident, cost him his seat. Assuming he intends to contest the seat again, I wonder if this bit of race-baiting will cost him his Gujarati Muslim votes in Blackburn. (More: Osama Saeed.)

Image sourced from Wikimedia Commons.

I’ve written about the Doncaster tweet before. In both cases, it’s arguable that the content did not justify the authors being arrested, since terrorist attacks on airports (let alone aeroplanes) do not generally come from dissatisfied customers but from politically-motivated terrorists, and a single person cannot stone someone to death: it takes a crowd to do that. Still, if a dissatisfied customer threatened to burn a restaurant down, that would be taken every bit as seriously as this, if not more so. It is only to be expected that threats to bomb airports are taken extremely seriously, because there have been attacks, and attempted attacks, on planes in the very recent past, and unlike in a train or car accident, if one blows up in mid-air, you have no chance. People are just that much more nervous about threats to air safety.

This is only the latest in a long line of incidents in which there is outrage at a law which, supposedly, should be getting used to keep “others”, be they Muslims, young Black men or “chavs”, in line being applied to middle-class white people. A few years ago, a commenter noted on the blog Samizdata that there was a tendency for well-to-do white women to run to the media with tales of outrage because they were arrested and put in a cell overnight for knowingly breaking the law, as if the law only applied to lesser mortals. The same was true of the outrage about the white British man who could not bring his 19-year-old white Canadian wife into this country, a law clamoured for by the anti-immigration lobby as a way of eliminating the Asian practice of bringing in young wives from “the village back home”; if the bride had come from a poorer country and had not been white, there would have been no such outrage even if she and the husband were well-educated.

A similar attitude can be found in some of the protests against intrusive airport security, such as the “naked body scanners”. I recently saw an article on the right-wing news website WorldNet Daily complaining about the scans in the USA, and two of those who complained mentioned that they were white or “as American looking as apple-pie”, as if that should excuse them from the same level of security as everyone else. What isn’t said is that it’s quite OK for this kind of harassment to take place when those travelling are Muslims, or have names that look like Muslim names (because of terrorism), or Hispanic or Black (because of drugs etc.), but perish the thought that someone who looks like an American goes through the same thing. Of course, Timothy McVeigh did not look or sound like a Muslim, nor did the Unabomber.

The article does mention that staff operating scanners in Nigeria had been reported as using them for what is essentially sexual harassment of passengers (who are mostly black, obviously), but the article clearly is not objecting to the sexual harassment of passengers in general, only when it’s white people, because white people are obviously not criminals or terrorists, an assumption that history does not bear out. They should accept that the law applies to everyone and exists to protect everyone and assumes nothing about what the threat looks like or where it comes from (that’s the theory, anyway), and if they do not like it, they should campaign to make it fair for everyone, not just exempt themselves by saying that it should apply only to everyone but them.