A life worth celebrating

It must have been a pretty formative experience for an eleven-year-old:

I can still see myself standing on the west bank of the Mississippi looking over into East St. Louis and watching the glow of the burning of Negro homes lighting the sky. We children stood huddled together in bewilderment ... frightened to death with the screams of the Negro families running across this bridge with nothing but what they had on their backs as their worldly belongings... So with this vision I ran and ran and ran

The running took the writer of these words to Paris. There, according to a French scholar, Pap Ndiaye, she made an unexpected discovery:

When she arrived, she was first surprised like so many African Americans who settled in Paris at the same time…at the absence of institutional racism. There was no segregation … no lynching. (There was) the possibility to sit at a cafe and be served by a white waiter, the possibility to talk to white people, to (have a) romance with white people

Much later in her life, she took part in the 1963 March on Washington and spoke from the same platform that Martin Luther King used to make his ‘I have a dream’ speech. Among other things she told the quarter-million strong crowd:

You know, friends, that I do not lie to you when I tell you I have walked into the palaces of kings and queens and into the houses of presidents. And much more. But I could not walk into a hotel in America and get a cup of coffee, and that made me mad. And when I get mad, you know that I open my big mouth. And then look out, ’cause when Josephine opens her mouth, they hear it all over the world.

So there you have it – her name. Josephine. Josephine Baker, in fact, as she’s best known, from the surname of one of her husbands, though originally she was Josephine McDonald.

She was born in St Louis, Missouri in 1906. A singer and dancer, she got into the chorus line at a couple of New York shows before travelling to Paris in 1925 and getting a real break. She starred first in the ‘Revue Nègre’, the Black Review. The very title reveals that France was hardly free of racism. Baker danced near-naked there and in other reviews, including the Folies Bergères night club, playing to, but also poking fun at, stereotypical white views of black women. Still, at least the racism, as Ndiaye makes clear, didn’t expose her to violence or deny her service in restaurants and hotels.

Josephine Baker, 1930
She really did have a pet cheetah

In any case, those performances turned her into an international superstar and the first black woman to land a starring role in French films. ‘I became famous first in France in the twenties,’ she would say, and the country that made her feel safe and allowed her to shine became her home of choice. Her best-known song, ‘J’ai deux amours’, ‘I have two loves’, was dedicated to her love of her country and of Paris. She took out French nationality, renouncing her US citizenship to do so.

Nor was her relationship to her adopted country a one-way arrangement. During World War Two, she served France just as she’d benefited from it: she worked as a spy, passing information about troop movements and military preparations that she was able to gain thanks to her freedom to move, as an international celebrity, in some elite circles. When northern France was occupied, she moved to the southern, unoccupied area, living in a chateau where she stored weapons for the French resistance, provided shelter for its fighters and for Jews escaping persecution, and continued to collect and pass on any intelligence she could.

When that part of France fell too, she moved to North Africa, where she provided entertainment to troops at concerts to which she offered free entrance.

Her wartime service won her the Resistance Medal awarded by the French Committee of National Liberation, the Croix de Guerre from the French military and the Légion d’Honneur, France’s top honour, awarded to her by Charles de Gaulle.

Baker in French Air Force Uniform, 1948

She also adopted twelve children from around the world, bringing them up in different religions, to prove that kids could live together harmoniously despite ethnic and religious differences.

She never gave up fighting for the rights of black people back in the United States, as her presence at the March on Washington shows. But she could never live there again, infuriated as she told the crowd that day at the contemptuous behaviour to which the colour of her skin exposed her. She fell on hard times at the end of her life, but was taken in by her friend Grace Kelly, the film star turned Princess Consort of Monaco.

She died in 1975 and was buried in Monaco. In 2021, she became only the sixth woman to be honoured by a tomb in the Panthéon in Paris, reserved for the greatest figures France produces. Her grave remains in Monaco, but a casket containing earth from places where she’d lived, including St Louis, Paris, the south of France and Monaco, was brought with full honours to the Panthéon, and a plaque set up to her.

Why am I writing all this today?

Because she was born on 3 June. So today I’ll raise a glass to what would have been her 119th birthday. And I thought I’d share that moment with you.

Entitled racing and how to avoid it

It’s been years and years – around half a century in fact – since I spent any amount of time involved in sailing. And even then it was absolutely the bottom of the range in sailing – dinghies, with no deck, where your feet are a plank’s thickness away from the water. Nothing to do with yachts and large crews and state-of-the-art-cutting-edge-technology or anything like that.

Funnily enough, even a half century on, it’s left me with a yearning to have another go one of these days. I did like that feeling of being so close to the water and whipping along on its surface. I liked the playing with the sails and the tiller and feeling the boat react and race, and I’d be delighted to enjoy those sensations again.

But not yachts or large crews or any of that state-of-the-art-cutting-edge-technology sort of stuff. Oh, no.

Now there’s an organisation known as Internations that operates in a number of cities across Europe. It brings together locals and foreigners who enjoy meeting each other and maybe speaking a little of the others’ language. Usually it’s quite fun.

Danielle and I have joined the local branch, here in Valencia. She’s been to more events than I have, but I have to say that the ones I’ve attended have been good. So when she said ‘there’s an Internations event to watch a sailing race’, the association between an organisation I find fun and an activity for which I still have a hankering felt too good to pass up. So we went.

Now this wasn’t dinghy sailing. It was the ’52 Super Series Valencia Sailing Week’. The crews represented each of eleven nations. And it was absolutely one of those state-of-the-art-cutting-edge-technology competitions. At least, as far as I can tell, though I have to admit that to me most of the boats looked pretty much the same as each other.

