Beware the backlash

Subject: Beware the backlash.

Gary Young is a young British black man presenting a story on Channel 4 television about the right wing movement in America and it's claim to white supremacy. It's one of those documentaries which purports  to seek answers to the deeply entrenched questions surrounding race. He is not an intellectual rather he is a man thrust into the job of presenting something he was ill equipped to represent, the strength of white feeling about their whiteness. Admittedly he had more than an interest being on the other side of the race equation but just as we recognise that it's insensitive to send people in to interview segments of society if they have any hostility to what they might find so with American white supremacist, sticking a British black man into the lions den of a white supremacist rally in the Deep South seemed to me more than inappropriate.
Now I am on fragile ground because my assumption of race, of my whiteness has in recent years been dismantled by nonwhite people, although I'm not supposed to evaluate myself in that way, poor old Gary was apoplectic hearing a far right leader denying his assumption that he not really British because of the colour of his skin and that the progress made in America was not based on the contribution the slave had made, rather it was due to the genius of the white man and his creative organisational skill. Gary of course, having grown up in Britain absorbing the myth that without the contribution of  African or Asian  people progress would not have occurred in this country and then the American by questioning his Britishness saying "but where do you really come from, where were your parents born", got at the root of much of the racial antagonism in this country.  Poor old Gary was unused to this line of argument his background was cemented on his birthright and his ethnicity (a state of belonging to a social group that has a common national or culture tradition) The American rightly or wrongly called him out on this and Gary became very very angry.
Much of our identity in this country has become a political construct, a construct to meet a political set of circumstances. I doubt if a white person born in Japan sees himself as Japanese other than having a passport which entitles him to reside there. Perhaps he does by absorbing the culture but to the Japanese around him refer to him as Gaijkokujin a foreigner and specifically caucasians are identified in this way. The Chinese call us Gweilo, in India we are Gora or Falang and there are racial epithets in all these terms acknowledging the difference in our background. Only in Britain do we banish background as a way of getting to the root of a persons historical story.
It was a show put together by Channel 4 and resembled a similar antagonism when they sent Louis's Theroux to interview the right wing Afrikaner Eugene Tablanche. It was a mismatch of cultures and designed purely to accentuate that difference, to provoke a fight and like so many of the so called 'actuality shows' was no more than red meat to the UK audience.
Gary's British naivety, protected and endorsed by the Race Relations Act, left him unable to fathom how these questions could be asked. They are outlawed back in the UK and his angry response showed how disarmed people have become by a decade of political correctness. The assumptions made by non white people about us and about them toward us are never challenged, it's an anathema to the media or sections of Middle England academia who find shame in being white and British and are almost gleeful to receive a kicking over our past.  We are almost alone in declaring ourselves unfit to have any sense of pride in our past. But if you ask a Frenchman or an Italian, a Greek, anybody from a Slavic background, an Indian or Chinese, all are proud of their birthright and their history, but not us.
We have supinely given it away, to who ever wants it.  People who either arrived since the war or their children can freely trash our heritage and history by using the very laws which were designed to prevent it happening to them.