Feet Of Clay?

We all rewrite our personal history, but due to journal-keeping I can check on early versions of events. Therefore I think I can say with some confidence that I’ve never really had heroes or role-models. The closest identifiable person was one I mentioned in a school essay when I was thirteen, a couple of years before I started writing a detailed diary in earnest and at length, and it was Kate Bush. I can still see that, to be honest. I obviously wouldn’t have a sportsperson as a hero due to my total lack of interest, but I suppose I might have a scientist or an author, or there might be someone in my everyday life such as a friend, relative or teacher, and in fact there probably are two identifiable people who fall into this category. They are one of my English teachers and Isaac Asimov.

I’ll start with my English teacher, whose name I won’t mention. Just to be clear, I had two particularly significant English teachers I have reason to refer to and I don’t want them to be confused. One was the folk singer John Jones of the Oysterband, known under the name Fiddler’s Dram for the one-hit wonder ‘Day Trip To Bangor’. This is not the person I’m talking about and I want to emphasise that although my view of him at the time was unfairly negative for some reason I don’t understand, he’s clearly a diamond geezer and I once tried to get his band to sing at a fundraising festival for Greenpeace. Not him, not him, not him! Okay?

So, the guy I’m talking about is my favourite teacher of all, and a significant influence on me, shall as I said remain nameless. At an early stage he opened my eyes to the evils of homophobia, encouraged my creative writing, introduced me to Radio 4 and facilitated my appreciation of literature. He was my English Language and Literature teacher for three years altogether, at twelve and from fourteen to fifteen. I visited him in his home twice. Whenever I begin a sentence with a present participle, that’s his influence. He was also blind, apparently due to albinism, but refused to be registered blind because he regarded it as an unnecessary encumbrance. He had disguised his blindness at his job interview. He was also single the whole time I knew of him, and left the school as a full-time teacher shortly after I did, citing me as the reason, because he felt the school couldn’t cope with my talent and personality and nurture me properly. Yes, he specifically left my school because of me, and this isn’t just something he told me but something which appeared in the local paper when he became a post master. If you want a model of what he was like, watch ‘Dead Poets’ Society’. A minor but interesting detail which came out later was that he had also been Boris Johnson’s teacher a few years previously, at a different school, and in fact the first time I heard Boris Johnson’s name was in 1979 when he mentioned him as a star pupil in passing. I honestly never had a better secondary school teacher and he really believed in me.

I’m sure you know what’s coming because this is how all stories like this end. A few years ago, he was found guilty of serial sexual abuse of children at another school where he taught in the 1960s CE and early ’70s and sentenced to fourteen years. This had been at a previous school, the one where he taught Boris, and it had been conveniently omitted from his reference for my state school, and to me the implication is that the independent school in question decided that it was okay to have him teach at such a school because oiks don’t matter. A book has been written about this whole situation, which incidentally criticises J K Rowling for promoting boarding schools as positive institutions because the author sees them as inextricably rife with abuse and ‘Harry Potter’ as making children want to go to them where he expects them to suffer at their hands. My school friends and I talked about the situation at length shortly after it came out and we agreed that you could see the signs. One frustrating aspect of the book written about him is that the author is not allowed to report on his defence, which he predictably made himself, because it would give insight into how abusers think and operate and therefore that way of thinking went unchallenged when it was in fact entirely spurious and easily refuted, and the insidious nature of his arguments would therefore continue to persuade people otherwise.

Now I don’t know what the argument was, but I’m going to take a stab at two candidates for it. My original thought was that it was based on pederasty, and remember this isn’t just idle speculation: I had extensive contact with him over many years. Pederasty, which you probably know about already, was an openly acknowledged and positively sanctioned institution in the Greco-Roman world where a sexual relationship existed between a fully adult man and an adolescent boy as part of a mentoring situation, which might later be repeated by the boy after he reached maturity. Given his background in independent schools, which in England often emphasise Greco-Roman patrician culture, I can easily believe that this is where he was coming from.

