ABSTRACT
I am talking to you as, originally, and to some extent still, a white racist, and I want you to know why I say such a thing and what I mean by it. I was born before the Second World War, so when I was in school we were shown all those classic stereotypical things. I can remember being shown the globe and the teacher had a spoon and showed how small England was beside the head of the spoon, then I was shown all the red areas on the map: ‘See how important we are’. We were an entirely white class of course, and my own experience of black people was from Tarzan films on Saturday mornings: black people leaping up and down; black people being villainous; black people being servants, and all the rest of it, all those cliches you know about, and disgracefully those films are still shown. So that’s where I was coming from. As I grew up in Manchester, after the war, I didn’t see any black people; I may have seen the occasional American serviceman during the war, but I can’t remember it. Then I went to Australia. I trust you know something of how, in the 1950s and ‘60s, Aboriginees were still excluded from white society, perhaps not so much now, though the battle continues. So my experience was not good for not being a racist, if you see what I mean. I had to go through a stage of seeing black people on television, speaking about politics or some other topic, and of thinking, Isn’t that black person talking intelligently. How interesting.’ I don’t know how far I’ve got on that journey of learning about my own racism. It’s hard isn’t it, digging out things like that from yourself, especially when the impressions are given to you so young. I don’t know if it is easy for young people present to know what it was like when there were very few black people in England, or at least where I was from. There’s no doubt that those appalling depictions in Tarzan films do go into one’s brain and have influence.
