Racism for the mainstream

Writing in The Australian, Pipes argued Europe was in danger of losing its “distinct cultural” identity as the “global engine of change”. The danger comes from a growing European Muslim population and a lax approach to European heritage. His solution to this perceived danger is for Muslims to be more “Western” and less Muslim. This despite there being no consensus on what it means to be Western or Muslim. Moreover, many Muslims, including myself, have no qualms about being Muslim and Western.

Of course Daniel Pipes is not alone. One need only recall the respected scientist James Watson, who co-discovered DNA, and his belief that people of African origin are less intelligent than other human beings.

Watson revealed these sentiments during an interview published in The Sunday Times of London, where he remarked, “all our social policies [on Africa] are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours - whereas all the testing says not really … people who have to deal with black employees find this not true”.

His astonishing claims reach new heights when he warns, “there is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so.”

At first glance Watson’s sentiments sound informed, almost respectable. Like Pipes, some valid points are raised. But masked within the euphemisms and indirect speech is a classically racist argument: blacks (or Muslims, or whomsoever is targeted) are not just inferior to us in the West, but inherently so.

As researchers have known for some time, a good education is not always a barrier to racism. However, an educated racist has the capacity to lend credibility and nuance to the fear, latent in every society, of those who do not look or behave quite like “us”. This is not the racism of Pauline Hanson or soccer hooligans. It is far too dishonest for that kind of chauvinism. It is racism for the mainstream.