Look closely. We’re all going colour-blind

My 84-year-old Yorkshire father and I know better than to talk about race. Doors will be slammed, Christmas could be spoilt as it was once 20 years ago when I stormed out of the house after remarks by my uncle that I won’t repeat because such poisonous, hardcore bigotry no longer has any place in public discourse, and quite right too.

These days the racism of old people makes me sad more than angry. It is possible to understand — without in any way excusing — the views of someone who lived all his life in a homogeneous white, working-class community, didn’t go abroad until he retired, who saw maybe two black faces a year.

My father shakes his head over the Daily Mail and tells me the country is ruined: by which he really means, all certainty and familiarity is gone, the landscape now is alien, unsettling, frightening. He is more mystified than outraged why his grandsons’ primary school classes contain mostly black faces.

Then he’ll confound me by overtipping his African mini-cab driver because he was a “lovely fella” or I’ll find him chatting about cricket with our elderly Jamaican decorator and after he’s packed up, Dad carefully examines the kitchen paintwork and says reverently: “Now, he’s a proper craftsman.”

Meanwhile, my children understand that racism is the most heinous playground crime. They have grown up with Black History Month, assemblies on Nelson Mandela and our groovy new school building is named after the black Crimean nurse Mary Seacole (the children’s other suggestion was Rosa Parks). I feel with absolute conviction if they or any of their friends join the Army and find themselves training a bunch of recruits, they will not spur some laggard through the assault course by calling him a “black bastard”.

For all we love to label our young people toxic degenerates, in one regard they look down at us from the loftiest moral heights. In all surveys, the young’s tolerance of other races and intolerance of racism itself far outstrips the adult population: 82 per cent of under 18s, according to a National Research Centre poll, claimed they are not at all racially prejudiced, compared with 69 per cent of adults. While this reveals nothing about their actual behaviour, it reflects that racism is now taboo.

This week the writer Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, reflecting on the remarks by Patrick Mercer, the Tory homeland security spokesman, and the CCTV footage of a black woman, Toni Comer, being beaten by a white police officer, wrote: “The filth of racism has washed back, but now there’s no concern, no shame, no real opposition.” But who could possibly agree?

No act of perceived racism now goes without exhaustive analysis. Mr Mercer was summarily sacked by David Cameron just three hours after his remarks. Only a few months ago — in what seems now like some lurid dream — the nation’s media and political leaders ceased discussion of the Iraq war or loans for honours to debate the implications for race (and international) relations in Jade Goody calling the Bollywood star Shilpa Shetty a poppadom on Celebrity Big Brother. The 30,000 people who complained to Channel 4, the tens of thousands more who voted to ensure Shilpa won the show, were not letting racism pass by unopposed.

My father’s old monocultural generation is dying; the blithely colour-blind young are ascending. Those in the middle, the generation now running the world, are left questioning our own attitudes, trawling for prejudices, trying to make judgment calls in an atmosphere where to err is to be history.

It is seldom acknowledged that we grew up in a deeply racist climate, where our country was affiliated with South Africa (try explaining apartheid to an eight-year-old: it is almost beyond their imagination), where blokes in pubs joked about Paki-bashing, the top sitcom Love Thy Neighbour spoke cheerily of “nig-nogs” and “darkies”. As a nation we have progressed a long, long way so very fast. And although we still have far to go, are these slippages really very surprising?

Patrick Mercer’s mistake was to be a 51-year-old man who assumed promoting and fairly treating black NCOs under him — as many of them have testified — exonerated him of all racism. In his day in the Army, his actions probably made him a cutting-edge progressive officer. But he was not schooled enough in modern antiracist nuances to appreciate that the insults “ginger” and “black” don’t come with equivalent volumes of oppression.

And his remark that some black soldiers “used racism as cover for their misdemeanours” was the most problematic. Is it possible ever to say this publicly now? Even on a day when Lord Levy’s supporters suggest the inquiry into his role in cash-for-honours is fuelled by an anti-Semitic desire to hang a rich, prominent, influential Jew up to dry?

Or when a drunken, aggressive woman, who has been ejected from a nightclub and then vandalised a car, claims the policeman who thumped her arm to stop her grabbing his genitals did so because she was black? The fact that this case — disturbing as it is to watch any woman being hit by a man — has not been whipped up into some South Yorkshire Rodney King moment does not demonstrate indifference to state, racial violence. Rather it shows, I’d bet, that black people themselves realise they don’t need such a lousy figurehead as Toni Comer.

And whether the Army let “black bastard” foul the barrack-room air seems as nothing compared with its huge unchallenged inequalities: that Gurkha soldiers have only now been granted the same pension rights as the British men they died beside. And this was not after a sudden lightning bolt of racial justice but because our Army is undermanned and needs to attract foreign nationals.

It is one thing for David Cameron to keep step with the latest antiracist language, another to pledge action against the huge, institutional injustices: that twice as many black British men are in prison as at university, that gun crime is little addressed by white politicians since its victims are almost all black, that a whole generation of black boys is tumbling, unchecked, through the education system into low-paid jobs, unemployment or crime. These are the sticks and stones that hurt more than any name.

Times Online