Last week Times LIVE ran a story about a group of school-yard psychopaths.
These kids had tied two chickens’ legs together and then kicked them to death in a football game.
They were caught out when they started harassing other pupils with the carcasses.
The thing is when I looked a the comments on Facebook, there were a lot of people defending the practice – some going on about how “pink” people were being hypocrites for opposing this act.
The fact is that there was nothing in the story about the race of the pupils involved; they were described simply as pupils at the school.
Maybe people read the original Beeld report and that included the race of the pupils, but in real terms looking at our copy and the reaction, it just seemed to be this weird assumption.
So what was originally a story about bad behaviour by a bunch of matrics, bad behaviour which could and probably has been mirrored anywhere, suddenly became a racial thing.
You get the same thing in gaming whenever a story breaks about some feminist getting death threats – there is a stream of excuses and lack of empathy which only makes gamers look worse than would otherwise be necessary.
It was also a major component to the response to the Ferguson police killing a teenager, and a lot of the responses to that YouTube video of a gay teenager coming out to his religious parents.
The second you have a culture, you get this sort of venomous hateful character cropping up to defend it.
And of course there is the other side to this – the danger of what happens when basic multiculturalism mixes with bigotry.
Within the UK recently, we saw the Rotherham report and the dangers of culture there.
Some will say the issue was political correctness, but I don’t think that is correct.
I think if there wasn’t a long history of racists claiming that members of other races were forming rape gangs, when a group of largely Pakistani men actually formed a rape gang it would have been taken a lot more seriously a lot more quickly.
It was an example of how multicultural ideas – not wanting to lend support to racism and undermine the value of tolerance – mixed with the very real presence of racism and intolerance allowed horrors to arise.
The Daily Mail crowd may claim that they were vindicated, but in real terms their constant stream of bullshit didn’t exactly help when there was something to complain about.
And of course multiculturalism didn’t exactly come out well, because defending the culture of others tends to mean taking their worst, most reactionary elements and defining the entire group by being sensitive to them.
Sometimes this deeply reactionary element is imaginary – worse than even the worst of a given group.
This means that the members of the Asian communities, who were complaining about their kids getting raped too, were also ignored.
The only real way around both problems is to act in a manner which is anti-culture.
I define anti-culture as basically the idea that you do not consider ethnic, religious or national values as being important. The values that are important are the individual ones.
Those chickens were kicked to death, whether they were kicked by black or white kids, and the cruelty displayed was just as bad whatever culture those kids came from.
The fact that people point to culture as some sort of defence doesn’t make what those kids did okay, it makes it look like there are a whole lot of individuals who are willing to behave in such a manner and this needs to be changed.
When we allow culture to be used as an excuse, we not only risk it being used that way but also it excusing our own inaction in the face of evil.
And that doesn’t really help anybody.