Because it’s not about you irvine
It’s about something far deeper and ultimately far more sinister than a silly spat elsewhere.
My daughter is currently in a relationship with a man who is of Indian heritage. Have a look at this thread. The OP is pregnant and is repeatedly being told her child will be “cute” by others - because the child will be mixed race. Let’s be clear here: others aren’t saying “aw, you two are so good looking, the baby will be gorgeous!” They are explicitly stating that the child will be “cute” because he or she will be mixed race.
And some of the replies are:
My friend looks like a Viking maid, people comment her baby will be blond ... is that racist too?
they are trying to be nice. Get used to it.
just people trying to be nice to you
i can see how it might be tiresome. But I actually think people are being nice
if your baby looks anything like my friends mixed race daughter he or she will be stunning
i think mixed race children are interesting
That’s from the first page.
Do you see the problem? Do you see how many people are being nice? “Nice”, in this context, is not only patronising in the extreme but has the effect of firstly, turning children from a mixed cultural background into a breed apart, not a person at all but a ‘thing’ separate from them and if checked can be spluttered over with hands apart and mouths an O of indignation But I was being NICE and secondly, denies racism. It does exist, not here, no sir, nothing to see. We see this from one of the first replies. Why, having a mixed race baby is the same as one with curly blonde hair don’t you know? Bam goes years of oppression, then!
Then we have the ‘my toddler said’ “game” - here is one such example; I don’t have time to go through the several other pages but you can see yourself, first page someone’s toddler called an Asian family ‘p**is’ (muddled with makka pakka) and someone else’s toddler called someone with dwarfism a name. I just found that there with a quick search.
Those threads are pretty revealing, they pop up on probably a six week cycle and they are always hateful. Yet people find them utterly hilarious - again, like the whine of i am being nice this time it is well, it’s my toddler, and she is only three!
You can’t be held account for being “nice”, even if your niceness is patronising and condescending in the extreme. Or for what your toddler said - why, he’s a toddler! And as for what you may think about celebrities, well why, white celebrities get discussed too and talk about playing the race card.
To go back to my first point, my daughter is of course beautiful to me but objectively is no more or less lovely than any other young woman in her very early twenties. As such, any child she may have would likely as not be ordinarily lovely too. Why, then, would people think of her baby as ‘interesting’, especially ‘cute’ because it would be the product of sex between a white British woman and an Indian man? And why is that racist? Why is commenting on Meghan racist when I criticise Kate too? Why is what my child said racist?
The answer is because in all of those cases, the original post - whatever it is - acts like a key unlocking some pretty ugly attitudes. People aren’t stupid: they know they can’t state explicitly that mixed race children are in their eyes at least akin to an exotic pairing between two animals - so not really human at all - that Meghan is just a little too black to claim the British throne and that their toddlers voice something so dark and ugly inside them that they wouldn’t recognise it themselves if it walked up to them wearing a BNP flag and punched them around the head with it.
Yet I can see it and so can others and the more we say we can see it, the more others do. And that’s the only way of ultimately removing it.