BY DOMINIC WIGHTMAN

I always thought that racism was due to a lack of a decent education. There was no other explanation for the horror of Antisemitism. No other reason for those fools who treated blacks badly. Or for the bullying behaviour of thugs who insulted the Asians running corner shops and post offices. Surely racists were either dim or unenlightened, or so I thought.

I didn’t know any blacks at school. Nor at university. Nowadays I work happily with a mostly black team on a daily basis, my doctor is Indian and my main client is a Filipino. It would never occur to me to insult them or denigrate them for their race or colour.

Yet white on other racism exists. You see it in the Antisemitism of the Corbynistas. You see it in the football stadia of Italy against black players. In the last two decades Islamist extremism has increased racism towards Pakistanis and Somalis; even against Sikhs who anyone with half a decent education would know have no links to Islamism in the first place.

I recall being verbally racially abused in Jamaica in the late nineties in a hardware store not far from Runaway Bay. I was jeered by locals who called me whitie, which wasn’t particularly pleasant but I accepted their bigotry to be a reaction to white on black racism by others in the past and a lack of education. Nothing that couldn’t be solved with some eye contact and a few Red Stripe over a game of pool.

Is it my imagination or is black on white racism – alongside racism directed by other so-called ethnic minorities at whites – at its highest level in history? Hasn’t racism from whites been almost wholly replaced by abuse directed at white men and women? It seems that ethnic minorities can get away with calling whites whatever they want these days yet when whites are racist they get no free pass. The pendulum has swung far too far – in a manner not dissimilar to the feminazis (those feminists who wish for the subjugation and abolishing of male kind for a female-dominated planet) who have moved way past decent equilibrium of the sexes into a poisonous and bigoted space out in the extremes.

How can the British Asian writer Aisha Mirza get away with writing this piece about why White Women Drive Me Crazy? “We are taught,” Mirza writes, “to walk home with our keys between our fingers for protection from men in the night, but no one tells us how to defend ourselves from the white women who will try to ravage us from the inside out, with a smile, a comment, a betrayal, a vital inaction, a look.” The equivalent written by a white woman would end up in court. It’s of a similar tone to numbskull Combat 18 diatribes; just the colours have been reversed.

America suffers from this new reverse racism problem far worse than us Brits. Just type whites into Twitter and look at the black on white racism emanating from over there. In America, you have a right to say blacks are lazy, whites are racist, Jews are greedy, infidel are Islamophobic and Muslims are terrorists. Hate speech is protected. In the UK hate speech is prosecuted – but, except in cases of religious incitement, only against whites. Something is severely awry both here and across the pond.

Which brings me back to my original point – that racists are uneducated. There can be no other explanation. At least those racists displaying intelligence in other areas have chosen to be selective about which parts of their brain they are using.

In a civilised world, what’s good for the goose is good for the gander. What is good for one type is equally good for another type, despite any irrelevant differences between the types. If we are determined to prosecute all racists, we should start from a position of equilibrium. And include those who use the excuse of racism to unfairly denigrate others when they have no grounds on which to stand. Preferably, we’ll educate ourselves as to the omni-negatives of racism and avoid racism altogether – then perhaps we can all get along and prosper without acid dripping needlessly from our tongues.