Now, I’m not denying that there’s skill in this kind of sailing. My own experience of sailing those dinghies back in the sixties left me with a clear picture of just what lack of skill looks like, so I have a vague idea of what it must be like to sail with real intelligence and aptitude.

On the other hand, when I see the ludicrous figures people spend on their boats, I can’t help feeling that the cash register must weigh heavily on the outcome. At a different, much more recent epoch of my life I spent some time rowing and one of the things I like about that sport is that, in competition (and I was never at competition level) there are strict limits on what one can do to boats. They have to be at least so heavy, the hull has to be a certain shape, etc. So it isn’t the technology that determines winners, it’s entirely the skill and strength of the individual rower or crew.

It’s not like that in sailing. As far as I can tell. Though I admit that to my untrained eye, it looked as though the state-of-the-art technology stuff was all under water...

Anyway, when I got down to the port I was rather dreading being a spectator at a sport for which I was finding it hard to work up much enthusiasm. It felt too much like money racing money. But I needn’t have worried.

The meeting place was in a bar. Or a restaurant. It depends on how you look at it, I suppose. Most bars out here serve food and most restaurants serve drinks. 

It wasn’t obvious which bar was meant, since each successive email gave a different name from each of two alternatives. In one email it would be the Arribar, in another the Marina. Fortunately, those were the only two mentioned and they’re right next door to each other, so it wasn’t difficult to go to one for a while and then check out the other.

Eventually we found the group, and it was as with all Internations events. A lot of interesting people speaking any of four or five languages at different times (though predominantly English: Europe is becoming very English, even if England refuses to be European). We got chatting over drinks and it all went well, as it usually does at these gatherings.

Eventually, Danielle asked ‘what about the race? When do we see the boats?’

‘Oh, they’ve been coming in for the last hour or so,’ the organiser assured us, ‘I’ve seen a couple. But you’d have had to turn around to see them yourself.’

I asked how the race had been going. She didn’t know exactly, but said she’d been pleased to see that there was at least one female participant.

‘In the South African boat. One – only one, but still one – of the crew was a woman.’

‘Good for them,’ I said, ‘and how many were black?’

‘Ah,’ she said. ‘It’s true that while they may have taken a small step forward against sexism, they’ve taken none against racism. They were all blond.’

Then she smiled. ‘Good looking, though,’ she said and grinned at her husband.

An hour or so later we left the place. As we walked to the bus stop, we came past the line of boats all carefully docked and waiting the next day’s competition.

All lined up and raring to go for the next day’s racing
But they all look pretty much the same to the unpractised eye

We didn’t see any of the actual racing. But then, with a sport of wealth and privilege, maybe that was just what suited us best. We enjoyed the company of pleasant people from Internations, and left the entitled to race against the entitled. 

Corbyn's courage is not enough

Afiz Shah, who describes himself as British Asian, is a Labour Councillor in Bristol. He recently called in at a police station to report a serious crime, and was promptly arrested himself. He apparently ‘looked like’ a suspect the police were looking for.

Let’s be clear: ‘looked like’ means he had a similar skin colour.

This kind of ingrained racism is something from which many suffer for the colour of their skin or because they are Muslim. Suffer not once but repeatedly.

By contrast, though my mother’s family suffered from antisemitic persecution in the 1930s and 1940s – ninety relatives in Lithuania disappeared without a trace – I haven’t personally suffered any kind of threat or insult based on my Jewish roots. In particular, in my membership of the Labour Party, I’ve never seen any antisemitic behaviour directed against me or anybody else.

That’s not to say that I think antisemitism doesn’t matter. On the contrary, I think it matters deeply. It is a pernicious disease, just like any form of racism, such as the far more widespread Islamophobia in our society. It needs to be resisted, above all by the political left of centre, which ought to be the beating heart of anti-racism.

This means that any trace of antisemitism within the Labour Party itself has to be extirpated quickly and decisively. Not because antisemitism is in any sense the most important form racism, but because if we are tolerant of any form of racism, we weaken our position to combat all the others.

We owe it Afiz Shah and so many like him not to let that happen.

Many Jeremy Corbyn supporters claim that the accusation of Labour antisemitism within Labour is merely a stick used by his opponents to beat him. It certainly is such a stick, which is another reason that makes it urgent to deal with the problem. That it isn’t only such a stick is made clear, however, by Corbyn himself, in his statements of the seriousness of the problem.

‘We have not done enough to get to grips with the problem… my party and I are sorry for the hurt and distress caused’ he said before a meeting with Jewish leaders on 24 April.

Corbyn: not doing enough. Maybe not capable of doing enough?

It takes courage to admit that the party that made him his leader has not done enough to tackle a key failing.

On the other hand, who if not the leader is responsible for making sure that sufficient action is taken?

The Jewish leaders he met were deeply dissatisfied. They could not, for instance, persuade him to adopt the definition of antisemitism used by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. For information, this is:

Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.

This seems so uncontentious a definition it seems hard to understand why Corbyn could not accept it and pledge himself to campaign for the party to accept it. He couldn’t bring himself to do it.

The most telling criticism came from Jonathan Goldsmith from the Jewish Leadership Council who said that Corbyn ‘engages in conversation until you ask him to do something.’ Or, as he told the BBC, ‘when you ask him to do something he has this habit of staring and just shrugging.’

Corbyn has been a backbench MP for 35 years. For 35 years he has been paid to talk and write about politics in the highest forum Britain offers for it, but he’s never been called on to take responsibility for putting anything into action. Indeed, his image of a kind of saintliness depends on it: he’s never sullied his hand by actually having to deliver anything in reality.

Thirty-five years is a long time that produces ingrained habits. Perhaps to stare and shrug when asked to do something. It is now nearly a month since Jews protested in Parliament Square against antisemitism in the Labour Party, and we are still in a position in which Corbyn has to admit that ‘we have not done enough’.

