“Obviously, America’s an extraordinarily racist country.” So says Gary Lineker, a successful soccer player in the 1980s who went on to become a $2 million-per-year BBC sports presenter. That’s not a bad wage when you consider that the BBC is taxpayer-funded. He made his remarks in the context of…
bviously, America’s an extraordinarily racist country.” So says Gary Lineker, a successful soccer player in the 1980s who went on to become a $2 million-per-year BBC sports presenter. That’s not a bad wage when you consider that the BBC is taxpayer-funded. He made his remarks in the context of saying that, whatever Qatar’s human rights record, the United States as the next World Cup host had problems of its own.
The shocking thing here is the “obviously.” In the circles in which Lineker moves, the idea that the U.S. is peculiarly racist, almost as bad as Britain, goes without saying. One of the oddities of the public discourse in the U.S. is the inverse correlation between how racist the country actually is and how much people fret about it. On every measure, from the end of lynchings to the rise of mixed marriages, racism in the U.S. has declined sharply and palpably. In the 1950s, 40% of white Americans said they would move if a black family bought the house next door, 55% approved of segregated schools, and over 90% opposed interracial marriage.
There are two things wrong with the “only white people are racist” shtick. First, it is palpably untrue. The West did not introduce the notion of categorizing whole peoples. On the contrary, it introduced the notion of the sovereign individual into a world that had until then been tribal. The reason we have a word for racism, the reason we recognize that it is unjust, is that a combination of Judeo-Christian and Enlightenment traditions teach us to see the world that way.
France Dernières Nouvelles, France Actualités
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