The other candidate I can think of, and the two aren’t mutually exclusive, is a common line of argument in the ’60s to the ’80s that just as homosexuality and extra-marital sex became accepted, so should active paedophilia. In fact I’m almost certain that he believed this. It was really prevalent at the time. The National Council for Civil Liberties supported paedophilia, as did the German Green Party in the ’80s, and there were also adoption programmes for paedophiles in Germany at the time which encouraged known paedophiles to adopt children in orphanages so that they could abuse them. In Britain there was the Paedophile Information Exchange. It was simply seen as the logical extension of tolerance for homosexual sex at the time, for several decades. We need to acknowledge that this was so and, equally, assert calmly, without panicking, that this is not okay. Nonetheless, I think this may have been how my teacher argued, and ironically by arguing to me that homophobia was no better than active racism and sexism, he persuaded me to adopt the attitude I still have today, and it is correct. But he very probably took it further. What was absent, and I think this applies more widely, was the notion of consent and the ability to do so.

It’s very easy to say that he had a bad and a good side and that people are complex, and that’s true but I don’t think it’s that simple. For him at least, I think these things were part of an organic whole. The very qualities I perceive positively are intimately related to the vices. It isn’t that people can’t function and be, say, anti-homophobic, pro-feminist, anti-racist without also being child abusers, but in his case they were all connected and that made sense to him. So I suspect.

The other example is less personal, although he too has been an influence on me in a way, and this time it applies to many millions of other people. I’m talking, of course, about Isaac Asimov. Asimov goes back a long way for me and I’m not sure exactly how far, but I do know I got his ‘Guide To Science’ for Christmas 1975 and I was already familiar with some of his fiction then. I was also aware of his screenplay for ‘Fantastic Voyage’, although like many other people I didn’t realise he wasn’t the author. Much of his fiction, though not all, consists of men talking to each other in rooms far away from any action, which may not even be happening, and his main genres are science fiction and mystery, but from the ’60s onward he moved away from fiction towards more general writing, initially in science as he was a professor of biochemistry and then famously branching out into every century of the Dewey Decimal System except philosophy. One of his major qualities is writing extremely plain language and he’s a genius at communicating complex concepts clearly to the general reader. Even today, I sometimes go back to his explanations, for instance for the electron configurations of the transition metals and rare earths, because no-one I can recall is as good as he is at clear, explicatory writing. He’s famously responsible for the Three Laws of Robotics and like many other sci-fi authors he successfully predicted the internet and many other 21st century technologies. Going back to his sci-fi, he made a major attempt in his later years to link most of his stories together in a manner which I and many other readers found tiresome, and his second attempt at ‘Fantastic Voyage’ is probably the second most tedious novel I’ve ever read (the most boring is Aldiss’s ‘Report On Probability A’). His most celebrated story is ‘The Last Question’, but actually I don’t think it’s that good. Two of his favourite stories, and here I agree with the consensus that they are indeed brilliant, are ‘The Ugly Little Boy’ and ‘The Dead Past’. The former is about a nurse who is hired by a scientific establishment to care for a Neanderthal child whom she develops a strong caring relationship with and ultimately makes a major sacrifice forced upon her by a heartless decision by her employer. It’s good, brilliant in fact, but to my mind his best story is ‘The Dead Past’, which has a number of things going on but basically recounts a professor of ancient history who strongly suspects he accidentally started a house fire years before which killed his daughter and is attempting to prove that the Phoenicians didn’t sacrifice their children by fire by persuading a physicist to develop a Chronovisor to look into the distant past, but is being investigated by a McCarthyite, CIA-like government body which it turns out is trying to protect the privacy of the general public and is being genuinely benevolent. To my mind, ‘The Dead Past’ is one of the best stories I have ever read, regardless of genre. It should also be said that although the ‘Foundation Trilogy’ can be perceived as a textual sleeping pill, it also presents an interesting parallel to Marxist theory, invented the idea of music videos in the early 1940s, formed the basis of the setting which ‘Dune’ reacted against and ‘Star Wars’ copied and created the concept of the Encyclopedia Galactica, which in turn led to Douglas Adams’s Guide and ultimately Wikipedia. It must also be said that the Apple TV series using the same name is an adaptation in name only and that the film ‘I Robot’ is also very dissimilar to any of the robot stories.

