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► “A few years ago I was in Peckham, south London, having a drink in a pub with a certain guy from work. He was a likeable bloke, but he had a huge chip on his shoulder about his being a black guy in England, even though we both lived in a predominantly black area and he was born and raised in England, like millions of other black guys. He was a likeable guy, otherwise I wouldn’t have sat drinking with him, but, yeah, he kept bringing up race and complaining about white people this, white people that. I’m not sure how it came up, probably because of some racial moan on his part, but I told him that although I was English, my line on my father’s side is Irish. Suddenly, as far as he was concerned, I was no longer English but Irish, despite my insistence that I was English. ‘No, man, you’re Irish, and I respect that, it’s almost like being black - you guys have been persecuted by the English just like us!’ And suddenly, in his mind, we were on the same radical side, fighting the English like comrades, a couple of freedom fighters - even though we were both English. This is, I think, a great example of the stupidity of racism, and the stupidity of racists. I’d gone from being English to Irish in the space of a minute, and, in his eyes, become a different man, an honorary black male. I wonder what would have happened if I’d pretended to be Jewish? Listen, only stupid people are racist, and racists come in every colour of the rainbow.”
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