Yesterday's Diary contained a stupid error - mine own work entirely - which, by means of a wretchedly written sentence, suggested that sexual crime by men of Afro-Caribbean origin in Britain was higher than it actually is. It is in fact proportionate to the numbers of men of that origin in prison. And that number is disproportionately greater than the percentage of men of such origin in society at large.
However, the real point is not the error, or indeed the ratio of men of this origin or that being behind bars or living in millionaires' row or whatever; after all, the population of English prisons is disproportionately Catholic because so many inmates are of Irish extraction. No, the real point is how exceedingly difficult it is to write about race without feeling extreme discomfort or, worse, causing extreme offence. I confess to feeling a profound unease in writing this.
Greatest taboo
Why? It is simple. Discussion of race nowadays is profoundly taboo; it is in fact the greatest taboo of all in polite circles. Yet silence is no friend to race relations. Silence will not alter the reality of racial conflict. Silence about all our differences do not eradicate those differences. All analogies are misleading if taken too far, but they do help us understand how human it is to avoid problems by not talking about them.
Silence can take two forms. The first is subliminal. Mankind throughout the western world seems to have engaged in a vast and unconscious conspiracy to deny the monstrous evil of child abuse. Barely more than a decade ago, it would have seemed perfectly preposterous that the sexual abuse of children by male family members was not uncommon. Even scholars such as Freud attributed his patients' allegations to sexual fantasies. I still have extreme difficulty in accepting what is now known to be a truth: that some mothers sexually abuse their children. Our silence on such matters was, is, understandable, but it was not healthy. Our knowledge makes us sadder by far, but immeasurably wiser.
The other kind of silence is deliberate. Such a silence concealed the reality of homosexuality within the human race. No lawmakers anywhere, in criminalising homosexual deeds between men, thought that what they were outlawing was virtually non-existent behaviour. All of them could have been in no doubt about the abundance of homosexuality and homosexual desire - no doubt because so many of them had experienced it themselves. Instead, they pretended ignorance, which they then guarded with the criminal law.
Female sexuality
Lesbianism did not usually attract such legislative prohibition, but not because there was, as is so often thought these days, ignorance of female sexuality. I happened to pick up a selection of 19th-century American-published books recently, entitled What every boy should know, What every young girl should know, What every man of twenty-five should know, etc. The authors were fully aware of the "perils" of sexuality: girls as well as boys were warned of the lethal dangers of the "solitary vice", which in the case of girls would always reveal itself in a permanently contorted face, an appetite for vinegar and charcoal, and eventually insanity and death. What terrors were caused by this kind of poisonous drivel we cannot say, for silence was drawn over the consequences of such aberrant advice as it was over the almost irresistible urges of the sexuality which prompted it.
To have published an article about lesbianism in this newspaper a century ago would simply not have been possible; but to have published one about race would have been simplicity itself. It would probably have been drivel comparable to the handbooks on what young people should know, but at least it would have appeared in newspapers. Now we can discuss all forms of adult sexual behaviour freely; our news pages are full of the most atrocious stories about child-hoods ravaged by sexual abuse. But we cannot discuss race.
There are good and decent reasons for this. The sin of slavery lives with us yet - not just in what was done in Africa, and in the slave vessels crossing the Atlantic and the marts in human flesh in the Carolinas, but also in the language, sensitivities and the political culture of English-speaking peoples. Furthermore, frightful crimes have been done by whites across Africa, right into this decade: it is rightly a matter of shame - or rather it should be.
But of course, racial crime is not an invention of white people, nor of black people, nor of yellow people. We humans are a violent species, and Europeans who have this century provided the languages of the world with either new meanings of existing words, or completely new terms like genocide, holocaust, ethnic cleansing, concentration camp - and in Ireland, peace line and car-bomb - are in no position to lecture anyone on racial violence. We can give master classes on it.
But we are not alone. Race-judgement, the assessment of someone on grounds of their race, is profoundly wrong and profoundly stupid; but it is also profoundly widespread too. So, as we now know, is child abuse. There is no point in denying truths because these truths, like our indomitable sexuality, will assert themselves through the barriers of censorship and the disapproval of prigs.
White Irish
We have seen the last generation of the white Irish. Henceforward, a increasing proportion of Irish babies will be black and yellow and brown and tan. We must live with this; and we must be aware of the problems and the pitfalls which lie ahead. Myself, I can think of nothing finer than to see a black soldier being commander-in-chief of the Army, or the President wearing the turban of the Sikh.
These things will happen, though probably not in my lifetime. We have the opportunity to prepare for the certainty of a multiracial society. But we must be honest now about the painful realities of racial interaction in other societies. To be silent about such painful realities certainly dooms us to relive them.