The Last Ditch by Tom Paine

Link: How to make my child feel like a black sheep – Comment – Times Online.

I am so sick of Trevor Phillips. The man has never done an honest days work in his life, moving without pause from student politics to allegedly “grown-up” politics. He is a parasite, living on fears that he works tirelessly to promote. This article by Jamie Whyte at Times Online therefore, made me whoop with delight. Forgive me for quoting extensively. I can’t take the risk that, having come this far, you won’t click through (as you really should) to read the whole thing.

I am white, my wife is black and our daughter, unsurprisingly, is brown. I think she is lucky. Her skin is almost golden and her hair falls in beautiful black ringlets that, thanks to my Celtic ancestors, reveal copper undertones when caught by the sun.

But according to Trevor Phillips, the chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, my daughter may be in grave peril. In a recent speech he claimed that, as a person of mixed race, she is at risk of “identity stripping”. She may “grow up marooned between two communities”.

Like many others in the race industry, Mr Phillips is a racialist. He thinks that your race is the most important fact about you. It is so important that it determines your identity and your community. If you are mixed race, you will have neither.

Mr Phillips is mistaken. Despite her brown skin, my daughter is no harder to identify than her white father or her black mother. She is a no more vague, nebulous or otherwise indefinite creature than any other human being.

Nor is she marooned between two communities. For I do not live in the white community and my wife does not live in the black community. As far as I know, there are no such communities. Despite our different colours, all three members of the Whyte family live in the same community, a nice bourgeois suburb.

Hat tip to the indispensable Tim Worstall