This article by Jack Doyle, is jaw-dropping, as are the comments:

Border staff stop and search white air passengers to 'even up racial mix'

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... l-mix.html



What the Mail wants is a two-queue system. One for the darkies and one for the innocent white people. Of course there's no chance whatsoever that a white person would ever commit a terrorist atrocity. Just ask that nice Mr. Breivik.

Kipling's The Jungle Book has made Britain nation of 'passive racists' says John Barnes as he blames classic authors for bigotry

I was expecting sensitive introspection and open examination of our shared cultural prejudices in the comments. "If you don't like it here, then piss off" doesn't count, does it?

Probably the most anti-racism book ever written. dickhead!

I've always been a big fan of Kipling, and one of the reasons is that he isn't racist, certainly not by the standards of his time, and not by the standards of many people today.
Yes, he wrote with some stereotypes, but he's also the man who said "You're a better man than me, Gunga Din" and wrote touchingly about the problems Indians faced at the hands of English racism at the end of the Victorian age - there's a short story about a beautiful and elegant woman who could never become a 'lady' because she was Indian, and some comments on the nature of 'ladies'.

I think John Barnes needs to look below the surface level and 'received' opinion on Kipling. But he's right about Christie etc., they reflected the unthinking racism of their time.

At least one is talking sense.

Has Barnes met much racism outside of football? I don't believe that football supporters are representative of the whole UK population.

_________________
Sick Left-wing Zealot.

Yes, yiayia - it used to be titled 'Ten Little Niggers'. Nothing remotely troubling there.

+1
Applying 21st century morality to 19th century people isn't very realistic.

"Puck of Pook's Hill" was a childhood favourite of mine and instrumental in fuelling my love of history.

_________________
That subtle admixture of the absurd and the surreally plausible...

DM readers are swarming like flies to denounce Barnes because they can not be racist as they know Black people.

Humiliating Barnes is just part the DM agenda of hate and looking at the comments, readers fall for it.

Do not look for answers at an intellectual level, as there are none at all.

_________________
"Fanaticism is the only form of willpower to which the weak minded and irresolute can rise."

Agreed. But consuming Edwardian literature uncritically isn't good for anyone. The key to reading a writer like Kipling is to approach him simultaneously from historical and present perspectives. His attitude to colonialism was ambivalent — ours is critical. It's important to highlight the perspectives we share, and those we do not.

The Mailites can't handle that. They can't even read the Daily Mail critically. Their understanding of racism is, ahem, black or white — either you're (permanently and unpleasantly) racist or some of your favourite footballers are black. As children, Mailites did not see the racism in Tintin in the Congo, therefore there is none; they read Tarzan yet have not lynched a single black person, therefore Tarzan is not racist. The idea that they did not notice the racism in those books, and do not notice it in their own behaviour, might be because they have white privilege does not occur to them. And when John Barnes points it out to them, they react by insulting him.

I think I consume all literature critically, Edwardian or not...

A common phrase then, but nothing to do with the plot of the book. A phrase we are well rid of, but I'm not convinced that reading Christie nowadays inclines one to be racist.

_________________
Sick Left-wing Zealot.

I'd say it was more a class thing with those thirties detective stories. As there were so few black people in Britain at the time they don't really appear.

I'm sure you do. It's such an important skill to have.

The specificity of Kipling is that he was taught to the first waves of 'native' pupils in India, in Burma and elsewhere in the empire. Colonised peoples learnt about themselves through the words of this benevolent but sometimes blinkered white European. Kipling saw through some of the prejudices of his class and epoch, but missed and even encouraged others. (As we all do.) I'm not a huge fan, but I find it interesting to think about how he would have been read by those (privileged) subjects of empire.

I'm quite sure they'd have been more willing to listen to an Other lecture them about themselves than the Mailites are with John Barnes.

Me too, sometimes to the point where it annoys me because it makes me so slow as I analysis to the nth degree. I even do it with trash.

_________________
That subtle admixture of the absurd and the surreally plausible...