I apologise for ‘reprinting’ the offensive terms and language that I received in this email, but equally I didn’t want to let it just sit in my spam folder and passively accept this kind of hateful speech.

I received this chain email from someone I used to work with, and am replicating it here purely to unpick some of the insidious and manipulative lies within it, that are so often propagated unchallenged. If by publishing this here, people feel I am perpetuating rather than effectively challenging this kind of hate speak, I would appreciate that feedback in the comments, and if I have misjudged this, I sincerely apologise and will remove this post.

The blocks in boxes / quotes are from the original email, and I’ve inserted my response email addressing each paragraph.

It began like this:

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A thought provoking passage written by an Englishman about the current situation in HIS homeland
– Racist – me? I have been wondering about why Whites are racists, and no other race is … There are British Africans, British Chinese, British Asian, British Turks, etc, etc, etc And then there are just British.,. You know what I mean, plain ole English people that were born here. You can include the Welsh, the Scottish and the people who live off our shores of Great Britain on tiny islands Yes, we are all true Brits.

This email is possibly the dumbest thing I’ve ever read, I hope you don’t actually believe any of it? It goes without saying most of the statements are clearly untrue, but it’s also borderline hate speak, so you should seriously consider why you would send something so deeply offensive.

Your construction, reliant on the mawkish phrase “plain ole English”, implies there is some accepted understanding of what English / British  (which you’ve used interchangeably no doubt to the annoyance of Welsh, Scots and Northern Irish people) is, and that it also somehow implies race or some clarity around a shared origin? British people are mongrels. We are of pure French (Normans) / Anglo-Saxon (eg. Germanic descent) / Danish (Vikings) / Irish / Polish (Celts) / Slovakian (Celts) / Bulgarian (Celts) / Serbian (Celts) / Ukrainian (Celts) / Romanian (Celts) blood. And that would be to assume you’re ignoring our origins in the fertile crescent of the Middle East / North Africa (because that would play merry hell with your grounds for hatred!) I wonder if you have a specific date in mind that could be shared for those of us unaware of when some genetic composition was copyrighted as being “British”, to the exclusion of all of the above facts, because I don’t think any such time has ever existed.

The others that live here say the following: : You pass me on the street and sneer in my direction. You call me ‘White boy,’ ‘Cracker,’ ‘Honkey,’ ‘Whitey,’ ‘Caveman’…. White trash……White c–t …. And that’s OK.. But when I call you, Nigger, Spade, Towel head, Sand-nigger, Paki, Camel Jockey, Beaner, Gook, or Chink .. You call me a racist.

The insults to white people mentioned, except for the ones that actually include swear words, are simply not as offensive as they have never been used in the context of slavery, repressing a country or its religious freedoms, or to justify our “great” country’s violent colonisation and robbing of other countries and their people.

You say that whites commit a lot of violence against you… So why are the ghettos the most dangerous places to live?

Ghettos are often the most dangerous places to live, and have been since temporary, informal and/or slum settlements first came about. Because people don’t choose to live there, nor do they choose to be poor and live among people some of whom become so desperate to survive they turn to petty crime. If the author was able to see beyond the Daily Mail reality they’ve been fed, they might notice that actually by value most crime is committed by the business people and so-called professionals of Surrey, Chelsea, Kensington, etc. Unless of course someone stealing a wallet with £30 in is a worse crime than stealing £600k from people (from your Daily Mail), or Philip Green stealing more than the entire of benefits fraud has been calculated for the same year (from New Statesman). So is white collar crime ok, simply because it has white in its name and your racism is so deep seated, that the value the crime takes from you doesn’t matter… or maybe it’s simply because they wear a suit while they commit their crimes and you are incapable of seeing beyond the deference you have been taught?

