Mick Hartley

Theodore Dalrymple (via Laban) looks through the pages of the Guardian and finds blacks photographically over-represented and Indians under-represented:

How are we to explain this? Does it mean that The Guardian, if it systematically ignores Indians, harbours specially friendly feelings towards blacks? By no means: I think the most likely explanation is quite otherwise. I admit that my hypothesis cannot be proved and is somewhat speculative, but I think it is more plausible than the alternatives.

The people who run and write The Guardian have deep, suppressed and subliminal doubts about the equality of human races. To prove to themselves that they do not have such doubts, they overcompensate by publishing as many photographs of blacks as possible in their pages.

They don’t have any such doubts with regard to the Indians and the Chinese. Moreover, these two groups have a horrible and fatal vice, as far as the mindset of The Guardian and its readers is concerned: grosso modo, these two groups can shift for themselves, and require no help from the coalition of intellectuals, moral entrepreneurs and bureaucrats in order to thrive. On the contrary, they are well on the way to outstripping the white population in achievement, thus demonstrating the redundancy of that coalition.

By contrast, blacks are regarded in the pages of The Guardian much as conservationists regard endangered species, in need of special protection. They therefore represent a goldmine for the coalition.

A caricature of the Guardian position, no doubt, (and Dalrymple is writing, one assumes, with a slight smile on his lips) but still….those who see racism everywhere are as much in thrall to it as the openly racist.

But what of Muslims? For the leftist-Guardian worldview they’re a problem: more blacks than Indians…..victims of Islamophobia, and so given special dispensation to express opinions which coming from anyone else would be excoriated….yet they seem sadly unappreciative of the efforts of their liberal well-wishers, using the opportunities given them to further their own, deeply illiberal, agenda.