Looting: it’s not a race issue

While in no position of great authority on US race relations, I find it sad, but by no means surprising, to hear people already rushing to make a race issue out of the looting and other disorder in New Orleans. As the sister who writes Dictator Princess wrote, people accuse black people of looting, but when they see a white couple with “groceries” in the French quarter, they ignore the fact that they had probably stolen the groceries themselves. But there’s also the old chestnut of black people being “prone” to this sort of behaviour, which may or not have been expressed openly in the USA in the past few days, but it’s certainly coming out here.

Yesterday morning, Vanessa Feltz was doing the 9am-midday phone-in, sitting in the vacant seat left at BBC London when Jon Gaunt was sent (back) to Coventry. “Could it happen here?” was the topic of conversation: in the event of a disaster striking London and people being desperate, would Londoners run riot, loot and rape? Would you just help yourself to the DVD recorder you wanted if you thought you could get away with it? Would you (she really offered this example) rape your neighbour’s Scandinavian nanny if you were all going to die soon anyway? People really thought that the British “stiff upper lip” would put paid to any such lawlessness, which I think is nonsense, but someone wrote in and said that rioting was not something working-class white people did. It was something you get from black people (as in Brixton, LA and elsewhere) and Asians (as in the riots in Yorkshire and Lancashire a couple of years ago).

Feltz is Jewish, and no doubt was told about pogroms when she was a child, so I’m surprised she allowed this arrant load of rubbish to go unchallenged. Pogroms, for anyone who doesn’t know how this term originated, were mob attacks on Jewish villages in the former Russian empire. The perpetrators were Russians and Ukrainians, particularly Cossacks. And guess what colour Russians and Ukrainians are.

You don’t have to be Jewish to know that white people are as prone to lawlessness as anyone else, however. Did anyone see the rioting on TV which followed the decision to allow Protestant marchers through Catholic areas in Northern Ireland in the late 1990s? Not many black people there. Not to mention the “no-Popery” rioting which periodically affected the UK during the 18th and 19th centuries. Some of this was kicked up by people who actually went around giving anti-Catholic presentations – among other things, by staging spoof Catholic masses, and taking their shows to places with large Irish populations. And then, of course, one must ask what colour the people who used to gather to lynch black people in the places now affected by Katrina. Did they come all the way from Mexico for the purpose? As for looting, you might look at the British Museum in London for plenty of evidence of looting by civilised white Brits with their stiff upper lips, to say nothing of the vast quantities of loot moved around the world by both Nazis and communists during the 20th century. We’re not talking of TVs and washing machines here, but artwork and other heritage items which sell for millions.

To hear these people talk, you’d think black people rioted just for fun. The causes of all such incidents of rioting are well-known; usually they are related to the police attacking and harrassing black people (particularly men) in the streets. Anyone who doesn’t know this can easily find out before offering their opinions. On the other hand, when whites have rioted in Europe in recent years, it has usually had something to do with a setback for the football (soccer) team they support, such as when Millwall fans rioted in London in May 2002, following their team’s failure to win promotion to the Premiership. The New Orleans situation is being used by those who relate everything to race as simply another excuse to carry on doing so. There are some people who resist any attempt to connect black underachievement in both Britain and the USA to anything other than their genes, be it crime, low academic achievement, or whatever.

Rioting generally takes place when powerless people are oppressed; the white people in Zimbabwe did not riot when Mugabe turned on them because they, unlike Afro-Americans, had an escape route. America is simply the only home most blacks (unlike a lot of whites) have. None of this matters to a racist; to them, blacks are simply less human, and just one step away from behaving like animals. It’s all baloney, of course. I’m white and have lived among whites all my life, and I can assure anyone who is in doubt that they are as capable as blacks of acting like uncivilised rabble.