Self-perpetuating resentment (I'm Not Racist But...)

Member Name: Hasufel

Product:	I'm Not Racist But...
Date:	01/12/02 (92 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Tolerance, Respect, Equal Opportunities

Disadvantages: Resentment, Baby out with the bathwater, Extinction of European culture

My personal belief is that we are all human beings and deserve certain rights, the standard human rights of freedom to pursue happiness, found a family and seek prosperity. And as a taoist I can't help but laugh at the way we so closely defend our national borders which are, to nature, imaginary, entirely transient concepts of human imagination, and which birds and fish and all of nature just ignore without penalty.

However....as I am also human, I can't help but feel that it's becoming a little unfair that white people are fashionably regarded uniformly as the oppressors. The majority of white people in England are tolerant and decent people - perhaps we have our own minority, an enemy within - the white English racist.

One thing that iritates me is when at school we were supposedly taught RE to learn about all cultures and religions. What actually happened was that we spent about one term learning about Christian religions, with one week devoted to each major denomination, before the ethnic minorities started complaining and excluding their kids from the class. We spent the rest of the five years at that school learning about every religion and culture under the sun, except that of our own people.

It seems that now most children I talk to know all about Muslim and Hindu and Jewish festivals, yet they don't even understand Easter and Christmas, and have no idea of some of the rural native English traditions that are still alive in their own homeland. Ask how many kids know about the Green Man or Beowulf, compared to how many know about what Indian people eat for dinner and the Jewish for passover.

There has been a great attempt to dumb down English culture, and indeed even the word English now seems like a dirty word as the Welsh and the Scots and the Irish seek to blame us for all their ills and misfortunes (though there are many Scots I've spoken to who resent our rule over them, there was only one who knew
the two kingdoms were legitimately united by their King inheriting our English throne, and that it wasn't won by battle).

Like the recent proliferation of compensation cases, everyone suing everyone else on a big bandwagon to get what they can while the fashion lasts, it seems that everyone's clamouring to find some excuse to 'sue' the English, jumping on this communal anti-majority bandwagon to see what rights and priveleges they can get the government to cede to them while the majority will still bear it.

If an Englishman researches even a little into the background of his people, he will find it an irrefutable fact that the majority of us descend from tribes originating from the north of Germany and Scandinavia. Yet if he says this out loud, or expresses pride in this, he's immediately shouted down as a Nazi by all the sudden proliferation of Celtic wannabes who decide that because their gran was half-welsh this makes them the sole spokepeople for all Celts who ever lived, and their personal quest seems to be to punish the English for the transgression of our ancestors over a millenium ago.

We're not supposed to be English, we're supposed to believe that we're all mongrels with equal amounts of French, Roman, Celtic and Germanic blood; was this idea originally put to us by someone who didn't want us to have any pride in our real roots, in case it sparked up racist riots again?

I've nothing against learning about other cultures and ignorance, prejudice and racism are some of the things that I find absolutely abhorrent to my soul. Indeed I've spent much of my life researching other cultures and learning many different languages, and I can plainly see there are many parts of English culture that would be better evolved away than preserved. But it seems to me that the continual dumbing down of English culture has only resulted in more resentment from the average Anglo-Saxon descendant, a
s he sees the achievements and folklore of his people being washed down the drain as politicians try to convert this country into a USA style melting pot, the metaphorical baby thrown out with the bathwater.

But why does it seem that the world opinion today is that it's the white man's duty to scuttle like a crab on the ocean floor of the other races' existence in eternal apology for the things done in the past (though very politically, no mention is made of the black kings in Africa who sold their own people, without whom no slave trade could have happened), while the ethnic minorities in England are simply allowed to turn their noses up at every effort we make to make amends, with no interest at all in learning about the culture of the country that has raised them, fed them, housed them, employed them and in many cases, given them asylum? And to every one of their sneers we're supposed to just crawl back to the drawing board crying, "It's just not enough, it's not enough!"

I'm not racist, but I am fed up of being made to feel that it's wrong just simply to be born white and English.

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