March 13, 2017

POCs don't destroy civilisations, crazy politicians do

located:	Germany
editor:	Gurmeet Singh

I am what people call a 'person of colour'. My parents were Indian immigrants to the UK in the 70s, and I grew up in Britain, and now live in Germany. Hence the label - if I was born in India, I guess I'd be called Punjabi, or a Jat, or a Sikh, or something. First born son.

OK, so POC it is. A morally-neutral but still weird-sounding term to describe me and others in a socio-political context. How do POCs vote, what do POCs buy, what generational differences exist in POC communities etc. This is all kind of OK - the obvious things annoy of course, why the hell am I a POC, what is a white person then, a non-POC? An antiPOC? Maybe just a P. But that's a matter for the 'best language for an imperfect world' debate. I don't want to get involved in that.

Instead, I want to say, as a POC, one of the most unbelievably infuriating things to see and hear, is to be blamed for the downfall of an entire civilisation, and watch on the sidelines as those very same people doing the blaming (nonPOC) take apart that civilisation brick by brick.

Take Steve King, for instance. The Republican congressman for Iowa tweeted support for Geert Wilders, yesterday: “Wilders understands that culture and demographics are our destiny. We can't restore our civilisation with someone else's babies.”

OK, let's pretend for a second we're ok with the word civilisation. Let's be ok with the weirdly cutesy-wutesy phrasing of someone who clearly has white supremacy on the mind. The weird thing about this is actually the word 'restore'. Restored to what? Restored to the time before multiculturalism, of course. Restored by whom? NonPOCs like Steve King.

This is a seriously telling insight into the mind of the extreme-right wing (Steve King is also a fan of Le Pen, has made known his support of AfD, he's so predictable it's pointless to say he probably/ definitely likes to go as Hitler for Halloween because you know, everyone feels it's ok on this day! aah hahah ahah...): They really do ideologically believe that when they act rashly, threaten to destroy the EU, tear up social-securities, stir-up hate - that they're doing God's work. I mean, up until recently, I thought a lot of what they said and did was merely hot-air, pragmatically blown across this and that political landscape to get attention and votes (I'm sure some of it still is).

But now I think I'm actually taking seriously the view that these people really believe that: a) Destroying the political landscape and replacing it with an ethno-national state is a good thing, and b) it is POCs that are destroying the state and communities etc. It's really kinda annoying.

I used to think that racism was my problem: I'm brown, right. But then I realised that it's a white problem - in this society at least. I mean, I'm not the one losing sleep about whether my house gets robbed by some POC or my daughter marries some POC etc. I don't have dinners where my main topic is, really guys, come on, what do we really think? In the same way, homophobia is a heterosexual problem, and sexism a man's problem. Even if we should prioritise the victims, the complexes exist in the mind of the perpetrator. And even something does come about, where there are no more POCs in Europe, and the great days are returned, and everyone eats turkey on Christmas day in the magical castle, the world will have been destroyed to get there, and it won't have been destroyed by a POC.