Ghandi was quite right, of course. Indians are very different from Africans. But the British whites couldn't see this a century or so ago. Anybody who was black or even partially so, was considered inferior. When Dr Livingstone was surveying Africa on behalf of the British Government in the mid-nineteenth century, and was then subsequently praised for his magnificant courage in penetrating the "dark continent", the newspapers and the subsequent history books didn't mention that most of central Africa had already been surveyed by two Portuguese -- but they were mulattoes, so they didn't count as real explorers. Also, Dr Livingstone simply didn't notice that, as he gradually struggled along the Nile, deeper and deeper into the 'dangerous' rain forest interior of Africa, he was also passing regular Indian trading posts that had been there for many decades.
But there are genetic traits which are different. Just as African blacks are the best 100 metre athletes in the world (and will probably dominate English football and several other sports in the coming years*) for genetic reasons, so do they also possess genetic predispositions in behaviour. I saw a BBC Horizon programme last night about the fate of Caribbean blacks in this country. It was so sad. Their unemployment rate is enormous, they populate our prisons to a considerable extent, there are almost no black businesses in the whole of the country, it is becoming normal for young blacks to carry guns for self-protection in many boroughs such as Hackney in London and other parts of the country, as Prof Bill Julius Wilson told me in 1996 about the blacks he was researching in Chicago, the only thing for many of the most enterprising blacks to do in England today is to push drugs (in this country black drug gangs from the Midlands are now spreading cocaine and crack into the far north of Scotland), only a minority of black mothers are supported by the fathers as they try to raise children, and so on, and so on.
The whole affair is an immense tragedy and there's no solution. It isn't helped -- and it's made a great deal worse -- by the ideology of the last 50 years ins considering all races as somehow the same, with the same inclinations and the same potential cultures. Yes, when they are among us, in our culture, they should have the same rights as everybody else. Of course they should. Everybody is as human as everybody else. But it doesn't work out that way and it is likely that it never will, particularly as the stresses of modern life become greater for everybody and in which we also have an increasing white underclass and an increasingly hopeless sub-middle-class dumbed-down by our educational system.
And then, to return to Ghandi's country, what about the caste system there? Upper caste middle-class Hindus, superbly well-educated (far better than anything that exists in our English state schools**) are now taking jobs away from American and UK call centres (but who are already progressing into higher quality jobs such as call-centre investment analysis and consultancy), but those lower in the caste system have little hope of advancement -- lower caste wives are still set fire to if their husbands die. Periodically, thousands still die in India when Moslems and Hindus attack each other.
There are probably only a handful of gene clusters that are different as between white Europeans, Africans, Indians, Chinese, etc. Maybe, in two, three or four centuries, when we have all interbred -- if we ever do -- these differences will have disappeared but, meanwhile, there'll still be great differences in behaviour and cultures. This isn't racism. It's an acceptance of reality. I think this is going to be increasingly clear as increasing energy prices produce enormous tensions between countries. I think there are going to see immense changes in the social structure of advanced countries in the coming decades.
(*I think that the Olympic Games will die a death in the not too-distant future (say, within a couple of decades) because sports will become so competitive that they'll be increasingly specialised and dominated by one race or another -- e.g. Ethiopeans in the marathon, etc, etc. And then there'll be no real inter-country contests.)
(**Many [unwealthy] Indian families in England are now sending their children back to India to boarding schools there because they are appalled by the standard of education in the state schools that are available in their area.)
Keith Hudson
<<<< GHANDI BRANDED RACIST AS JOHANNESBURG HONOURS FREEDOM FIGHTER
Rory Carroll
Johannesburg -- It was supposed to honour his resistance to racism in South Africa, but a new statue of Mahatma Gandhi in Johannesburg has triggered a row over his alleged contempt for black people. The 2.5 metre high (8ft) bronze statue depicting Gandhi as a dashing young human rights lawyer has been welcomed by Nelson Mandela, among others, for recognising the Indian who launched the fight against white minority rule at the turn of the last century.
But critics have attacked the gesture for overlooking racist statements attributed to Gandhi, which suggest he viewed black people as lazy savages who were barely human. Newspapers continue to publish letters from indignant readers "Gandhi had no love for Africans. To [him], Africans were no better than the 'Untouchables' of India," said a correspondent to The Citizen. Others are harsher, claiming the civil rights icon "hated" black people and ignored their suffering at the hands of colonial masters while championing the cause of Indians.
Unveiled this month, the statue stands in Gandhi Square in central Johannesburg, not far from the office from which he worked during some of his 21 years in South Africa. The British-trained barrister was supposed to have been on a brief visit in 1893 to represent an Indian company in a legal action, but he stayed to fight racist laws after a conductor kicked him off a train for sitting in a first-class compartment reserved for whites.
Outraged, he started defending Indians charged with failing to register for passes and other political offences, founded a newspaper, and formed South Africa's first organised political resistance movement. His tactics of mobilising people for passive resistance and mass protest inspired black people to organise and some historians credit Gandhi as the progenitor of the African National Congress, which formed in 1912, two years before he returned to India to fight British colonial rule.
However, the new statue has prompted bitter recollections about some of Gandhi's writings. Forced to share a cell with black people, he wrote "Many of the native prisoners are only one degree removed from the animal and often created rows and fought among themselves." He was quoted at a meeting in Bombay in 1896 saying that Europeans sought to degrade Indians to the level of the "raw kaffir, whose occupation is hunting and whose sole ambition is to collect a certain number of cattle to buy a wife with, and then pass his life in indolence and nakedness". The Johannesburg daily This Day said GB Singh, the author of a critical book about Gandhi, had sifted through photos of Gandhi in South Africa and found not one black person in his vicinity.
The Indian embassy in Pretoria declined to comment, as it prepared for President Thabo Mbeki's visit to India. Khulekani Ntshangase, a spokesman for the ANC Youth League, defended Gandhi, saying the critics missed the bigger picture of his immense contribution to the liberation struggle. Gandhi's offending comments were made early in his life when he was influenced by Indians working on the sugar plantations and did not get on with the black people of modern-day KwaZulu-Natal province, said Mr Ntshangase.
"Later he got more enlightened." >>>> The Guardian -- 17 October 2003
Keith Hudson, Bath, England, <www.evolutionary-economics.org>, <www.handlo.com>, <www.property-portraits.co.uk>
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