I said before that it took courage to make that admission. Unfortunately, while leadership certainly requires courage, it needs more than courage alone. Another essential quality is decisiveness.

Sometimes Corbyn can be decisive. He quickly fired Owen Smith from his team for publicly espousing a position on the EU with which two-thirds of the Labour Party agrees. Unfortunately, there’s a suspicion that some of the antisemites against whom he’s required to take action are supporters, possibly friends, of his. Is he less decisive with his friends than with an avowed opponent such as Smith?

Wobbly with his friends. Accustomed to speaking a lot but doing far less. Corbyn seems fated to disappoint on an issue needing to be addressed urgently – not for the sake of the Jews but for all those facing racial bigotry.

The question Corbyn really needs to answer is this one: is he up to the job? Now, making an admission in answer that one will need far more courage than just accepting that too little has been done. An admission, after all, would have grave implications for his own position – implications he may not be willing to face.

Any more than his supporters are.

A racially pure Britain

It’s been quite a month for racial awareness in Britain.

First we learned that the country’s first inhabitants were black. The first recognisably human people to populate the island, some 10,000 years ago, were dark-skinned, new research into so-called ‘Cheddar Man’ has shown. Bad news for those grieving for the ancient racial purity of the country. At least if they’re white.

Next we had the news that quite a while after Cheddar Man’s time, around 4500 years ago, a bunch of people showed up from the Continent. These were the ‘beaker people’, so-called because of finds of a distinctive style of pottery beakers with a flared lip. DNA analysis has shown that they’re distinctly different people. They turned up in Britain and the previous inhabitants simply vanished into the background, never to re-emerge.

One of Britain's original inhabitants, apparently

So the population of Britain was originally black. Those people were then supplanted by immigrants from Continental Europe, though what their colour was I don’t know: what I’m focusing on is that they came from what is now the EU.

What this means is that all those concerns about immigration that drive Brexiters are entirely misplaced. Especially when they target immigration from the European Union. We – and indeed they - are the immigrants from Europe. Without such immigration, few of us would be there.

The third piece of news that caught my attention in this context was the statement of Diane Abbott, the Shadow Home Secretary (Labour’s spokesperson on home affairs), that some use the term ‘immigration’ as a euphemism for ‘race’. Good for her for having said it. To be honest, the statement is so obvious that it really shouldn’t be necessary to say it, but it certainly is. There are far too many siren voices, particularly worried about the pro-Brexit sentiments of the North of England, who keep urging the rest of us to understand the ‘legitimate’ concerns in some communities about immigration.

Well, if it’s a euphemism for racism, as it all too often is, I see no reason at all to accommodate it.

In any case, these new findings of archaeologists should have left the xenophobes in disarray. Let’s say we do set out to get rid of the immigrants from our midst. One of the geneticists who worked on the Beaker people project reckons that “at least 90% of the ancestry of Britons was replaced by a group from the continent”. That would suggest something like 59 million would have to leave Britain.

Angela Merkel has been good about taking refugees in the past. Today, however, the pressure is on her to stop. And in any case – nearly 60 million? Could be tough.

Interestingly, that would leave a very small number of Britons on the island. It might be hard for them to keep basic services going – the schools, say, the hospitals, the trains. But then I suppose that’s the problem with people who want to create ethnically homogeneous nations: they don’t realise they’re cutting off their noses to spite their faces.

Still, they would at least have achieved their aim. The country would at last have shaken off the impact of 4500 years of immigration. It would be racially pure.

And, of course, black.

Hopes for 2018. Or are they just blinkers?

One of the aspects of 2018 that appeals to me personally is that it will be my second calendar year in a job I actually enjoy.

That may sound pretty unimpressive but when you’ve spent ten years moving between six jobs, five of which were lousy fits – or, to be fair, to which I turned out to be hopelessly unfitted – finding one that I actually like is a remarkable uptick.

So it’s good to be starting a new year in it.

One of the aspects I enjoy of the job is that it involves quite a lot of work in Italy. Why should that appeal to me? It’s where I was born, but in the course of a long career, I’ve never had the opportunity to work there. Now, however, I’ve been working with Italian colleagues and developing relations with Italian clients, and it’s wonderfully rewarding.

As a child, I spoke Italian pretty well. Perhaps to near-native level. Today – well, it’s half a century on and things get rusty. So one of the things I’ve been doing is working on the language. Reading is one of the best ways of doing that.

Do you know Primo Levi’s book The Periodic Table? I liked it so much that I’m re-reading it. The beauty is that it’s extremely funny, which only intensifies the harrowing poignancy of the life story of a man who was one of the few survivors of the extermination camp at Auschwitz.

Primo Levi: an extraordinary history for an outstanding writer

The book’s title is derived from the profession Levi first chose, long before he became a writer. He was a chemist. Each chapter is associated with the name of an element from the Periodic Table. Near the end of one of the early chapters, Zinc, Levi explains that:

…I had always considered my origins a negligible if curious fact, a little amusing anomaly, like someone whose nose is bent or who has freckles; a Jew is someone who doesn’t decorate a tree at Christmas, who shouldn’t eat salami but does anyway, who learned a little Hebrew when he was thirteen and then forgot it.

That struck a cord, because it is so close to the way I feel about being a Jew myself. If I were more religious it would matter much more but, since I’m not, it remains for me simply a cultural idea – or, more importantly, a cultural emotion – which is far from defining who I am. It’s as essential to my character as is my imposing height (167 cm or 5’7”) or my spectacular hair colour (six decades to get it to this particular white, though it was well under way in just three).

That’s surely how these characteristics should be. Of some interest, maybe, but not the basis for any kind of real judgement. Sadly, for Levi, in the late 1930s, his origins wouldn’t long remain a mere curiosity. As racial laws were promulgated by the Fascist government, walls began to go up around him, with the doors in them closing one by one.

