This is the question put by Toby Young on his
blog in today’s Telegraph. Here’s my response:
It is hard to exaggerate the degree of intimidation contained in this question.
In the Middle Ages the corresponding question would have been, “Does he believe in God?” Of course he would have believed in God (only the heathen didn’t, who, in our midst, were either converted, cast out, or killed), i.e. is not a racist (only evil people like the Nazis are, who we cast out of civil society).
The real question is, “Does he believe in the Church’s (the state’s) interpretation, i.e. ideology, of what it means to believe in God, i.e (not to be a racist)? If not, he’s a HERETIC, which is almost as bad as being a complete non-believer (racist), because defying the authority of the Church, i.e. the STATE; and ultimately this is all about POWER, the power of the Church or STATE over the population they claim to SERVE.
So, what is state ideology in regard to race? Basically and not coincidentally, it’s the exact, but equally extreme opposite, of the racial ideologies which underlay Jim Crow, Apartheid and, above all, Nazism, the contrast with which it uses to claim an absolute (but also spurious) moral high ground for itself. Anyone who challenges, or even questions, it, as with church ideology in the past, is automatically dismissed and condemned in the harshest possible terms, which nowadays is as a “bigot” or “racist”.
It is the ideology of “colour-blindness”, of “one-human-racism”, of the “global melting pot”, or whatever one chooses to call it, which insists that race and ethnic origins are of no social or political significance, except to evil “racists” like the Nazis. This, despite their profound importance for any deep and meaningful sense of personal and group, i.e. national identity, although, of course, it is for this very reason that this ideology is so attractive to the multi-racial state, which, in order to legitimise its authority and power, must pose as a single nation (notwithstanding the oxymoronic absurdity of “multi-ethnic nationhood” ).
America was already multi-racial, but not European states, which chose to become multi-racial in order to demonstrate their ruling elites’ adherence to state racial ideology and thus moral superiority and right to rule (the cheap foreign labour it brought into the country also suiting business and capital interests).
Where “liberal (and not so liberal) fascism”/statism and its ideology of “colour-blindness” reigns supreme, the “colour-blind” (or those who can feign it) are kings . . !