Does wealth make you immune from racism?

 

At the time of writing this the Prime Minister of the UK is Rishi Sunak, whose parents are Tanzanian and Kenyan, who happens to be the richest man to ever occupy Number 10 Downing street, for many he is an example of what the son of immigrants can achieve with the right education and the right motivation, he has after all reached the highest office in the land, but how is that possible in a conservative party that has been moving evermore right wing for over a decade.

We tend to associate political parties that are further to the right as the least welcoming to ethnic minorities, we have seen in the past far right political groups such as The National Front, The BNP, and EDL having an agenda based around Immigration, and more recently UKIP have had the same strong views on Immigration, but because of their anti EU stance, and making immigration just one part of their manifesto, they seemed to negate the risk of any serious accusations of racism on an organisational level, there were many instances of UKIP members getting caught up in race scandals, but the party itself appeared to be try to do something about that, even if it was just purely about not being seen as another far right extremist group, UKIP had councillors and parliamentary candidates from ethnic minorities too, giving further legitimacy to their rebuttals of accusations of being a racist party, and this is what prompted me to write this blog today and ask the question, can wealth make you immune from racism?

When I was a young boy, growing up in an ethnicity diverse part of West Bromwich in the West Midlands, there were so many ethnic groups, and different religions it felt like there was a different culture and identity behind every door of the street, my best friend in primary school was Sikh, my neighbour on one side were Irish Catholic, and the other side Hindu, the strange thing about living in such a diverse place, was the lack of “ethnic” names, the couple who owned the local corner shop were born in India, and were known in the area as Sam and Rose, and the neighbour across the road was a Sikh man name Bob.

This was in part because trying to teach the locals to pronounce their actual names was a complete waste of time, and for the purpose of assimilation, they decided to go by more English sounding names, in the 70s someone from India or Pakistan would have an easier time of it if they fit certain criteria, speak English well, not take offence to blatant racist jokes, and basically not show their ethnicity in any way other than having a slight accent and their skin colour, not an easy way to live I know, and it should have never been that way, but this was the formula for success back then, and that shop is still in that family, with Sam and Rose retiring long ago and their son Sanjay taking over the family business.

Knowing this it begs the question does a person of colour have to “play the white man” in order to be taken seriously, or has racism all but disappeared from this green and pleasant land?

Well I don't think it has, you may remember previous blogs me talking about my childhood, some might say in fact that I talk about little else, but if you have read a few of my blogs, you will remember me saying that I grew up around people with some racist attitudes, varying from full on to casual racism, racism that, fell naturally from the lips of people around me, and this brings me to my point, that racism was rarely aimed at me directly, and the reason I was party to those conversations was because I was “alright” because “Trev is one of us, he's not like those other black people, he was bought up by white people” so just like Sam and Rose, being distanced from my ethnicity, made me less like the “others” and so I was acceptable, and as such, I could listen to the ignorant bigoted bullshit that spilled from their mouths.

I would sit, and I would listen to the people around me, hear them saying how “they should all fuck off back to where they came from” or “I wouldn't have one living next door to me” and the classic “if my daughter bought one of them home.....” and if they should get called out on their bigotry, they had an ace up their sleeve, “how can I be racist, our Trevor is black”.

Yes, I was not only having my self esteem striped away as I heard a constant barrage of racist language, and being made to feel less than, I was also the get out of jail free card for the whole family.

It seems to me, that the same is true of institutions of government, find yourself a brown person who is willing to get their hands dirty, and do what you cant without the accusations of racism, the last two home secretaries Suella Braverman, and Pritti Patel, are both Asian women, and both happen to have hard line approaches to immigration, and tend to use language that “others” migrants, and gives the whole country a case of amnesia, because they seem to have made everyone in the country forget that there is no safe and legal route into the UK to claim asylum, so when they talk about the Illegal wave of criminals entering into the UK, it sounds to me like they are trying their best to sound like one of the gang, after all, they are women of colour, how could they possibly be racist?

When I look at the conservative government over my lifetime, there have been 3 women prime ministers, and one person of colour in number ten, and the conservatives love to point out that fact to make out that the left are the racists and sexists, they are obviously using that same get out of jail free card that I once was, how can you claim misogyny when we have had women PMS, and how can you claim were racist “our Rishi is PM”.

If you think that the PM is the most powerful person in British politics, then you haven't been paying attention, there are a lot of people behind the front man, like a rock band, the drummer keeps everyone in time, the bass player translates the timing into a groove, and the lead guitarist and front man take all the credit, and all of the risk, because if the show is terrible, the drummer and bass player can melt into the background as if they were never there, and leave the front men to take all the bottles of piss thrown at them, and if they sack the front men, the drummer and bass player will still provide the same beat and groove, so nothing changes but the ones at the front, and we think that the whole band has changed.

Being rich does not mean you don't have to deal with racism any more, it just means that you only have to deal with a different kind of racism, the fact is you will never really be accepted in those circles, you are nothing more than a buffer zone, the black friend they wheel out when someone has said something unsavoury, if your conscious is at ease with being fine, but don't expect the rest of us to be fooled into thinking that there is no racism in the conservative party, Boris Johnson has burst that bubble long ago.

Photo by El gringo photo: https://www.pexels.com/photo/man-in-expensive-red-suit-10439664/