These days, of course, while anti-Semitism is hardly dead, it isn’t the force it once was. Nor is it by any means the main cause for the persecution of people on the basis of what they are, rather than what they have done. Today the groups suffering the most are Muslims or Blacks.

Something that brought this home to me particularly strongly was when I asked a black woman I’d just met, where she was from. It was an innocent question. Her accent said loud and clear that the answer was ‘Luton’, the town to which my wife and I had just moved. That was the answer I was expecting. But that’s not an innocent question to a black person.

She replied, “I’m from Cheltenham”.

Now Cheltenham and Luton are about as far apart as any two towns can be in England. Not geographically, though they’re hardly neighbours. The real distinction is social. Cheltenham is nice, a word you should pronounce ‘naice’. It’s wealthy. It has a fine girls’ school. It has a major British spying centre. It has a Tory MP. House prices are, I doubt not, astronomical.

Luton has two Labour MPs. It’s just a tad dust-blown. Its great advantage is that, for being this close to London, its house prices are amazingly cheap – perhaps a third to a half of the capital’s.

It’s hard to imagine anyone with her accent coming from Cheltenham.

Still, that was her answer, and we chatted a little about the town and her upbringing there before moving on to other subjects.

By the afternoon, she’d got to know me a little better. And suddenly, unprompted, she turned to me and said, “actually, I was born in Jamaica. I came to Cheltenham when I was five”.

All the weight of blackness was suddenly laid bare for me. Ask a white Englishman where he’s from and he tells you. Ask someone black, and there’s a moment at least when he has to be wondering, “are you checking on whether I’m an alien? Whether I don’t belong here?”

The attitudes that would ultimately inflict terrible suffering on Levi are still there. They just have different targets, for the most part, today.

Back to Levi’s book.

The following chapter, Iron, starts with the words:

Outside the walls of the Chemistry Institute it was night, the night of Europe: Chamberlain had returned outplayed from Munich, Hitler had entered Prague without firing a shot, Franco had subjugated Barcelona and was sitting in Madrid. Fascist Italy, a minor pirate, had occupied Albania, and the premonition of catastrophe was condensing like a viscous dew across the houses and in the streets, in careful talk and muted consciences.

Well, we’re not there yet. Reading those words on the brink of 2018 reminded me how much less bad things look today than they did in 1939. But then, they didn’t look so bad in 1930, but the 1939 catastrophe came anyway.

And yet, if we wanted to live, Levi tells us later, if we wanted in some way to take advantage of the youth that was flowing through our veins, there was no other resource… than voluntary blindness.

Yes. That’s what stops us preventing that kind of slide. And yet, if Levi chose voluntary blindness, with what he was facing, what’s to stop us doing the same?

I’m looking forward to another year in a job I like. It should be fun. But is that just me choosing blindness too?

The seeds of racism in all our souls

Some decades ago, I was a lodger in a house owned by Jewish friends. They were perhaps slightly closer to the Jewish mainstream than I was, but otherwise had similar views to my own: they were secular, leaned to the left politically and were deeply English in character even though the grandmother had never lost her native Russian accent (she had attended meetings addressed by Trotsky, and spoke wonderingly about how he could generate a wave of collective enthusiasm uplifting an entire audience).

On one occasion I met one of their cousins, a man of quite extraordinary culture and who ultimately suffered, or perhaps enjoyed, a remarkable end. We had a mild but warmly defended disagreement on some aspect of human behaviour – I forget which – and at one point he said to me:

“Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto”

I looked at him, completely blank, the sad – embarrassed, indeed – product of five futile years of studying Latin at school.

“So sad, so sad,” he said, “they teach you but they don’t educate you. We’re forgetting that our culture has roots steeped in Latin.”

He shook his head, overcome by sorrow at the pitiful state of our schools.

“It’s Terence,” he said, “the great Roman playwright. ‘I am a man and I hold nothing human alien to me’.”

Publius Terentius Afer
Smart man. Got his humanity right

Well, the words have never left me. Partly it was the context in which I learned them. Partly it was the idea itself. I am a human myself and therefore anything that can be found in a human, could be found in me too. I can’t say, “oh, no, that’s not me.” If it’s human, then admirable or repellent, it can be in any human.

It’s invaluable advice. It came to me just the other day, in the course of a conversation on Twitter. “Most people aren't racist,” I was told. Well, that’s a nice idea, but I don’t know. Racism strikes me as a fundamentally human response, and I find it hard to believe that it isn’t in all of us. Some combat it with more determination than others, some more successfully. But surely none of us is entirely free of it.

I know that I’ve found myself stared at, with my white skin, on night-time streets by gangs of young black men and felt distinctly uneasy. Would I have felt different if they’d been white? I’m not sure but have a nasty feeling I might have felt less alien, even though I might have been no safer. 

Then there was my visit to Mbabane, capital of Swaziland. We’d been told to avoid the city at night, but we had no local currency and couldn’t find an ATM in the country. So in the end we went into town well after nightfall, and drove around the streets looking for ATMs. We saw several, but each had a large black man, armed with a vicious looking stick, sitting next to it. We drove away quickly from three until, finally, we realised that the men weren’t there to rob us, but to protect us.

So at last I wen up to one of the machines. The man with the club couldn’t have been more helpful. 

“Ah, no,” he explained to me, “your card won’t work here.”

He gave us accurate directions that were easy to follow that took us directly to an ATM that provided us with the money we needed. 

Again, would I have felt less uneasy if the guards had been white? I simply don’t know. What I am sure about is that it would be no healthier for me to pretend that I don’t have those anxieties: we can’t overcome them if we deny them. So I don’t accept the notion that “most people aren’t racist.” I think the best we can say is that a number of people have controlled their racism better than others, but no one can say they’re wholly free of the contagion.