You have the Muslim Council of Great Britain. You have Black History Month. You have swimming pools for Asian women. You have islamic banks for muslims only. You have year of the dragon day for chinese people. If we had a White Pride Day, you would call us racists. If we had White History Month, we’d be racists. If we had any organization for only whites to ‘advance’ OUR lives, we’d be racists.
A white woman could not be in the Miss Black Britain or Miss Asia, but any colour can be in the Miss UK . If we had a college fund that only gave white students scholarships.. You know we’d be racists. There are over 200 openly proclaimed Muslim only schools in England . Yet if there were ‘White schools only’, that would be a racist school !.

This point about having whites-only institutions… take a nano-second to think about that. Could it be possible that the reason the other organisations and awards are in place are because of the inherent racism still at work in the mainstream versions of them? Obviously incredibly hard to imagine now that Steve McQueen is the first black director, in history to win an oscar for best picture. Also an achingly obvious point is that Islam is actually a religious denomination, not a racial signifier. There are many white Muslims, in fact quite a few of whom would pass your selectively informed definition of a “British” person, as referenced in the first para.

In the Bradford riots and Toxteth riots, you believed that you were standing-up for your race and rights. If we stood-up for our race and rights, you would call us racists. You are proud to be black, brown, yellow and orange, and you’re not afraid to announce it. But when we announce our white pride, you call us racists. We fly our flag, we are racists. If we celebrate St’ Georges day we are racists. You can fly your flag and its called diversity. You celebrate your cultures and its called multiculturalism. You rob us, carjack us, and rape our daughters. But, when a white police officer arrests a black gang member or beats up an Asian drug dealer running from the law and posing a threat to society, you call him a racist.

Police arrest criminals of any colour, all the time (for those of us who don’t live in suburban bubbles and witness it on our doorsteps). They are not called racist if they’re arresting a criminal. They are called racist when they beat up or kill people in their custody because of the colour of their skin. Because that is a racist act. This is a despicable paragraph for so many reasons, but the instrumentalisation of rape in the abstract (i.e. backed by no facts, and used purely to insight fear and hatred) is particularly vile and dehumanising.

People who fly the St George’s flag, sometimes also have extreme right wing tendencies, English football fans, the National Front / BNP for instance. It’s nothing to do with the flag, but what the flag has come to symbolise thanks to people with the views expressed in this email, spreading racial hate through the nation. When our grandfathers fought in the world wars, the St George’s flag was supposed to stand for an intolerance to fascism, but in one of the most brilliant dupings of a population, Brits now line up behind it supporting these far right views.

I am proud…. But you call me a racist. Why is it that only whites can be racists?? There is nothing improper about this e-mail.. Let’s see which of you are proud enough to send it on. I sadly don’t think many will. That’s why we have LOST most of OUR RIGHTS in this country. We won’t stand up for ourselves! BEING PROUD TO BE WHITE! It’s not a crime, YET… But getting very close! It is estimated that ONLY 5% of those reaching this point in this e-mail, will pass it on.

If you interacted with people of different backgrounds to yourself, and by that I mean people who have travelled, people who are open-minded, people who have read books, people who have lived in different communities to your own, you would soon realise that of course it’s not only white people that are racist.

Overall this email has as much merit as the ill-informed who say ‘why do we have women’s rights and not men’s rights?’ Simply put, history.

Emails like this just make me think our education system must be completely broken that people are still out there saying, ‘won’t somebody please think of the privileged white men’. I find it deeply offensive and to be honest, consider it a form of hate speak. Please apprise yourself of some facts before forwarding further emails like this.

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This kind of email is probably continuing to do the rounds, spreading its insidious message of racial hatred and divisiveness. If not penned by a UKIP / BNP representative, certainly playing into their far right agenda.

Here are some links to organisations taking positive steps to end racism, please sign up with them and/or take action with them:

There are many others, most doing great work to counter this kind of propaganda, and reflect real people’s experiences living in multicultural Britain. Similarly some of the credible media houses now seem to be able to talk about the government’s convenient lack of information dissemination about actual migration facts, such as this piece in the Spectator’s blogs section, pointing out there’s minimal evidence of “migrants taking British jobs”. A line that was not well publicised by the government who produced the report.

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