Is it coz I is black and a footballing millionaire?

A couple of incidents in the stratospheric heights of football recently serve to illustrate the new paradigm of racism today.

Firstly was bananagate, an incident of shocking racism that wasn't, which took place in London at an international friendly between Scotland and Brazil. Brazil won, thanks to two goals from wunderkind Neymar, who, like many Brazilians, is a tanned lad of multiple ethnic backgrounds.

In short, a banana was thrown onto the pitch near him at one point. Obviously, this was a despicable act of racism on the part of dour, sore-losing, pasty-white Scots. We had Neymar, who while still only a teen is already a millionaire and set to become exceptionally rich this summer when he moves to a top European club, pontificate about how offended he was by this appalling act. We had his teammate, the indisputably white Lucas Leiva, rant even more about how such actions were neanderthal and unacceptable in this modern age 'where we are all equal.'

Never mind the small fact that the banana had come from the end holding the Brazilian fans. The Scots, while protesting their innocence, made all the usual statements about stamping out racism. How could they do otherwise, with the ongoing sectarian problems of Celtic and Rangers?

Now it transpires that, in fact, it was thrown by a German tourist who was sat in the Brazilian end. This teen has been interviewed by the Metropolitan police for, effectively, just littering. The police are happy he had no racist intent and was just being stupid.

Will Neymar and Leiva now apologise for maligning the entire nation of Scotland? Don't hold your breath. Racism doesn't flow in that direction, as we well know.

The second issue was the publication of a report detailing the apparent lack of black managers in football. There were only 2 out of 92 in the whole English league. This, apparently, amounts to racism among the clubs, and the report noted that since fans had no problem with black managers, it was institutionalised within the industry of football at the top level.

Until you look at a couple of statistics, that is. The black population of England is around 2%. So basically, that's spot on the ratio of black managers in soccer. Another interesting statistic is that around a quarter of players are black, some ten or twelve times their prevalence in the general population.

So when the demographically proportionate number of managers are black, it's apparently insufficient and evidence of racism, but when ten times the proportion of players are black, that's not. It's just evidence of superior skills.

No one thought to look at the superior skills argument as it relates to the black managers. Two of the most high profile ones - John Barnes and Paul Ince - have been largely rubbish, in Barnes's case, spectacularly so. Gullit and Hughton have performed much better. The evidence points to black managers being just as likely to be rubbish as white managers.

Incidentally, the report didn't even refer to the astounding dearth of players or managers of Asian sub-continental origin. Perhaps sense prevailed at this point and they realised that those kids all gravitate to cricket instead.

Here is the modern race paradigm. It's still racism even when the proportion of black people in a given environment reflects exactly the population as a whole. Fair isn't fair. More than fair is the new fair. But it isn't racism when the proportion of black people in that environment exceeds tenfold the proportion in the population at large. That's not unfair. That's just greater ability.

And this paradigm cannot ever be queried, because anything and everything will be twisted into an allegation of racism, even when the complainants are multi-millionaires proclaimed globally, and even when the incident is something as daft and innocuous as a German teenager throwing away a banana he didn't want to eat while enjoying a soccer game on a trip abroad.

President Obama's conundrum

Here's a pertinent little point I suspect might raise a few hackles, but that's what I'm here for, so let's go.

What would President Barack Obama do about affirmative action programmes after he was elected?

Try as I might, as I wade through the positivist verbiage that passes for political discourse in the US presidential election, I can't find a single hard statement by Obama on the issue.

But in the past, he has said he supports affirmative action supporting the promotion of blacks in educational admissions, public employment and state contracting. Then again, he's also said that the black community need to take responsibility for their own fate, and that there is no black or white Americans, just Americans. So, the position is a little contradictory.

But if he gets elected, the future of affirmative action going to come to a head, no doubt about it.

Because a black president would put the nail in the coffin of the theory that underpins the entire process. A black president would be walking, talking proof that there is no glass ceiling for minorities in the land of opportunity. Obama himself holds an undergrad degree from Columbia and a Harvard Law degree, and there is little evidence he entered either institution as a result of affirmative action. He's just a very smart guy.

Whither then, the state-sponsored skewing of access to higher education in favour of blacks?

Equally, a black president, mindful of his core vote while seeking a second term, would be mental if he rolled back on the system whereby blacks are privileged in terms of access to the halls of learning, by way of quotas, lower admission levels, and so on.

It's a perfect checkmate, and one that conservative Republicans would be all too quick to put him in.

Let's briefly consider the concept of affirmative action. Firstly, it's discriminatory and anti-meritocratic. It permits those with lower test results to enter higher education in the United States purely on the basis of their skin colour.

This is based on the theory that black people are in some sense the subject of endemic prejudice within the education system, as borne out by systematically lower levels of educational achievement across the board.

Now, one of three things is causing that lower level of achievement. (Here's where the hate mail begins.)

Either the systematic racism exists, is widespread, and in many cases is being perpetrated bizarrely by (presumably self-hating) black teachers in predominantly black schools.

Or black students are simply not applying themselves to their studies to the same degree white and Asian students do.