At least, not unless they merely want to live in denial.

In particular, what I’m sure of is that the racism boot is sadly on the other foot at the moment. Where, for decades, racism has been shameful and keep its head down, today it feels far more at liberty to express itself freely. In Britain, far too many Poles and citizens of other European nations have been asked, since the Brexit vote, when they’re going home. People argue that the vote was motivated by many considerations, but I would counter that a huge part of it was simple racism – or at best xenophobia, which is only racism’s little brother – and far too many seem to feel it’s permissible once more to spew its toxic messages.

That, as far as I’m concerned, makes it more dangerous than ever to deny the racism deeply within us. “Most people aren’t racist” sounds like a positive statement. It isn’t. It expresses a complacency that needs to be resisted.

Remember. If you’re human, then nothing human is alien to you. And that goes for the ugliest aspects of humanity as well as the most attractive.


Postscript What about my friends’ cousin’s end? I said it was remarkable.

He wasn’t particularly Zionist. He never showed any real desire to move to Israel. On the other hand, it was always a wish of his to visit the country, although it took him years to realise it. Eventually, however, he got there and spent three weeks touring around and seeing all the sights he’d longed to enjoy.

Then back at the airport, as he was walking across the tarmac towards the stairs to his flight home, he was struck by a massive heart attack and died on the spot.

It’s hard to imagine a better death. Quick and merciful. And having just realised his heart’s desire.

Of course, it was terrible for those he left behind. His family most of all. But even to me: I’d hoped to have another conversation with him and give him the opportunity to open my eyes to further aspects of our common culture I’d missed.

Now, sadly, it was not to be.

Cleaner or MP? Lift operator or Judge?

Did you see the story about MP Dawn Butler?

She was the Labour MP for Brent South from 2005 to 2010, when the seat was abolished. But she stood in Brent Central in 2015 and has been an MP again since then. She told the BBC that she was recently told, while travelling in a members’ only lift in the House of Commons, that it “really isn’t for cleaners.”

Back in 2008, she told the Fawcett Society, which campaigns for equality, that she had been accosted by a former Minister in the members’ area of the House of Commons terrace. He challenged her right to be there, and when she assured him that she was a member, he replied “they’re letting anybody in these days.”

Does this all seem odd? It isn’t. Dawn Butler is, naturally, black.

Now it all makes sense, right?

Dawn Butler? MP or House of Commons cleaner?

This all puts me in mind of the first ever black justice on the US Supreme Court, Thurgood Marshall. He was a man with a fine sense of humour – even his name has a colourful history: he was originally named Thoroughgood but decided, as a child, that it was too tiring to spell, so changed it to Thurgood.

One of his favourite stories of his tenure at the Supreme Court was being in a lift – sorry, elevator – when a couple of tourists climbed in. A black man in an elevator? Had to be the elevator operator.

“First floor, please” one of the tourists said.

“Yowsa, yowsa,” Marshall answered. And pressed the button.

It’s hard to avoid the feeling that organisations such as the Fawcett Society have a bit of way to go yet before we can claim that equality has been fully achieved.

I was irritated with the Oscars being so white this year, yet again. But maybe that doesn’t matter quite as much as I felt. It seems to me that it’s even more important to sort the problem of black MPs not being taken for cleaners in the British House of Commons, or black Associate Justices taken for elevator operators in the US Supreme Court building.

Thurgood Marshall. Not an elevator operator

Although there’s no reason not to make sure that black actors get the recognition they deserve at the same time...

Thank you, Oliver Letwin, for making Tory views clear

What a fine row has blown up following publication of Cabinet papers from 1985.

The controversy has focused, in particular, on a memo signed by Oliver Letwin and a colleague. It advised the then Prime Minister, Maggie Thatcher, not to respond to that year’s riots by increasing investment in black communities, because the money would be frittered away on the “disco and drug trade.”

Those bright young men apparently viewed the proposal for a £10m communities programme aimed at dealing with inner-city problems, as little more than a means to “subsidise Rastafarian arts and crafts workshops”.

Tottenham riots in 1985

To discover that the Tories were racist in 1985 is hardly an earth-shattering revelation. It would be much more interesting to be told that they were still racist today, but we’ll no doubt have to wait a couple of decades or so to have that suspicion confirmed.

What makes this memo interesting is that Oliver Letwin is still firmly in politics, an MP and Minister, and a leading adviser to the present Prime Minister David Cameron, as he was to the Prime Minister back then.

It isn’t even the comments on black communities that I find most interesting. What he has to say about whites is, in many ways, far more illuminating still. He was clear that blacks oughtn’t to benefit from the riots, in particular because “lower-class unemployed white people had lived for years in appalling slums without a breakdown of public order on anything like the present scale.”

What’s so striking about these words is that Letwin clearly meant them as a compliment. It’s a good thing, in his world view, for people to accept life in “appalling slums.” They know their place, no doubt, and don’t disturb their betters by complaining to angrily which, in contrast to those nasty black rioters, makes them fine people. Not actually fine enough for a Tory government to want to help them at all, but fine enough to win applause, in a slightly condescending way, from the betters who keep them in their slums and are pleased not to be bothered by them too much.

It’s become something of a commonplace of English politics in recent years to assert that not enough is done for the white working class. There’s a lot of truth in that statement, if it’s taken at surface value – taken to mean exactly what it says. Unfortunately, it’s often code for “we really ought to accommodate the xenophobic and often racist views that certain elements within the white working class express.” Organisations like the far-right UKIP like to draw on that kind of bitterness. Sadly, however, many on the right of the Labour Party would like to counter UKIP by pandering to its anti-immigrant policies.

