Political colours

One day the colour won’t matter but yesterday it mattered so much that the black-over-white victory eclipsed the blue-over-red; at least over here, where no one much cared that the Democrats had trounced the Republicans, except in the sense that Bush’s party had lost, which everyone applauded. Colour mattered so much because it marks the end of an era in which colour mattered so much. Let us not be coy. It marked the end of world-wide dominance by the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant tribe.

I’d better declare my own self. I’m white, my wife is black, my politics are blue: not aligned to the American Democrats, but the British Conservatives. I’m technically a WASP myself, a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant: not religious personally but descended from an Archbishop of Canterbury on the mother’s side. Of the father’s side I know less: illegitimacy and distance have got in the way. I look in the mirror and see white, but there’s enough oddity in my features to have inspired a genealogy wherein I had for great-grandparents a renegade Catholic priest and an abducted underage Aboriginal girl. “Where did that come from?” you ask. From pure imagination, but that doesn’t prove it false.

My wife is an Afro-Caribbean, as they say over here. There is no such expression as “Afro-Briton” to correspond to Afro-American. The race-police who monitor these things are more interested in “ethnic origins” than fostering patriotism. You never hear “West Indian” these days, except amongst the elderly who can’t keep up with fashion in political correctness. Away from the public arena wherein language is mangled on the altar of guilt to appease pressure-groups, I like the word negress: beautiful, descriptive and all the better for being taboo.

We listened to the speech of the President-elect live on radio, then switched to the TV. Tears flowed. We felt---she felt, I felt---the electric moment, the long-awaited signal to the black men and women of the world, that they may be prouder than before. This is not for the whites to fear, unless the ending of top-dog status justifies fear. I suppose white racial dominance started with the Greek Alexander, but now its long reign has come to an end. There are still weapons, fraud, cruelty, greed. There is a huge mess to clear up. But one barrier to a united world has gone.

At the end of one short speech yesterday, I heard President Bush say, “America is the greatest country in the world.” I thought “Why, George W, why? What is going on in your addled brain at this moment? Is that what you think this is about? It’s foolishness like that which sends bombers with hate to you and your country. Stop competing, for God’s sake. We need healing and unity in this world, not a top-dog mentality.”

I said my politics are blue, which over here stands for Conservative. It depends what you want to conserve. “Guns and religion” would not be on my list. My deepest instincts are against everything progressive: cities, social engineering, psychiatrists, electronic gadgets, neologisms, fast cars and planes. Poetically as opposed to rationally, I prefer Cuba’s political system to the USA’s. At the deepest level, I’m an anarchist. You can keep your “freedom”---that excuse for so many wars. I passionately embrace what Kropotkin says:

It is not love and not even sympathy upon which society is based in mankind. It is the conscience---be it only at the stage of instinct---of human solidarity. It is the unconscious recognition of the force that is borrowed by each man from the practice of mutual aid; of the close dependency of every man’s happiness upon the happiness of all; and of the sense of justice, or equity, which brings the individual to consider the rights of every other individual as equal to his own. Upon this broad and necessary foundation the still higher moral feelings are developed.