Or they can't apply themselves to that degree because they are generally not capable of competing at the same level.

Depending on your position, there's a case to be made for all three explanations. Does racism exist? Sure. But is it really as widespread as to push black student test results around 15% below that of white students in general? Let's say it is. In which case, a country so endemically racist is unlikely to ever elect a black president. We'll see about that come November. But if he is elected, then the country just isn't that racist.

Do black students not take their studies as seriously as other students? Perhaps not. Poverty could be feeding into that, of course. So could gang culture, family breakdown and a few other factors. But Latino students are just as impoverished in general, just as affected by gang culture and family breakdown, and they do better than black students in general. South-East Asian kids are, especially first and second generation immigrants, also impoverished. But they do better than the white kids in general, never mind the black kids.

Are black kids inherently less academically able? (Cue the hate mail.) There are IQ studies that show a clear differential in educational attainment for various races. Ashkenazi Jews score 15% higher than Caucasian kids on IQ tests. Black kids are a further 10% behind. Such studies are often depicted as racist, junk science in the PC media without their ever offering scientifically based counter-arguments.

But they're invariably done by highly respected scientists, who have a lot to lose and little to gain by publicising such research. And simple logic dictates that we are not all born with the exact same intelligence potential.

And simple examinations of post-grad level students, especially in the sciences, indicate a vast predominance of Jewish and Asian (including sub-continental Asian) kids well out of kilter to their predominance within the wider population. And given how many of those are the children of recent immigrants, at least among the Asians, affluent backgrounds don't explain it.

Which brings us back to President Obama's affirmative action conundrum. He cannot support affirmative action in education if his own election demonstrates that America is not endemically opposed to black betterment in society. And he cannot scrap it without alienating his core vote.

If you can work a way out of that checkmate for him, he may well have a job for you as Education Secretary come next January.

Programmed to be racist?

Are we all programmed to be racist? Is a degree of racist response endemic in our DNA? I was wondering about this while the Celebrity Big Brother programme row over racism raged last week both in the media and in comments from senior politicians like Gordon Brown.

I have a theory, which I will happily admit to nicking partly from my old pal Missing Neighbour, about the nature of racism and why, despite the fact that our contemporary intelligence would counter such insane prejudice, many people are still capable of iterating racist opinions.

The gist is basically that we're predisposed to fear as 'the other' those from visually different tribal backgrounds as ourselves, since back in the day they offered a tangible threat to available resources (ie they'd nick your bint, your grub and then kill you painfully.)

The other stuff - mean Scots, big black cocks, Pakistani corner shops or whatever, is therefore just our civilised minds' attempts to justify the animal brain fear.

Missing Neighbour says that he believes that there is a 'low level anxiety' we all have when we are placed in unfamiliar situations/environments with people we don’t know. We are unable to make rational informed choices about our situation because our conscious mind has so little information to go on.

So what happens next is the good old brain stem (the bit left over from our long gone knuckle dragging days) kicks in and hey presto we turn into a prehistoric fearful raging ape. Obviously this effect varies dramatically from person to person but our primal brain sees change and difference as a threat, especially if the way things are at the moment (as far as our selfish self preserving brain can tell) are just fine and we are ticking along nicely.

On a more macro level racism and many other socially unacceptable behaviours seem to be extreme reactions to human beings being taken outside their comfort zones and the old ‘Its all mine and I am fucking keeping it attitude’ kicks in rather rapidly.

The important thing to remember though, is that we all have frontal lobes to override our animal responses.

This is why most men don't rape all round them, why it is unacceptable to rob other people's stuff and why racism is wrong.

But if you acknowledge the existence of the low level anxiety Missing Neighbour talks about, especially when there are visual cues of 'otherness' around you, like some punter with different coloured skin, or the fact that you aren't in your home environment, then the explanation for that, as I see it, is the animal response.

But it is up to all of us to use the 200,000 years of civilisation and development of our frontal lobes to override such responses.

If you consider Northern Ireland, where both tribes look, behave and think like each other in the same cultural context, or you consider footie crowds, where each side is made up of many different races, visual cues need to be created in order to generate the flight or fight response (kerbside painting, orange order sashes, footie scarves and shirts).

Once otherness is established, then it is up to the individual who feels threatened in themselves to override their animal response. Most of us do. Obviously the chavs of BB, threatened by the 'class' of Shilpa Shetty, haven't managed to do that and responded by seeking solace from their fear in greater numbers - ie bullying.

Is it racist? Yes, of course it is, even if Jade Goody happens to be of part-black inheritance. She wouldn't be the first racist of such a background and white people certainly do not hold a monopoly on racist attitudes.

But primarily, it is fear, safety in numbers, and ignorance that has inspired this bout of bullying. If you wish to ensure that neither you nor your children are racists or develop racist attitudes, then the crucial issue is to prevent your animal brain from taking over when you encounter people you automatically identify as 'other.'

Because if you manage to turn off that response, which is pre-programmed in us all, you are likely to discover that the people inspiring that response are human just like you, friendly just like you, worth knowing just like you and all of a sudden they are no longer 'other', just like you.