by I. Bismuth

Introduction

When historians yet unborn tell how the ultimate triumph of Anti-Racism came about, what will be their primary sources in that yearned-for future in which the ground has closed over the last woman of Whiteness, her rainbow children giving her a clenched fist salute at the graveside, and in which no man will ever again have to look in the bathroom mirror in the morning and ask himself what he can do today to atone for his pale face?

To the primary sources for the broad political arc of history must be added other primary sources that offer telling details of the daily lives of the long marchers though the institutions who made the politics possible. The future must know that the strugglers against evil were not all superhuman readers of teleprompters and that some of us had to fit in our struggling with our digesting and our re-carpeting, our loving and our laundry. They must know that the life of the race replacer was not all glamour.

As a professor who has presided for twelve years over the Department of Sensitivity Studies at the University of Sunlit Uplands, and as a digesting and a loving person (though not, I confess, much of a re-carpeter or a launderer) I can supply these humanizing little touches. That is why I intend to keep a diary. My contribution to the projects of those historians who are not yet even gleams in their grandfathers’ eyes is to become a primary source myself.

Let me say a few words about my family.

My partner is the award-winning children’s author Rose Blamer. (Twenty years ago I was in the habit of calling my partner my wife, and she, with equal tactlessness, would think nothing of calling me her husband. Today, we cringe with retrospective embarrassment at how much offence our use of such terms of monogamous heterosexual imperialism must have caused before we knew any better.) She has written several dozen educational stories for young Anti-Racists. Her most successful so far, The Three Asylum-Seeking Little Piggies, was made compulsory reading for all five-year olds suspected of developing unacceptable attitudes, and was mentioned in the House of Commons as being powerfully therapeutic against early-onset prejudice.

The product of our union, Lucy, a chip off the two old blocks, has reached the end of the first year of her degree in Hitlerology at Sun-Up, and next week she is off touring in the malarial zones with her latest boyfriend, Nkwanwu.

Our house (a four-storey Victorian terrace in Ratwell Road, Waslington, London, mortgage paid off) is no smaller and no less comfortable than a pair of indispensable professionals deserve, which means we need a live-in housemaid who speaks no English, one who speaks no English being willing to do the jobs that the ones who speak some English say they will not do.

Regrettably, we have had to fit the house with an array of sophisticated security devices, since we find that our local racists frequently drive our local diversity to burglary, not burglary as committed by Whites, which is invariably to fund an addiction or for simple gain, but burglary as a desperate cry for social inclusion. Still, the reinforced glass and the movement sensors really are unavoidable. Not even we Bismuths relish desperate cries for social inclusion being made with our bric-a-brac.

That is enough for an introduction to my diary. Tomorrow night I shall start making myself a primary source.

The Diary

July 4: It’s nearly midnight and I’m feeling slightly better now. Some American friends invited us to a Fourth of July party at their house, but we had to leave early because tomorrow is a working day. Even so, the drink and the noise did get to me.

The most notable occurrence at the party was my discovery of an odd cultural practice among Arizonans. It happened just before we left. The whiskey and the whisky had flowed freely, and the hubbub was such that any conversation beyond a half-heard introduction and a toast was out of the question, so the details are sketchy, but I believe that after learning that a guest I had never met before was from Arizona, I raised my glass and said, ‘Cheers. Here’s to 1776, the break with Old World racism, and the beginning of the long struggle for a non-White America.’

Now, I could be wrong, but, in reply, and most bizarrely, I’m almost sure he started talking about my donkey. As I sit here in my study, after two hours of rest and orange juice, I still have the impression that I heard him inviting me to remove my donkey from out of there. Or, since Arizona has a strong Mexican heritage, he might have asked me to lead away my burro. If I am right, in either form it is a pleasantly quaint way of responding to a toast, and I must find out the precise form of words so that I can use it the next time I visit the States.

 

July 5: Teaching has finished for this academic year, but there are still a few professorial duties to attend to before we can pack our bags for the tanning shores. So I left Rose working on her script for the dramatization of an early book of hers, Jack the Giant Rehabilitator, and set out for the university, a brisk walk of no more than half an hour for a well-toned champion of inclusiveness.

