I was watching the news with two white friends last Friday, when a story came on about a woman who had been blinded by her boyfriend. The man and woman, both white, had been involved in fights before, but this time he "went too far," according to the woman. It was a really sad story. There was a particular moment that was really heart wrenching - when asked how she felt about what happened, the woman responded that she felt like a ghost, as she is totally blind and can't see anything (not her two children, and not even her hands). Tears began to flow from both eyes, and she said sorry to the interviewer as she dabbed them with a handkerchief.
This is the kind of story that makes me want to do something (write an article, contribute to a cause, be on the lookout for signs of domestic violence, etc). I don't know how my friends felt, but I was sad and angry at the same time - sad for the woman, and very angry with the man. Nobody has the right to hurt, talk less of blind, another human being! I was so angry that if I had come across the man later that evening - which was very unlikely given that he had been arrested - I would have likely approached him and given him a piece of my mind.
But as I reflected on my conflicting emotions, something occurred to me. My white friends spoke more about the sadness of the woman's condition, than the injustice of what her boyfriend did. It was almost as if they had accepted (rightly, I guess) that there are sick white people in the world, and that these things happen. I found myself wondering what their reactions might have been had the man been black. Would they have reacted the same way by focusing more on the victim than the assailant? I do not know. But I do know what I saw and heard during the London riots last year - white friends of mine mentioned to me that black kids often end up as gangsters that cause trouble, and that the police should come down hard on the rioters to deter other would be gangsters.
And that's when it occurred to me that when a white person commits a crime, most whites tend to see that person as the bad apple in the cart. The system deals with him or her, and the rest of the apple cart remains safe (at least till the next bad apple turns up). However when a black person (or a group of black persons) commits a crime, conservative whites tend to see that as justification of their suspicion that all the apples in the black cart are bad. And their response is almost always to ask that society deal with the individual apple(s), as well as all apples in the cart (the former through the formal justice system, and the latter through informal, institutionalised racist practices).
My friends that I watched the news story with are not conservatives, but sitting and watching the story with them, I could not help but wonder how our discussion could have gone had the perpetrator been black. Because he was white, we spoke about the individuals involved. But I suspect had he been black we would have spoken about the races or "communities" involved, and I might have had to once again explain to white friends that black people are not all the same (like I found myself doing several times during the London riots). My white friends also know that white people are all different; it's obvious from years of interacting with other whites at home, school, work and play. They also know this from history and the media. Yet even some of my educated white friends are totally ignorant about the differences between black people. And the same problem applies in larger discussions in the media - note for example the common references to Africa, even when speaking about issues that are specific to certain countries (see an earlier post about this here).
I believe this ignorance leads to the lumping of black people together when issues are being discussed, which in turn makes it easier for conservative white Brits and their minions (Nirpal Dhaliwal, for example) to do something as daft as trying to criminalise all black people in England for the actions of Mark Duggan and the 1,000 people (representing less than 0.07% of the black population in England) who showed up at his funeral (see Dhaliwal's article here, and see my response here).
This kind of negative rhetoric does not help matters. For better or worse, blacks and other minorities are now part of multicultural England. And blacks (including African Americans, black Canadians, black people from the Caribbean, and black people from 55 African countries) have so much to contribute to The Big Society (with different types of music, cuisine, art, dance, literature, etc). But it is hard to make these contributions if the larger society keeps putting all black people into one cart, and labelling that cart as being likely full of bad apples. We are all in the same cart, and there are bad white apples, as well as black, amongst us all.