But there’s a complication, of course. It manifests itself in his fictional writing fairly clearly. Asimov is not keen on characterisation and up until fairly late in his career, he tended to avoid portraying sex and relationships. There are some exceptions. For instance, ‘Satisfaction Guaranteed’ is about a woman committing adultery with an android, ‘Feminine Intuition’ is about a gynoid being designed to find the nearest habitable planet because masculine thought processes are getting nowhere. Moreover, the chief robopsychologist in the robot stories is Susan Calvin and she is not in any way a stereotype, being single, child-free and asexual. However, Asimov’s behaviour in real life with women is from a 21st century deeply dodgy. He was known to be “all hands” and was nicknamed “The Octopus” at science fiction conventions. One of the women he worked with complained about his sexual harassment in something like the 1950s or 1960s and was actually listened to, so it must’ve been pretty bad. He also wrote two books, ‘The Sensuous Dirty Old Man’ and ‘Lecherous Limericks’ which celebrated sexual harassment and assault as perceived today. The former is actually an instruction manual for it, although to be fair it is also a parody of a pair of books popular at the time, ‘The Sensuous Woman’ and ‘The Sensuous Man’, so the context for this is missing. Later in his life, the slightly older SF author Alfred Bester, who was incidentally exceedingly monogamously married to a woman for forty-eight years until her death, and also seems to have been a bit of a jock as opposed to Asimov’s nebbischkayt (nerdishness) gave him a bear hug, snogged him and repeatedly pinched his bottom to teach him a lesson, and he was somewhat repentant after that but unfortunately the way he put his response made it sound more like that he was personally hurt because his advances had been constantly unwelcome. Furthermore, although parents can’t be held entirely responsible for their adult children’s actions, David Asimov was found by California police to have the largest collection of images of child sexual exploitation ever found in the area.

But as I said, it isn’t that simple. In the late ’50s or early ’60s, he was at a meeting about scientists and someone made a comment about their wives, to which he chipped in “or their husbands”, scandalising the meeting, including women, because they thought he was talking about gay men when he meant female scientists, and he went on to say that it wouldn’t matter if they were gay either. At another point at a conference about Judaism, and although he was Jewish he wasn’t observant or religious, he objected to another Jewish person saying they didn’t trust scientists or engineers because of their involvement in the Holocaust by saying that the only reason the Jews hadn’t persecuted anyone historically was that they hadn’t had the opportunity to, and that on the one occasion when they had, with the Maccabees, they’d done so, which was not anti-semitic so much as an observation that it’s a general problem with human beings that, if we can, we may well persecute others. This seems quite prophetic in view of recent events.

Okay, so the differences between Asimov and my English teacher are naturally considerable, but the advantage of considering the former is that he’s much more prominent for all sorts of reasons to the English-speaking world. My English teacher has some notoriety nationally, but it’s quite low-key, and this makes him harder to treat as an example. It isn’t enough even to use the excuse that “it was a different time” here, because even at the time Asimov’s behaviour was strongly objected to and it must’ve been quite serious. However, he was also protected by his fame. On one occasion, when he sexually assaulted someone in a lift at a conference, the woman’s partner objected and it was he, not Asimov, who was ejected from the building. I’d be surprised if this was the only time this happened. Women would avoid SF conferences because he was there and this is very likely to have impacted on their careers long term and kept them away from success.

These things tend to come to notice about public figures due to the internet. The question arises of what may have happened in the past which never became widely known about others. It’s said that one should never meet one’s heroes, but it may be even worse than that. Maybe most people’s lives don’t bear scrutiny. Thinking about my own past, I can’t think of much that I’d be unhappy if it were more widely known, but maybe that’s how it works. Maybe people usually justify things to themselves or alter their own memories in their favour. I tend to think that the only difference nowadays is that things are harder to hide.

There is also the question of changing values and attitudes. Jimmy Savile, for example, wasn’t just protected by his fame, but also by the normalisation of sexual assault, objectification and harassment at the time. It isn’t just a question of faulty record-keeping. Rolf Harris is an even harder case to conceptualise, because unlike Savile he was actually very talented and creative. Savile probably was too, but not publicly so much as being good at getting away with his abuse. Even he, though, has his defenders. Some of the people he helped on ‘Jim’ll Fix It’ went on to build successful careers on the contacts they made and won’t hear a word against him. There can be a kind of sunk-cost fallacy here, in that having committed oneself to a particular set of opinions about someone, it’s hard to change one’s mind and retract them, even internally.

But why does it happen like this? Is there something about success that breeds this? Is it that success and the atrocities go hand in hand because they result from the same origins? Or, is it more that people who become well-known have their lives more closely scrutinised and that basically everyone’s a bit of a git when it comes down to it?

