No place for hatred in a rainbow nation (From Gazette & Herald)

No place for hatred in a rainbow nation

Gazette & Herald columnist HANNAH GIBBONS, 17, confronts the problem of racism after looking into the murky world of Britain's far-right groups for a school project.

TO my great displeasure, I found myself surfing the web pages of the British National Party and the National Front (and subsequently almost getting myself banned from the school computers until I explained the educational reasons behind my forage into this world, claiming to have "Britain's best interests" at heart).

"Examine the links between religion and racism in Britain today" demanded my religious studies coursework, and what better place to start than at the crux of racism (or 'nationalism', a more politically correct synonym, though political correctness surely isn't their forte), and headed towards these websites to try and understand their reasons for fearing or hating non-whites so vehemently - or at all.

Turns out, they don't! No, they blame those who decided that a multicultural society was the way forward for Britain, and suggest the sensible solution to the problems caused by this of deporting all non-whites "humanely" (an adjective hardly reassuring considering it's most often used in referral to the slaughter of farmyard animals) back to their country of origin... or their parents'... or their grandparents'... or that one great-grandparent who made their skin just a little darker than acceptable.

The more I read, the more I could draw similarities with Nazi policies; however, the BNP and National Front couldn't hide behind the past, where most atrocities can nowadays be excused with the old "they did things differently then".

This was current - a message on the interactive notice-board dated February 17 laments the loss of a police force that "walked through Asians as if they didn't exist" and calls for its return.

An article on the website questions the outcome of the Steven Lawrence case (a case concluded by presumably an all-white jury - or could there have been a stray non-white corrupting the outcome?), noting without comment a Dr Patel who first treated the wounded boy in hospital. Dr Patel - another non-Aryan aiding the downfall of British society by draining its finances and who should go back to the "cesspit that (he) came from"?

I am white, middle-class and live in an area where the Black Panther I'm most likely to see is of the big cat variety, but I'm not so nave that I don't know that a multicultural society is not without its problems.

Similarly, were I white in an area where non-whites seemed to take the jobs, or be causing all the crime or simply where I was the only white face, I can see how these Fascist parties could seem like a viable alternative to the mainstream ones, which may seem like all talk and no action.

But you can travel around the world in 48 hours - the world is getting smaller and there are no races anymore, just human beings.

Inciting racism won't help the situation, rather it's the racism that needs to be tackled in order to prevent those whose names don't look Aryan when they're read at the top of a CV from getting pushed to the bottom of the queue, thus making economic equality (from which all problems seem to stem) impossible to achieve.

Unlike the Nazis, however, the people of Britain can chose whether to vote for racism or not, and it is to their credit - black and white - that a supreme white race remains a farcical idea confined to a few bites of cyber space, of which its main purpose is to inform schoolchildren of how lucky we are to be in a working democracy.

Updated: 11:39 Wednesday, February 23, 2005