The approach that would allow Labour to remain true to its roots is quite different. And Letwin’s remarks show us the way. He talks about “lower-class unemployed white people” living in “appalling slums.” What does that suggest for Labour? It points us towards both a positive and a negative message.

The positive message is that we should push forward our commitment to build an economy that doesn’t leave you unemployed, or even unable to live adequately in a job, as happens today. And a commitment to building more, decent, affordable housing so that no one is forced to settle for a dire slum existence.

The negative message? That Letwin has let the cat out of the bag. Labour needs to hammer the point that the Tory Party’s perfectly happy to leave people unemployed, living in squalid slum environments. So if you want Labour to help you out of those conditions – stop voting Tory or UKIP and elect a Labour government to help us all.

Good of Letwin to have made that clear.

The Clarkson story: a parable for our times

It’s amusing to follow the ferment about Jeremy Clarkson, star of motoring programme Top Gear, that led to his being suspended by the BBC after what it called a “fracas” with a producer.

The rumours are that, in this instance, a “fracas” meant a punch thrown.

What makes the story more interesting than a banal news item about crass behaviour, is that Clarkson represents something quite profound in English society, indeed in society of most developed economies today. Considering that he’s spent years cultivating an appeal based on shallowness, it’s even remarkable that he can represent anything profound on anything.

Jeremy Clarkson
Some find him appealing

He’s regularly in trouble for using derogatory, even racist language, or just for slurring other people or even whole nations. He had to leave Argentina in a hurry after sporting a number plate (H982 FLK) which some thought was a reference to the 1982 Falklands conflict. He had to apologise to Mexicans for describing them as lazy and feckless. He riled India too with some tasteless comments.

What these incidents all have in common is that they’re delivered in a humorous way, which makes it hard to criticise them without seeming humourless oneself. My difficulty is that comments whose only effect is to offend don’t strike me as all that funny, and making them sound funny, only makes them more offensive.

In passing, I feel exactly the same about some of the more tasteless cartoons of the prophet Muhammad published by organisations such as Charlie Hebdo.

What the attitude reflects is a sense that it’s OK to be offensive about other people, and whole groups of other people. Those who think like Clarkson will assure you that they’re not racist, they’re merely upholding the right to say what they think (so they’re actually staunch protectors of free speech, not just bullying boors), and reject Political Correctness (to which they’ll usually tack the words “gone mad”).

It’s those attitudes that have led to the rise of parties such as UKIP in England or the Front National in France. They too would claim not to be racist, but to speak simple common sense for ordinary people. But dig a little deeper and you’ll discover that behind their rejection of Islamist extremism, say, there’s actually a dislike of anyone espousing Islam, and behind that, as a recently-former UKIP Councillor revealed, a dislike of anyone black (she claimed she couldn’t bear to look at black people).

So it’s a racism that generally dare not speak its name.

What makes its role so sad is that often the people who admire it most, the fans of Jeremy Clarkson, for instance, admire it for its strength. Clarkson has the courage to speak out and say the things many believe but don’t dare express. His boldness is admirable to them.

Taken to its extreme, this attitude can become deeply dangerous and corrupting. If three young girls from East London chose last month to travel to Syria to join ISIS, I can’t help believing that much of the attraction was to a movement with the courage to say out loud what others merely feel but are too timid to voice. And ISIS of course goes still further: it takes cruel action, instead of limiting itself to cruel words.

There’s no comparison in degree between a Clarkson bullying jibe and an ISIS beheading, but they’re still linked, by indifference to hurt, by a breaking of the normal bonds that prevent us acting on such aggressive impulses, and by the sense in many others that this is an expression of courage.

What’s particularly interesting about the Clarkson case, however, is the money aspect. As well as having made a fortune from it himself, under his tenure Top Gear has become one of the BBC’s most successful programmes. That touches on another problem in our present societies, the power of money. Given what he brought in to the Corporation, Clarkson must have felt himself to be immune to any kind of action against him. Whatever his behaviour, the BBC could never part company with him – they’d be cutting off the hand that fed them.

So it’s striking that the BBC has suspended him. They’ve even cancelled the last three programmes in the present series of Top Gear. And that really is a major step.

Because it says “there are certain forms of behaviour that we simply won’t tolerate. And it makes no difference how wealthy you are, or how much wealth you generate.”

It’ll be interesting to see where this story goes next…

Ah, this modern world, how far it is from realising its ideals

Have you ever given any thought to when “modern” started? Have we been living our modern lives a couple of years? A generation? Perhaps even longer?

Think of all those museums of modern art we have. When I was a kid, we’d never have included the impressionists in a modern art exhibition. But when I first began to be interested in art, the impressionist Renoir’s Bal du moulin de la Galette was under a century old, and today Picasso’s modernist Demoiselles d’Avignon is over a century old.

Renoir. Modern Art? Don't be silly

So when will modern art stop being modern?

Picasso. Modern art.
From 1907? Seriously?

We even have the notion of “post-modernism”, one of the more ludicrous we’ve come up with. After all, what comes after modernity? Surely it’s the future, isn’t it? So unless we have a time machine, how on earth can we know what “post-modern” looks like?

At the moment, I’m reading a book by Elizabeth Badinter, a leading French philosopher and feminist, who adds to her range of talents a profound understanding, and knowledge, of eighteenth-century history of thought. The book confirms a feeling I’ve had for some time, that the “modern period” started in the middle of that century. She traces two remarkable women of the time, Emile du Châtelet and Louise d’Epinay. They were contemporaries for a while, but du Châtelet died in 1749, and Epinay’s writing dates from the 1750s onwards.

