This is a shocking story about a racist cousin of mine. I was reminded of it in this age of Critical Race Theory (CRT) and Black Lives Matter (BLM). If they had been around at the time, I shudder to think what would have happened.
It was in about 1980. At the time, I was working at a factory in Bury, just north of Manchester. I went over the Pennines to visit an aunt living in Nottingham. The youngest of her four children was Alison, aged about ten. My aunt told me this.
One day Alison came back from school in a joyful mood. She told my aunt all about this lovely new friend she had made at school, a wonderful girl. Her name was, say, Mary (I’ve forgotten the actual name). Mary was so friendly, Mary was so interesting, Mary was so delightful. Mary was going to be her best friend for the rest of her life. An idle thought passed through my aunt’s mind. Nottingham was quite a mixed community, with immigrants from the subcontinent and the West Indies. My aunt asked, “Is Mary black or white?” Alison was taken aback. She thought for a while and then said, “I don’t know.”
The horror! The horror!
The foundation of CRT, BLM and the whole woke world is that you must never look upon people as individuals. You must never judge them by the content of their character. You must always look upon them as members of a group, and you must judge them solely on their race. It was bad enough that Alison saw Mary as an individual, but worse that she didn’t care what race she was and, worse still, she didn’t even notice what race she was. If this had happened today and been reported, my aunt and uncle would have been in big trouble from the race police. This would have been an awful example of the systemic racism of white, colonialist, imperialist Britain.
CRT regards it as a mortal sin to treat all people in the same way, regardless of their race. CRT demands that all school children must be told to see themselves and others as belonging to a racial group. If they are white, they must be told they are evil racists born of the original sin of white racism. They must feel ashamed of what they are. They must hate their parents for being white. They must keep saying, “Sorry! Sorry! Sorry!”. If they are black, they must be told that they are lowly, helpless beings, crushed by the brutal white oppressors. They are unable to fend for themselves. They must feel permanently angry, resentful and inferior. They must immediately report any white racism, real, felt or imagined, to the school authorities who will immediately expose and punish any accused white pupil, or demand a public apology or the dismissal of any accused white teacher.
In the USA, prophets of CRT and BLM such as Ibram X Kendi (formerly Ibram Henry Rogers) make huge amounts of money by lecturing big white corporations and schools on the evils of white racism. Kendi can charge $20,000 (R300,000) per presentation. Private schools and Model-C schools in South Africa are similarly paying fortunes to CRT practitioners. On the radio, I often hear Ms Terry Oakley-Smith, who runs a “Diversity in the Workplace platform”, telling whites that they must be sorry, sorry, sorry for their apartheid sins and must be terribly grateful to the ANC for treating them so lightly. I wonder what she charges.
Schools in South Africa present a paradox and a problem for CRT. According to the ANC we must have affirmative action for black people, and there must be “demographic representation”. Since 92% of South Africans are black (by the ANC’s definition), 92% of teachers must be black. It so happens that in most schools in SA at least 92% of the teachers are black, with many appointed by affirmative action. But strangely enough – or rather unstrangely enough – all elitist blacks, including all ANC politicians, and all woke whites, including Terry Oakley-Smith, avoid these schools like the plague. They deliberately send their children to private schools or Model-C schools where most of the teachers are white. They want white teachers and white culture for their children. But, when their children get to these schools, they accuse them of being racist and not respecting their black culture. CRT is making this worse. Black pupils are told that, if a white teacher reprimands them for anything, they must accuse that teacher of racism.
I’ve heard horror stories from schools in Cape Town and Johannesburg. A Johannesburg teacher told me that recently, during a tea break, she walked around the playground and found three black girls huddled close together. She said something like, “Excuse me ladies but please observe social distances.” The girls immediately rushed over to the headmistress’s office and accused her of racism. The headmistress summoned her and reprimanded her. Another teacher, refusing to make a public apology over a similar incident, had to resign.
Western Civilisation is based upon the individual, and this is why it is the most successful and benign in all history. (We can see this by the fact that people from Africa, Asia and South America want to go to Western countries, and people from Western countries do not want to go in the other direction.) Societies where people are judged on their group, such as Communist Russia (class), National Socialist Germany (race), apartheid South Africa (race) and now ANC South Africa (race) are doomed to fail.
Alison did not need Socrates to tell her that.