I’m aware that there’s a long list of men in this post. There are terrible women too, and there’s a bias I’ve seen referred to as the “women are wonderful bias”, which excuses women of more and presumes their good faith. However, it remains the case that men are more successful than women in public life and therefore have more opportunities to do wrong, so even without a gender bias they can be expected to have sinned against more. That said, there are allegations against Marion Zimmer Bradley. Although she may be less well-known than the men I’ve mentioned, MZB as she’s often referred to was a sci-fi and fantasy author whose daughter Moira Greyland accused her of sexually abusing her throughout her childhood, exposing her to other people to sexually abuse her and being forced to participate in ritualised sexual abuse. Unfortunately from a queer-tolerant perspective, Greyland sees this as integral to LGBTQIA2S (you can see why I hate that initialism) identity. MZB’s husband was found guilty of multiple counts of child sexual abuse – this much is not in doubt. As far as I understand it, she also defended his behaviour publicly, and also claimed to be feminist. This is to some extent reminiscent of Simone de Beauvoir, who is on record as publicly defending active paedophilia.

I don’t know, I haven’t got an answer to this. What do you think?

Racism And Islamophobic Racism

Someone asked a question the other day about Islamophobia and why that would be counted as racism, and also discussed racism as such, so I thought it might be worth talking about it in a little more depth. I’m aware I’ve done this before, but probably not from this angle. It’s also on my mind a bit after an exchange with a White acquaintance a week or so ago which is worth revisiting.

Last week, then, some people from here went to Carlisle for a counter-demonstration to the racist protest there, including my acquaintance. I made a very common statement which I expected him to agree with, that all White people are racist. He challenged me on this and I realised I didn’t have a ready answer, so it’s worth going into more depth on this matter.

I am an extremely lucky person. I was born in the developed world in just about the mid-twentieth century CE, I’m human, White, able-bodied, my first language is English and I’m middle class. I’m privileged in most of the ways anyone can be, and it’s important to remember this because of the “let them eat cake” (yes, I know nobody said that) obliviousness this gifts me with. I’m at the top of almost every pile. I’m even from the English Home Counties. Being in such a position means that to me, many issues are abstract and have little to no effect on my quality of life. I’m out of touch in ways which may very well harm others. This might sound like self-flagellation but it isn’t. It simply means that I am as valuable and worthwhile as any other person while also having the luxury of privilege, and of course many people in other categories rightly envy my position and might want to swap if that was possible. People who are less privileged than me might find it hard to understand how someone like Oprah Winfrey or Michelle Obama lacks privilege that they might have, and they do have a point because past a certain line sheer wealth cushions one from the effects of prejudice. However, a poor working-class White man is unlikely, for example, to be transvestigated to the extent Michelle Obama has been. In case you don’t know, there are probably thousands of people who see Barack and Michelle Obama as a gay male couple and Michelle as a trans woman, partly because White ideals of femininity refer to a White ideal female body. It’s very likely that Michelle Obama is protected from potential assassins, but she has to be protected like other powerful figures, and in her case the risk is greater than it would be for someone like Bill Clinton, or for that matter a poor working-class White bloke in England. Hence White privilege, and for that matter fragility, do exist.

This bit is going to be a rehash of a previous post I’ve now lost on ethnicity. The San people, also known as the “Bushmen”, of South Africa and adjacent states, are genetically unusually diverse for a human group. Interestingly, they’re more likely to be albino than any other such group, and although people always intermarry they can be thought of mainly as the sister group to the rest of humanity. One way in which this has been expressed is that it’s easily possible for two San individuals to be as different genetically as an average Irish person is from an average Sri Lankan. There’s nothing special about those two selections incidentally. I could equally well say the average Fuegan and the average Australian Aboriginal. There is also more variation within Afrika than outside it, genetically, so if we are going to divide people into ethnicities genetically, they may as well consist of a number of Afrikan races plus a single race comprising the people of the Sahara and everyone else. This is a bit of an oversimplification though, because Central Asia also has a lot of variation compared to the rest of the planet. Speaking of Central Asia, however, there is a small group somewhere in the Himalayas, if I remember correctly, which is considerably genetically distinct from others but is never regarded as a separate ethnicity in spite of the fact that the average difference between it and other races is as big as between White people and Native Americans, for example. I’ve seen a claim that it’s the Tajiks. If it is, the Tajiks to most people are basically slightly different from Persians in a similar way to the French and English being different. But I don’t know.

