Every man has his hobbies. Some collect stamps, others go fishing.
Me, I get my kicks from table tennis, cake decorating and vicious racism.
But it’s really been hard to enjoy the last of these lately.
Gone are the days of driving up behind elderly Chinese ladies carrying their shopping, and honking my horn so they spill their tofu and pork buns all over the footpath. No more the evenings spent reclining on the sofa, eating Eskimo pies, watching old Youtube clips of the Black and White Minstrel Show and sending vile twitter abuse to Taika Waititi. Never again will I scare the local kids at Halloween by putting on black face and dressing up as Michael Jackson. I’ve even said goodbye to the one I loved the most, the one I saved for really special occasions: institutional racism. I’d place a job ad in the paper and then decline an interview to all people with a hard to say name.
I think I got Golriz Ghahraman with that one.
Ah, such fun.
But thanks to the wisdom of several placards held up at BLM protests and the overseas toppling of statues of dead people I neither knew nor cared about, I am suddenly cognisant of my evil ways. I am overwhelmed with guilt. I must atone.
And so must all of us, pale comrades. So what to do?
Well, I’ve come up with a radical proposal to suit our radical times.
We bring back slavery.
Only this time, my pale brethren, we will be the ones in chains.
I know, I know, it’s an extreme solution, but please hear me out.
I’m not talking a lifetime of servitude here, just a period of enslavement where we work off our accrued racial debt. I’ve come up with a useful hierarchy of racial guilt to decide the length of servitude required. At the top would be those of English ancestry. After all Winston Churchill, Cecil Rhodes and Captain Cook actually invented racism, colonialism and golliwogs in one drunken evening (or so I read on the Internet). So if you’re English you’re looking at five years a slave. Next, come the Germans (Nazis and Sauerkraut, need I say more?). Four years. The French have to pay for Napoleon and inventing moustaches (three years). Italians, Roman conquests and opera (two). The Scots get guilt by association with the English but slight leniency thanks to inventing Whisky, so one year. The Welsh…well, being Welsh is punishment enough.
All this could be refined with a blood quantum calculation to give your exact sentence. Someone of German-English heritage would be enslaved longer than someone who is French-Scots. If you are Maori-English you would have to serve yourself – please see Winston Peters for how easily this can be achieved.
All you need do is become the legal property of a Maori, Samoan or Somali family and start working off those years of white privilege. We could police this system easily enough, perhaps demarcating the slaves from their righteous masters by the compulsory wearing of oh, I don’t know…a white star?
I’m sure most will object that slavery was never practiced in this country (ahem…at least by Europeans, but let’s not go there). But it’s collective guilt we’re talking here. A brutal white cop kills a black guy 10,000 kilometres away and all ‘white’ people in the entire world are to blame because they share the cop’s skin colour.
In this way racism will be cured.
Let’s do it for the nation.
Imagine the healing power of seeing Sir Robert Jones bringing Marama Davidson breakfast in bed. Or the marvellous feeling of togetherness engendered when Todd Muller is seen mowing Anika Moa’s lawns. The unity of the country achieved overnight when Judith Collins gives Hone Harawira a televised back rub.
OK…that last one went a bit too far.
But you get my point. And then when perfect harmony is achieved, I can go back to pursuing my hobbies in peace.
I just don’t know where I’ll get the Eskimo pies from.
John Black can be reached on Twitter @JBlackWriter
If you enjoyed this BFD article please consider sharing it with your friends.