Barbara McCarthy
Let’s stay proud of our Irishheritage–evenas others try to play the racism card –
‘YOU’RE such a racist,” is regularly thrown around on social media these days. It can mean anything – a Rudyard Kipling fan or a whitenighty-wearing, ‘N’-word-chanting, torch-wielding, swastika-flagholding Ku Klux Klan member and everything in between.
Just to confirm, for all the ‘liberal’ authoritarians out there, racism is horrible, and should be called out, but throwing the accusation around whenever someone has a different opinion than you is not only moronic, it’s also extremely dangerous. It not only dilutes actual racism and discrimination, but can exacerbate it.
‘Casual racism’ against white people is becoming acceptable and encouraged. Even here in Ireland.
“Oh Lord, please give me the confidence of a mediocre white man,” Labour councillor Rebecca Moynihan flagrantly wrote of Gavin Duffy’s decision to run for presidency. It’s not just misandric and sexist, it’s racist too.
Are we getting to a stage where being white, our native colour, is something to be ashamed off? What about red hair and freckles? They’re kinda racist to the POCs (people of colour) coming over here, no? Where will it end?
I’ll revert to Mr Kipling, whose poem ‘If’ had to be painted over at a Manchester university last week, because a bunch of sanctimonious snowflakes was offended by it. ‘If you can keep your head, when all around you are losing theirs and blaming it on you,’ he pondered.
Speaking of heads, German footballer Mesut Ozil kept his buried in the sand for the duration of Germany’s disastrous World Cup campaign, only to reappear this week. Despite pressure from his fans to comment on his much discussed, misjudged meeting with President Erdogan of Turkey in May this year, stating that it may not have been a wise decision, he pulled the race card. “I’m German when I win and an immigrant when I lose.” Well maybe you played really badly too.
The DFB, the German football association, who are champions of diversity and integration, made a balls of handling the issue, as German war apologists do, and managed to piss off everyone. Now tensions between Germans and Turks, who live happily side by side,
have been potentially damaged.
As a half German I’m incensed. People have been calling German fans racist. Germans are amongst the least racist people I’ve met. If the Twin Towers had been in Germany, they would have apologised for them being too high. “Sorry, we’ll build smaller buildings next time. Our bad.” The Germans welcomed immigrants with open arms, not just in 2015, but well before and since, at a cost of €93bn by 2022, according to ‘Spiegel’ magazine. German women handed out flowers to Muslim men after those sex attacks on German women in Cologne in 2015, and yet Germans are so racist?
There seems to be a misconception that racism is a white-only enclave. Maybe the modern day virtue signallers should visit Qatar and see how Filipino workers are treated on building sites of the World Cup stadiums, or mausoleums, I would call them.
Funnily, the people who love to accuse others of racism at the drop of a hat, and champion integration and diversity online like some kind of hero, are the same people who will run across the street, head down, pretending not to see you, in case they have to engage in a brief ‘hello’, for fear of awkward interaction.
White people who aren’t responsible for any kind of oppression are bullied by other white people, who think it’s suddenly OK to bash their own, as though they had somehow been oppressed.
IN the US, racism is a business and a way of keeping communities down. It allows people to always play the victim. Candace Owens, a black conservative, says: “The goal is to paralyse blacks with undue fear, keeping us enslaved to ideologies that continue to fail us.”
Racism, like sexism and misogyny, is convenient. Card pulling means you don’t really have to perform. By merely being offended, or being a victim, you can get away with stuff. Many women choose to be victims, but wouldn’t it be more fun trying to achieve something rather than blame our performances on others?
Also there’s so much good news out there, I never see anyone focus on it. Why do we fail to appreciate how much progress the world has made? According to economist Max Roser, “the number of people in extreme poverty fell by 137,000 since yesterday every day for the last 25 years”.
But who cares when you can make stuff up? Wars have been started over less, lest we forget World War I. Online spats resulting in name calling and personal insults, without real information, can lead to intolerance, so maybe just leave it be and appreciate that we live in a very open country which embraces diversity and where systematic racism doesn’t exist. But, at the same time, let’s be proud of our Irish heritage.
Are we getting to a stage where being white, our native colour, is something to be ashamed off ?