Some species are more diverse than others. Cheetahs and Beluga whales are known for being particularly genetically similar within their respective species. On the other hand, there’s a species of roundworm, Caenorhabditis brenneri, whose genes are the most diverse of any known animal species, being as different as lions and tigers even though they’re in the same genus as the famous Caenorhabditis elegans and in a whole phylum of animals which are very difficult for non-experts to tell apart. Humans nowadays are very genetically homogenous because of an incident, possibly the eruption of the Mount Toba volcano seventy-four thousand years ago, which by fifty thousand years ago left fewer than a thousand humans alive outside Afrika. There are some other species similarly affected at the same time such as the other great apes, macaques, the aforementioned cheetah and tigers (which I understand to be several species so I’m not sure what that means). On the whole, species are a lot more diverse than these, so we as humans, or rather Homo sapiens, are starting out from being remarkably similar to each other compared to most other species. Other species, ourselves included, can sometimes be thought of as having subspecies. As far as we’re concerned, that’s probably what Neanderthals were compared to us. That’s not the case for us any more, and hasn’t been so for many, many millennia. I have in my life been able to identify one person who was most genetically different from myself in that she probably had significant numbers of genes from Denisovan ancestors, and so far as I was concerned she was an Indonesian woman whose ethnicity as an Indonesian was more significant to her and others than her genetic makeup, even though she would’ve been dramatically unlike nearby neighbours in that country. It just didn’t matter, and in human terms the differences were really extreme.

My point, of course, is that we’re all mongrels. We’re all mixtures genetically. Moreover, the features on which we tend to focus as White people such as eye shape, skin tone, hair texture and shape of lips are not significant and don’t mean anything in terms of other features. It would be as easy to divide people up by other genetic characteristics such as blood group, tissue type or ability to digest various different compounds in food, which would have more important implications for everyone but would show groups of people which wouldn’t mean very much at all to us. There is basically no biological significance in what White people think of races. It may be true that dark skin protects it from sunlight damage but there are other inherited traits with other benefits elsewhere. Some people might have a genetic propensity not to be able to digest a particular species of caterpillar, which could be very significant in communities where they’re regularly eaten but we don’t use that to divide people up. We do do that with gluten intolerance but we don’t usually think about that in racial terms.

Hence there is no biological basis to race, or rather, its biological basis is arbitrarily decided from a biological perspective. What there is, and this is a social phenomenon, is racialisation. White people have decided that there are separate races, including White people who are in some way the “neutral” race and therefore usually have the privilege of not being aware of their own ethnicity without that being a potential problem for them. Hence we tend to be unaware of racism. It doesn’t quite work that way because, for example, English people tend to view the Irish as somewhat different and there can be prejudice against Ashkenazic Jews and White Eastern Europeans. Groups which are racialised basically have no choice but to be aware of racism. This means that our White privilege makes us able to be oblivious and therefore ignorant of the very real phenomenon of racism.

It often makes more sense to think of racism not as something people do so much as a structural and institutional problem from which White people benefit and racialised people suffer. One way this might help White people to accept our racism is to recognise that racist is simply something we are without seeing it as something which we accuse other White people of and of which we’re innocent. Apart from anything else, whether or not we’re actively racist, the point at which we decide other White people are racist and we aren’t is the end of us working to reduce our own racism and pursue anti-racism, which as White people is more our responsibility than that of racialised groups. It isn’t really the job of Black people to educate us about how we’re racist because we’re responsible for our ignorance and they suffer from it. It’s foisted upon them, and we do it to them, however passively, and passivity is tacit compliance. And again, this might sound like a guilt trip placed on myself and other White people, but it isn’t. It’s simply the recognition that we are racist and we need to do something about it.

A related feature of Whiteness is our fragility. This is also called White defensiveness, and describes our reluctance to talk about the Atlantic slave trade, European colonialism and downplaying the seriousness of racism. Another claim is of reverse racism, i.e. that White people also face prejudice. Accusations of this based on diversity-related affirmative action were once compared to the idea that having a wheelchair ramp into a building which occupies most of the width of some steps is prejudiced against able-bodied people. There clearly does seem to be “pulling the ladder up”-style racism, as with a group of a certain ethnicity then denying fair consideration to members of other, or even the same, minority groups. The Conservative cabinet in Westminster is notorious for doing this. Some research has been done into whether reverse racism exists, and it appears that it doesn’t in this respect, in the sense that it doesn’t impair opportunities to implement such policies. The idea that racism operates equally significantly or comparably between ethnicities is related to the idea that there are clear-cut biologically-based major categories of human populations between which prejudice occurs rather than the more accurate model that there are those able to escape racialisation and those who have been racialised. One thing which does happen, though, is that there can be prejudice between ethnic minorities, which serves White supermacists well through divisiveness.