Badinter shows that there is a real watershed between them. Du Châtelet was a leading physicist and philosopher, the first major French woman scientist, and the last before Marie Curie. Epinay wrote principally about education, in an environment where the natural sciences were beginning to lose their popularity in favour of the social sciences and moral philosophy. This trend led to the emergence of a notion of Man as opposed to classes, which would later in the century inform such ideas as “the rights of Man”, applying to all men or women, regardless of their station in life.

In Badinter’s words, “increasingly, the idea of humanity took hold in minds, previously more used to distinguishing men by their station than to bringing them together within a single concept.”

The changing view is illustrated by a story told by a certain Longchamp, a former manservant of du Châtelet’s, who claimed in his memoirs that she would undress without any kind of modesty in front of him; on one occasion, she called him to bring hot water for her bath; she opened her legs wide so that he could pour the water between them and, when he averted his eyes, she told him to watch what he was doing so that he didn’t scald her (I suppose she scolded him to avoid being scalded).

Now du Châtelet would never have behaved that way with anyone she felt she had to treat as a man, in other words, someone of her own aristocratic caste. But Longchamp was a servant; he didn’t count.

That was the kind of thinking that began to change around 1750, so that in 1776 the nascent United States could declare that they were acting on the principle that all men are created equal. To them, there is a community of man, to which we all belong, and from which are derived certain inalienable rights. A world-changing concept after 1750, it held little sway before.

Since that’s a fundamental idea of our time, I like to date the modern from then.

And yet. No changes in human mentalities is sudden. The old ideas cling on long after the new ones have begun to emerge and supplant them. Even the framers of that great Declaration of Independence were in many cases slave-owners: equality of humanity clearly didn’t extend to involuntary African immigrants to America.

Nor are we out of the woods yet. You probably saw the pair of demonstrators from the States, one white and carrying a placard asking “is my life worth more than his?”, the other black and with a placard asking “is his life worth more than mine?”

Sadly, our societies don't (yet) value them equally

The founding fathers of the United States framed a constitution in which a black man’s life was officially valued at 3/5 of a white’s. The idea should have been buried by the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments, but was it? Judging by the apparent right for whites, inside or outside the police, to shoot with impunity young black men in the States, one would have to say we’re not there yet.

No-one in Europe should feel any self-satisfaction with respect to the US either. If you’re Muslim, or black, or simply a foreigner, there’s a view in most of Europe today that you’re a lesser being. Your rights can be denied. If you’re attempting to enter Europe illegally and your boat sinks, you should be left to drown. Behind such thoughts is the notion that other people are inferior, not fully entitled to human rights, perhaps not entirely human.

Not caring whether such a person sees you naked may be a little degrading, but it does no more ham than that. Thinking such a person may be gunned down in the street for no offence, or doesn’t deserve to be rescued from a watery grave in the Med, is much more serious. When we reach a point where our societies no longer find it acceptable to shoot young blacks or abandon drowning migrants, we shall at last have realised the ideals that began to emerge in the eighteenth century.

So my view? The modern period did indeed start around 1750. When will it end? Oh, it has a long way to run yet...

Ferguson: continuation not interruption

Hasn’t it been fascinating to follow the happenings from Ferguson? 

Ferguson. Curious spectacle

I particularly enjoyed the description of the events by Darren Wilson,the policeman who fired the shots that killed Mike Brown. 

He painted a picture of Brown that was nothing short of terrifying. This huge man had reached in through the window of the police car and rained blows upon Wilson. It must have been appalling. I suppose we should at least be grateful that the blows left so few marks on Wilson’s face; or perhaps he simply has a capacity to heal from his wounds that far outstrips any ordinary person’s.

It may be an effect of the internal glow Wilson derives from having such an easy conscience: he has, indeed, assured us that his conscience is completely clear.

Things got even worse after this first nightmarish incident. The colossus, Brown, came after Wilson, furious and petrifying in his power. Let’s not forget that Brown had massive physical strength, while Wilson had only a gun to defend himself. He fired on Brown several times, and must have hit him more than once, because, as he declared, he saw him “flinch” several times. Despite all that Brown kept coming on until finally Wilson had to finish him off with a bullet to the head.

It must have been terrible. For that poor Mr Wilson.

Wilson, cool and in control, fired twelve shots at Brown. Whereas Brown was really, really rude to him. And threatening. Why, he looked as though he might have been armed. Of course, Wilson actually was armed whereas Brown wasn’t, but hey, it might have been the other way round.

Gary Younge reported on all this for the Guardian. He quoted Barack Obama commenting on the Grand Jury’s decision not to indict Wilson, “we are a nation based on the rule of law so we need to accept that this was the special jury’s decision to make.” But Younge adds his own gloss:

The trouble is that the United States, for far longer than it has been a “nation of laws”, has been a nation of injustice. And in the absence of basic justice such laws can amount to little more than codified tyranny. When a white cop, Darren Wilson, shoots an unarmed black teenager, Michael Brown, dead and then is not indicted, the contradiction is glaring. For a world where it is not only legal for people to shoot you dead while you walk down the street, but where they can do so in the name of the law, is one in which some feel they have nothing to lose.

Gary Younge. Well worth reading in the Guardian

That struck a bell. It reminded me of something that I’d read before:

… the legislation and histories of the times, and the language used in the Declaration of Independence, show that neither the class of persons who had been imported as slaves nor their descendants, whether they had become free or not, were then acknowledged as a part of the people, nor intended to be included in the general words used in that memorable instrument.

It is difficult at this day to realize the state of public opinion in relation to that unfortunate race which prevailed in the civilized and enlightened portions of the world at the time of the Declaration of Independence and when the Constitution of the United States was framed and adopted. But the public history of every European nation displays it in a manner too plain to be mistaken.

They had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race either in social or political relations, and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect, and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit.

