Sticking your head above the parapet

Subject: Sticking your head above the parapet.

Can a white person suffer from racialism.
The question asked was to an audience in Britain. Of course the audience had its proponents who argued that white people can never know the prejudice of race such as a black person experiences and its humiliating to black people to ask such a thing.
There were the usual protagonists who make their living articulating the black persons hurt and their disadvantaged position in our society. A black persons  negative identification, due to the colour of their skin, categorises that person according to racial  norms and the embedded hurt in some of the black speakers seemed to me to speak as much about them as about racism.
They all use Britain as their bench mark and hold this society as failing in its ability to be colour blind but it's strange that as a society, we seem to attract so many people who after travelling from the four corners on earth to get here, after arriving, soon seem to be at odds with our society and want to change what they find here. It's doubtful if their memory cast its thoughts back to where they originate from or the crucial issues that made them want to leave.
In the program no one seemed to think that 'white people' could ever be offended by racial opinion.  It is assumed that race and prejudice are the province of the powerful and that through the years of white expansion in terms of, British, Portuguese, Spanish, and German Empires, the countries which the white supremacist conquered and who set up mirror images of their own systems back home which excluded the indigenous local. A "them and us" mentality furthered the resentment which is  naturally felt by people who had had the power and their unique system of governance taken away from them by force.
Resentments is  meal eaten slowly and having decided to leave their own country they carried the resentment into their newly adopted home where for a few it festered.

If as a white person I were to go and live in Zimbabwe there is no doubt I would feel the odd man out and experience racialism. As a white man living in Saudi Arabia or Iran I would feel the impact of not being one of them. If I relocated to China or Japan I would be looked upon as an outsider and inferior. 

Non of this was inferred by the liberal UK audience, who on these occasions turn over on their backs in meek subservience and seek  forgiveness with many heartfelt apologies. As each black speaker decried the country they had chosen to settle in, the audience warmed to their anger and engaged in the usual bout of middle class self flagellation.
Mr Mugabe's overt racism was never mentioned. President Zuma's overwhelming desire to convert the whole racial power structure in South Africa to a black one  on the basis of a democratic mandate which, in a tribal setting, is an anathema to the chief and his elders, whilst subjugating the remaining whites still living there.
Of course people will say that, in the African context, it's about time the whites received their comeuppance but that aside, "racial profiling"   this time appertaining to a person with a white skin, is alive and well.
In this mornings multicultural audience no one had a good word to say for the beleaguered white person. The ideologically bullied,  home produced white man or women in the audience was unwilling to stick their head above the parapet and so the  issue was turned on its head and we were reminded, in monologue after monologue, what bad shits we white folk really are.