How not talk to a racist

Nearly five years ago, here, I wrote about the (new to me at the time) concept of pedigree collapse.

...the closer the consanguinity, the fewer the  maternal great grandparents. This pedigree shows how 1st cousins marrying share only three maternal great grandparents. 

When 1st Cousins M and F Marry

There is a corollary to this, which is hard to credit and seems counter-intuitive, but which Adam Rutherford explained in last Sunday's Private Passions: because of pedigree collapse, if you go back far enough, the family trees criss-cross so much that everyone living now is descended from everyone living then. For people of broadly European heritage, this point is about 1000 AD. So everyone in that population is descended from Charlemagne. (But don't get too cocky; we're also descended from Ivan the Terrrible.)

So the answer to William Wilberforce's question (for those of the XY persuasion, at least) is "Yes. I am a man and a brother."

Dr Rutherford went on to recount the story of a taxi driver who had asked him where he was from; he said he was born in Ipswich but now lived in Dulwich. This didn't satisfy the driver, who asked 'But where are you really from?'

<background>

In his book How to Argue with a Racist, Adam Rutherford writes:

I am mixed race, or dual heritage, or biracial. Half-caste is a term which has fallen out of favour, but for much of my life that is how many have described me, some out of habit, occasionally in a dismissive way. I am often asked where I am from, and I adjust my answer by second guessing what they are really asking. Britain, England, Suffolk, Ipswich or London, where I have lived for twenty-five years. All are true, but often, what they are really asking is why do you look the way you do? 

So I wonder why he doesn't answer that question. In the same book he writes

My father was born in Yorkshire, with both his parents being White and British. My mother is British and Indian, though she has never set foot in India. She was born in Guyana in South America. Her grandparents were shipped there from India in the nineteenth century to work on sugar plantations under the auspices of a colonial edict known as Indenture - a form of semi-forced migration and labour that is a shadow of slavery. She emigrated to England in the 1960s, in the wake of the Empire Windrush, the ship that brought 802 Caribbean women and men to begin new lives in Britain in the aftermath of the Second World War. Like them, she was a British citizen invited to the homeland of the colonies as the imperial age waned 

This does the job, although the version Sarfraz Manzoor gave on The World Tonight last Wednesday, mutatis mutandis (that's Latin for 'making the obvious changes, duh'), "I come from X ^UK but my people came from Y ^{HERE BE DRAGONS} "

</background>

As I said, I have to wonder why he doesn't answer that question. I know he is a firm believer in the accuracy of his research, but this makes him insist on coat-traiing when there is anyone who hasn't learned the Gospel According to A. Rutherford, giving him the chance to Make a Point.

<autobiographical-note>

This is a position that I know only too well. Many's the time that I have rocked the social or professional boat because of my insistence on sticking to an academic truth. On one memorable (well, I remember it) occasion I upset my toddlet (at the time) son, and his mother asked 'Did daddy shout at you?' He answered 'No, but he used his shouty voice.'

<parenthesis>

I'm reminded (with almost negligible relevance, but you're used to that, aren't you?) of a scene in the West Wing when CJ is being prepped for a court hearing. The lawyer asks 'Do you have the time?' and, looking at her watch, she says 'A quarter of two' (or whatever). Whereon he says 'I wish you'd stop doing that.' She asks what, and he says 'Giving more information than the questioner asks for. In your case, the answer was "Yes".' (I saw this several years ago, so it's not verbatim; but you get the gist.) 

My point is that sane people operating in society do more than just answer questions mechanically, but guess what the questioner really wants. This tolerance is the grease that makes society work.

</parenthesis>

</autobiographical-note>

This came up in that The World Tonight program, when a huge kerfuffle ...

<tangent>

(cause célèbre would be a bit of an exaggeration, though when Twitter gets its teeth into an issue like this it quickly becomes one) 

</tangent>

...kicked off about an old woman's insensivity, which  led to an event variously described as hostile, hurtful, unwelcoming, violent...

Of course, I am a WASP (or more accurately WAS RC_lapsed), so I'm in no position to say how non-WASP people feel about this sort of questioning. But it seems to me that there is room for more tolerance and understanding in this area, and blighting the few remaining years of an elderly woman is itself at best intemperate and at worst (ironically) insensitive, not to say plain stupid (though perhaps I mean childish?)    

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