Dalrymple writes that if despite everything, immigrants or people of immigrant descent, especially those of different races, are prospering and integrating well into society,
there is no need of a providential class of academics, journalists, bureaucrats, and others to rescue them from the slough of despond supposedly brought about by prejudice and discrimination. Many a career opportunity would be lost if there were no systemic injustices of this sort to untangle.
For the providential class, ethnic minorities in Britain
are mired in an oppressive neo-apartheid State.
The only solution is felt to be
virtually totalitarian control over society by the providential class.
Needed measures range
from the imposition of quotas in employment to censorship of what is said even in private.
Yet Dalrymple points out that immigrants and minorities
are not just immigrants and minorities but have individual and group characteristics that affect their destiny. It is not the character of the receiving country alone that determines the outcome for minorities, but the characteristics of the minorities. To think anything else is an inverted form of racism, ascribing all power to the receiving country and denying all agency to the minority groups. It is capable of fixing people in the amber of resentment.
To treat all people of non-European descent as if they must therefore have something positively in common
is to treat them as an undifferentiated mass defined wholly by their very non-Europeanness. Even Dr Verwoerd was not as crass as this.
For the providential class, a member of an ethnic minority
is the permanent possibility of a grievance that requires the intervention of the providential class to remove.
Dalrymple explains that the aggregation of ethnic minorities into a single category
is designed to disguise or hide the real differences between the minorities, because if such differences were admitted, they would not only threaten but refute the worldview of the providential class, namely that the society is so riddled with prejudice and discrimination that something akin to a revolution is required.
A large part of the British intelligentsia is obsessed with race and racism
as the sole or overwhelmingly important explanation of unequal outcomes between groups, at least where a minority group is doing worse than average. (Those that are doing better than average are almost reprehended, as if they were not complying with their duty to be the victims of a supposedly unjust society who are in need of rescue.)
For the providential class,
nothing succeeds like the failure of others. It needs there to be perpetual grounds for grievance by minorities, creating a constituency that looks for salvation by political means.