Who wrote these ringing words? Why, Roger Taney, Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, speaking for the majority in its decision of what has come to be known as the Dred Scott case. Scott was a slave who claimed that having been taken from a slave state, Missouri, to a free state, Illinois, he was in effect a free man. The Court decided that as a “negro” he was not a citizen of the United States and had no right to sue in its courts.

Dred Scott. A slave from Missouri
And absolutely not a citizen, according to the Supreme Court

You’ll have guessed that this was not a recent case. In fact, Taney gave his judgement in 1857. It contributed to the outbreak of Civil War. It was partly in response to that judgement that the thirteenth and fourteenth amendments to the US Constitution were adopted, respectively abolishing slavery and establishing the civil rights for all US nationals, irrespective of their previous status of bondage.

What’s interesting is that the War and the Amendments clearly didn’t change that much. As Gary Younge points out, the Ferguson events are a continuation of an important trend in US history, not an interruption of it.

Roger Taney would have have been proud.

Benign racism: the most pernicious form

There’s such power in Rudyard Kipling. 

The characters in Kim, for instance, are unforgettable: the red-bearded giant of a Pathan horse dealer, Mahbub Ali; the Babu, Hurree Chunder Mookherjee, self-declared a “fearful man”, but staking his life on serving the British Raj; and perhaps one of the most endearing figures in literature, Teshoo Lama from Tibet, seeking the river that will wash him clean of all taint of sin.

To say nothing of Kim, the epitome of the lovable rogue, constantly in mischief, whether his own or other people’s, a white but able to pass himself off as any of half a dozen Indian types. At least.

And yet, the pleasure of reading Kim comes with an uncomfortable trace of embarrassment. Because Kipling constantly refers to “the Oriental” way of being or doing things, and to certain characteristics as somehow “white.” Kim, for instance, is able to resist powerful, perhaps hypnotic, suggestion and see things the way they really are, and there is a strong implication that it is his European blood that gives him the strength.

Rudyard Kipling: fine writer, but the racism's no less toxic

Besides, it was Kipling who wrote a poem about the “white man’s burden”.

Take up the White Man's burden – 
The savage wars of peace – 
Fill full the mouth of famine 
And bid the sickness cease; 
 And when your goal is nearest 
The end for others sought, 
Watch Sloth and heathen Folly 
Bring all your hopes to nought.

Doesn’t that sound like Bush and Blair in Iraq? We fought a savage war for peace, and look what those lesser beings have done with what we gave them…

Perhaps one of Kipling’s greatest gifts was the ability to give the common soldier a voice, not something writers had tried before him. Who can forget Gunga Din?

Though I've belted you and flayed you, 
By the livin' Gawd that made you, 
You're a better man than I am, Gunga Din!

How enlightened is that? The white soldier admits that the Indian water carrier isn’t merely his equal, but his superior.

Except, except… he belted him and flayed him. And one can’t help feeling that it was Gunga Din’s darker skin that entitled the soldier, and Kipling who spoke for him, to do so. Indeed, when we look a little closer, the puzzle is solved: Gunga Din was a superior sort of man because, despite his brown skin, inside he was white:

An' for all 'is dirty 'ide 
'E was white, clear white, inside

There’s no denying the love Kipling had for India, and for Indians: it shines through powerfully in Kim. But it’s the love of a superior for an inferior. And the superior is there to rule the inferior. In the interests of the inferior, that’s Kipling’s message in The White Man’s Burden, but with a rule of iron (“though I’ve belted you and flayed you…”)

There’s something benign about the racial view propounded by Kipling. But that only makes it more pernicious. There’s nothing to wonder at in Gandhi’s swift denunciation of the notion of the “white man’s burden” as a yoke for colonial peoples.

Bas relief by John Lockwood of a scene from Kim

So when I re-read Kim recently, I rediscovered the pleasure I’d had as a child, at the spellbinding story and above all at the compelling characters, but with an acute sense of unease at the underlying message.

I suppose in a sense we’ve progressed since 1901, when the book appeared. The pretence that the Raj served the Indian people has been well and truly punctured, and the Raj itself ended; whatever the problems India still faces, and there are many, its people have made great advances since Britain left.

No ruler looks after the interests of the ruled as well as they would look after their own, if only he’d stop ruling them.

Back in Britain, we can take some satisfaction from the fact that racism is at least no longer hidden behind any kind of pernicious nonsense about its being good for the oppressed. 

When UKIP attacks Bulgarians or Romanians, it at least doesn’t pretend that it’s doing them some kind of favour. Instead, it makes it clear that it is targeting them as a group, just because they are Bulgarians or Romanians (“I was asked if a group of Romanian men moved in next door, would you be concerned? And if you lived in London, I think you would be,” said Nigel Farage to a radio interviewer).

They try to disguise their xenophobia behind an economic smokescreen: immigrants take our jobs (they don’t: they do jobs we can’t find native Brits for) although, somehow, at the same time they come here to live off our benefits (immigrants are 60% less likely to be on benefits than the native born). Underneath it all, they just don’t like people from abroad, and they know there are plenty of Brits who share their view, so they push it.

At least we can see the racism for what it is these days. Kipling disguises his poison, but in Farage it’s openly displayed. And there’s nothing benign about it: it’s wholly malignant.

It’s better to be able to recognise the toxin than for it to be hidden. Doing away with it altogether would, of course, be far better still. That would mean living in a world in which people were judged not as white or black or “oriental”, not as British or Bulgarian or Iraqi, not as Christian, Jew or Muslim, but as individuals. There’d be no space in such a world for the likes of UKIP.

Unfortunately, there might be no space for Kipling either. That would mean the loss of some great writing. Which would be sad, but if that’s the price, it’s worth paying.