Twenty minutes into it, in Market Street, as I wove in and out of the bargain-hunters, I passed a lone protester, an ignorable and ignored middle-aged non-enricher. He was carrying a pole surmounted with a placard which proclaimed Freedom. I carried on walking, noting only that though the ideological pedigree of the word was unimpeachable, it was curiously flat and old-fashioned. But if you are a flat and old-fashioned Anti-Racist, you must do your flat and old-fashioned best for Anti-Racism. There are many roads to vibrancy. We are all in this together. Each of must do what he can. Let a thousand flowers—And then involuntarily I stopped, causing a pedestrian pile-up of shunting and shouting behind me.

Freedom? No, no, no. Cries for freedom were all very well at the end of empire, but the liberation movements and the post-war loss of White swagger had done the trick, and the sun had set long ago on the pukka sahibs and the pith-helmeted planters. There was something decidedly fishy about this, and when a White man in the twenty-first century starts demanding freedom, the fish smells of the swastika.

I retraced my steps. The placard could at first blush be seen as unobjectionable, and in fact no one was objecting, but these non-objectors were all lumpenshoppers, mere units of footfall who needed to be educated about second blush. I did not like the look of this lone protester, and my whole career has been built on my knowing when not to like the look of someone. If these naive bipedal wallets had any idea of the extremism that Freedom signifies, they would tear him apart.

I placed myself directly in front of him, close enough to have mint breathed in my face.

For ten accusing seconds I stood in silence looking into his brazen eyes.

‘So,’ I said at last, ‘you almost got away with it. And in broad daylight too. You must be feeling pretty pleased with yourself.’

‘What’s wrong with you?’ he said, registering a fake frown of puzzlement. ‘I’m not doing any harm.’

‘That placard is divisive filth.’

‘All it says is Freedom.’

’Freedom for whom?’

’Everyone.’

’Including White people? Including White peoples?’

’What have you got against freedom?’

‘Freedom is defiance of power, and when power is Anti-Racist, freedom is Nazi.’

‘Are you insane?’

‘It didn’t take long for you to reveal your true murderous intentions.’

‘Murderous intentions? You really are insane.’

‘Insane again! Murderous intentions, you see. You can’t hide them. The insane will be sent to the gas chambers along with all your other victims.’

‘Gas chambers? I never mentioned gas chambers.’

‘No, you hoped we’d forget about them, did you? But we’ll never forget, never.’

‘I don’t want to murder anyone, not even you.’

He backed away, stumbled over a litter bin, and tried to fend me off with his placard, but I kept too close for him to take an effective swing at me.

’Nazi scum! Nazi scum! Nazi scum! Nazi scum! Nazi scum!’ I said, and rolled him into the gutter.

By the way, it was a beautiful summer’s morning and there was not a cloud in the sky.

 

July 6: Putting paid one by one to Nazi scum is like trying to kill a fly every time; you are not always sure when you have done it or indeed whether there was only of them in the first place. Nine times out of ten you catch sight of one defacing a harmonious modern surface with its diseased and confident shape, and then you creep up with your newspaper and give it an almighty thwack. But where has it gone? It’s not spread over the journalism. It’s not inert on the floor. It’s not inside your collar. It may go missing and be presumed dead, never to trouble you again, but still be active and trouble someone else, or it may turn up half an hour later, with two of its friends, making square circles round the light fittings.

And now I come to a shameful admission: there is a fly in my own family. All too often he makes square circles round my hospitality. And because he is in my own family, he is, even in principle, unswattable. The fly’s name is Walter. He is a dermatologist. He crawls over skin. And he is married to my poor sister. He delights in making disturbing remarks to me that he would never make to others, and takes unfair advantage of family ties, daring me to blab career-wreckingly to his colleagues.

Today I told him of my new diary and my intention for it to become a primary source for future historians. I waited for him to speak unspeakable evil and then to watch my face, which is what he usually does. But what he said was, ‘The racists or the traitors? Unborn historians, hesitating how to describe the bad fellows of the twenty-first century, are waiting to see who will pay their salaries’.

This was certainly evil, but not as evil as it might have been.