Theodore Dalrymple:
Now, despite friendly and long-lasting relations with many Muslims, my first reaction on seeing Muslims in the street is mistrust; my prejudice, far from having been inherited or inculcated early in life, developed late in response to events.
I said to a friend once that racism is something that develops in proximity to others. One never hates a man one doesn't know and one is never racist when one is amongst one's own. It is upon daily and close exposure that irritations and obvious differences arise. It is, for example, only when made to sit every day in a church full of chittering, gossiping, fidgeting, fluttering Philipinas whose total obliviousness to the anglo social signals, and dedication to the contents of their crackly plastic shopping bags, making you want to throttle them, that one starts to develop a dislike of them. I don't think I ever gave the Philipina ladies a thought until I started going regularly to a church where they, and their...err...prominent cultural differences are in the ascendancy, that I realized that they were different. People don't like difference. One's own way is the best way.
When I left the Island and moved to the Lower Mainland, I started becoming aware of the existence of other cultures and races. Growing up in Victoria there were really only Wasps and Chinese, and these were unconsciously blended in my mind into the superspecies, "Victorian". The Chinese in Victoria had come there at the same time as the English. The history was pretty bad, but by 1972, the place was pretty comfortably theirs as well as ours. And there wasn't anyone else. I did not see a black person in the flesh until I was sixteen.
When I was growing up the Chinese people in Victoria were by no means Anglicized. They were Chinese and retained their cultural identity. But they knew us, the white folk, and we knew them. And we all knew our limits; we interacted, bought things from each others' businesses, passed the time of day in the streets, went to the same schools and movies and parks and whatnot; we rode the same buses and lived in fairly close proximity. But the differences were respected. We were not them. They were not us and though the two populations were polite, we did not really "mix" very much. It was a fine arrangement. We each knew the other's quirks and while the division between us was fairly sharp, it was not unfriendly. More like two neighbours chatting over a mutually well-maintained fence. This was segregation that suited everyone's needs and served the public good. There were a few intermarriages and no one batted an eye, but it was rare and I can imagine, something undertaken in the face of much family opposition on both sides. (Things are probably no longer this way, mind you. We are talking about thirty years ago after all.)
When I moved to the Vancouver mainland the first time at 19, I was in shock for months. I had never imagined that there were so many kinds of people in the world. I was fascinated and a bit scared. I started roaming around Chinatown and buying the exotic-looking brown spikey fruit in the fruit stands. I bought periwinkles and blue crabs. I went to Mass in the Chinese Catholic church. I took a few classes in kung fu and watched in fascination the Wushu artists doing their martial dances.
But for the first time, I was aware that these were foreigners. These were not the Victorian Chinese who knew the ropes, who knew us. These were the deeply, unabashedly xenophoic Chinese who had kept themselves aloof from everyone who was not Chinese. There were third-generation Chinese in Vancouver who had never spoken English.
Vancouver's Chinatown was a different world and I knew right away that my presence was only tolerated as long as I was there to buy something. They did not have a qualm about not liking me. There is no political correctness in Chinese culture. White people are, simply, inferior and alien. One tolerates them to get what one can out of them but only that far.
And, after a lifetime of relative indifference and complete acceptance to the Chinese, among whom I had lived all my life, I was aware for the first time of an extreme othernes. These were not the friendly, happy, well-established family-business-owning, acculturated people I had talked to every day.
It was an interesting lesson and one that has been brought home to me again and again. The cultures are more important than the races, if we only think of "race" as physical characteristics. In my experience, Asians and European, Anglos, can get on if they are careful about boundaries. But these boundaries should not be crossed.
What seems to be coming clear is that Arabs and Europeans cannot get on. If they can be totally acculturated, fine. But we must be clear about what that culture is. Now that we have jettisoned the cultural things that made us what we are, or were, we have nothing to which to acculturate the unimaginably hostile aliens who are flooding into our historic territories. By abandoning our own culture, we have robbed ourselves, our children, and those who might have been helped out of their own barbarism.
I suppose I'm not really a racist, since I am still indifferent to colour. But I can't help being a culturist. It is being made abundantly clear that one culture is irrefutably superior to another. And I think in this case, there is no fence sturdy enough.
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