Before I get to Islamophobia, I want to talk about anti-semitism as it informs the way Islamophobia is rightly understood as a form of racism. The Jewish people as an ethnicity have at least three aspects to their identity: genetic affinity, culture and faith. Jewish people are generally understood as people whose mothers are Jewish, but many people in that category don’t identify as Jewish. There are rarely also converts to the Jewish faith, which would make them Jewish, and people who marry into the faith are kind of “Jewish-adjacent” and may or may not have Jewish children. Not all Jewish people are White, and in fact it could be argued that being Jewish entails not being White, something worth analysing. First of all, skin tone varies a lot between people who are genetically 100% Jewish, such as the Beth Israel originating in Ethiopia, the Ashkenazim, Sephardim and Mizrahim. These people are subject to racism within their communities. There are also straightforwardly Black converts to Judaism such as Sammy Davis Jr. Secondly, there is a sense in which they are non-White in a similar way to the Roma and the Irish are in England, i.e. there is plainly explicit and conscious racism against them because they’re not White Anglo-Saxon Protestants. Their skin tone in this situation is no protection against racism. Nonetheless, there may be no genetic difference at all between them and White people. Imagine two identical twins, one of whom converts to the Jewish faith. These two people would be of different ethnicities.

It doesn’t take much thought to see parallels between anti-Semitism and Islam here. Anti-semitism can be prejudice against people who are physically identical to Gentiles. These are in a small minority but they exist. Thinking back to my time in the English East Midlands, I knew at least three White English converts to Islam and a family of Albanians who to me just looked the same as White English people and were Muslims simply because Albania is an Islamic majority country. Nonetheless these people would’ve met with prejudice because of being Muslim. Many Albanians are culturally Islamic as opposed to being practicing Muslims, so they’re Muslim in the same way as Richard Dawkins is, in his own words, “culturally Christian”. Islamophobia can operate against Albanians even in their own country. Ethnic cleansing against Albanians has been called for by Albanian far-right groups, the state sponsors the promotion of Christianity over Islam and there have been attacks against women in hijabs, who have been called “terrorists”. I probably don’t need to mention what happened in the Balkans in the 1990s CE. There’s also often equation between Muslims and Arabs. Indonesia has the largest number of Muslims anywhere in the world and is not part of the Arab world. But like anti-semitism, Islamophobia is clearly racism. Besides this comparison, when you also consider the unfounded idea that racism other than these examples is based on biological differences in any significant way, then yes, Islamophobia is a form of racism. It isn’t so much co-opted in as that other forms of racism are more similar to it than often realised.

The other thing I want to stress is that racism is something which exists in White people without us needing to commit any voluntary racist acts. We’re able to operate in the world as if racism doesn’t exist, and that obliviousness is a luxury others lack and don’t owe it to us to explain, but we do owe it to them to identify how what we do is racist and what we can do to oppose racism. For instance, a job application might enable someone’s ethnicity to be identified simply through their life history and addresses, which have then been picked up by AI and used to profile a typical successful applicant, and even though the AI may be oblivious of their race, it bakes in and perpetuates racism. There are micro-aggressions, such as praising someone on their language because one assumes their first language isn’t the same as yours. That’s absolutely not intentional but it is insensitive. You might look at a photo of, say, a church website or an environmental conservation or country rambling group and only see pictures of White people without being aware of what that might imply or questioning why that might be. There are all sorts of things.

In conclusion, although there clearly is such a thing as malicious and conscious racism, the more insidious aspects of White racism that I’ve mentioned here may have a bigger impact, and this is something which disadvantages us all because we need diversity. Otherwise, we may have something like the banana plant cultivation problem: homogenous similar strains of bananas subject to being wiped out all at once by infectious diseases to which all of them respond in the same way. Monoculture is dangerous and needs to be avoided for all of us. Diversity is a strength which racism works against.