ABSTRACT
So could we all indeed have a ‘racist’ heart, as the title of this book suggests? And could it operate without any kind of conscious awareness? And what other kinds of unconscious or implicit biases may operate in everyday life? What about prejudices based on ethnicity or social class or region or social background or even something like beauty and physical attractiveness? How prevalent are they and how do these operate? I certainly have felt some of these prejudices in my own life so I could imagine how they might operate. But was there really something there or was I just being too sensitive back in the days of my fee paying school when I concluded that the headmaster and some of the teachers were implicitly (or, on occasion, explicitly) biased against me because of my class and my background. Or alternatively, did they simply know that to turn this boy from a rougher than average background into a proper ‘academy’ boy required a lot of hard work and perhaps some harsh lessons? After all, they did the trick. I did my PhD at Trinity College Cambridge where Kings Edward VII and George VI had studied, and Prince Charles. Prince Charles and I had the same college tutor, but separated by a number of years. ‘Never the brightest of students,’ my tutor would say in that slightly scurrilous and snobbish Cambridge manner about the young Charles, ‘never the brightest’. But later I found that manner turned against me, even after I had left. When I went back to college from my new home in Sheffield, where I was now lecturing, in a brand new suit, to dine with him on High Table the night before I was to receive my PhD, he turned up in a denim jacket, his dark hair slightly tousled in a studied sort of way, and looked at me in that slightly camp manner of his and said, ‘You look very prosperous,’ and then there was a long dramatic pause before the punchline, and, of course, the put-down, ‘in a Northern sort of way’. He then explained that he had other things to do that night (implying that he had much more interesting things to do), but he was sure that I would enjoy dining on my own sandwiched between the other graduands and their tutors who had turned up to dine with their students. But, at least, I had made it to the college of Prince Charles, not to mention the college of Byron and Tennyson, Earl Balfour and Nehru, Francis Bacon, Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell, Isaac Newton and Lord Rutherford (who had also worked on atomic fission at Manchester for a number of years, leaving a radioactive legacy in the very fabric of the building where I was now working).
