Trevor Phillips, the anti-multiculturalist, has turned into the race-obsessive.
In an article in the Daily Mail and on Channel 4 he has churned out supposed statistics about how this or that group of people are more represented doing this or that activity. To take one example: "Indian" women are more likely to be chemists.
This is the old 'science' of racialism. Not racist as such, but the racialist 'science' of divvying up people into whatever the race-scientist decides is a coherent or cohesive 'racial' group and then running stats all over that group to see what they are most likely to do.
1. First of all it requires a particular mind-set to see us all in these terms. It asks of the 'scientist' or commentator in question to think that these are important or necessary questions. But why? We know that there is one human race and that we have spent millions of years sharing our genes. The great motors of society revolve around how societies are ruled and resources controlled. Why is it logical or necessary to think that this is linked to whatever it is that these 'scientists' and commentators call a 'group' or 'race' or 'ethnic population' or whatever?
2. Then comes the question of how such people determine these 'groups' or 'races'? You'll see that Phillips uses the term 'black'. By so doing, he eliminates the cultural and class differences between millions (billions?) of people the world over, and reduces them to one entity. Yet thousands of years of intermarriage between people he might call 'Arab', or 'Chinese' or 'Spanish' or 'White' or 'Jewish' or whatever, make the designation of 'black' as a predictor of social behaviour unreliable.
3. Then comes the question of what Phillips or anyone else is going to do with such dodgy stats? Let's say, he can 'prove' that women of 'pure' (whatever that means - and it means very little other than where some people happen to live over a relatively short period of time) 'Indian' origin have a higher percentage of chemists amongst them than, say, women of Australian origin (!). Then what? And the 'then what?' question is crucial. We all know of politicians and opportunists using such 'facts' as means by which they try to gain or wield power. Does he or anyone know which bit of their 'Indian-ness' does the magic trick of turning people into a chemist? And what should we do about such 'facts'. Take that bit of Indian-ness off them? Go down to the Indian chemist and smash the windows of their shop so that we can all become chemists?
Or does he have some other objective? To enact some kind of social engineering, whereby the 'Indian-ness' of Indian women is distilled out and redistributed to the rest of us so that we can all become chemists that way?! Or is he suggesting covert and unfair systems of positive discrimination are working in favour of Indian women so that they can corner the market in chemists?!
In which case, what fine calibration of 'race' interviewing and selection is he, the great anti-multiculturalist, proposing? That we do micro-ethnic monitoring so that each and every sector of society delivers whatever the race-scientists tell us is the 'correct' distribution?
And it's here that further dangers arise in what he is saying. The man (Phillips) who made a living out of saying that multiculturalism was/is dangerous because it emphasises difference and creates jumped-up, unrepresentative community leaders has come up with a formula that would divide us even more, would require a whole new bureaucracy of 'race' or 'ethnic' scientists and officers but which at the end of the day has actually made himself a bloody great packet of dosh. Oh, so he's become what he says he despises.
