Round-up

1. Recently retired boxer Floyd Mayweather jnr has accused the American pay-TV channel Home Box Office of bias against him and other black fighters. "Is it racial? Absolutely. They praise white fighters, they praise Hispanic fighters, whatever. But black fighters, they never praise."

Maybe you just suck, Mayweather.

2. Toddlers as young as three should be taught about racism and singled out for criticism if they have "racist" attitudes, a Government-funded advisory group said yesterday.

Don't you just love the Nanny State?

3. This Canadian piece is in full anti-imperialist, "all Americans are racist" mode as it waxes lyrical about oppression of aborigines, and so on. As expected, I have some objections...

"Racism towards Aboriginals exists to justify the theft and genocide inherent in colonization. Historical documents show a reality of culturally rich, egalitarian, democratic and deeply knowledgeable societies before colonization."

Not always, they don't. Political correctness has caused many intellectuals to exaggerate the virtues of non-white aboriginal civilisations, often rather comically. In the 1911 Handbook of North American Indians, it was suggested that there were four Aborigine words for snow. By 1940, the estimate had gone up to seven. From then on, as Westerners tried harder and harder to denigrate their own culture by exaggerating the "rich" culture of the Native, the number went up to almost four hundred. And yet the fact remains that however many Eskimo words for snow there are, there are yet more in English. And the Native was not always possessed of great wisdom denied us greedy colonialist Westerners. In Polynesia, the present population descends from a native population that traveled there by canoe. This Native population brought with them various wildlife that was alien to Polynesian shores - resulting in numerous homegrown forms of life being virtually eradicated. And at one point there were so many people on one Polynesian island that these "enlightened" Natives resorted to methods such as cannibalism, infanticide and ritual sacrifice to control the population. Enough said.

I also wonder whether the author of this letter is aware that prior to the dreadful massacres of the American Indians, there was actually a strong strain of admiration among Englishmen who came into contact with them. For example, a Virginina minister named Alexander Whittaker wrote in 1613 that "the law of Nature dwelleth in them [aborigines]: for they have a rude kind of common wealth and rough government wherein they both honour and obey their kings, parents and governors, both greater and less, they observe the limits of their possessions, murder is scarcely heard of, adultery and other offences severely punished."

But the author does not mention any of this. Instead, all the evils of the world are placed on the shoulders of the White Man. Never mind the fact that every evil of the West, from racism to colonialism, has been studied copiously here. We are the masters of self-criticism, which, if anything, this author embodies. It remains to be seen how long some other cultures will take to catch up with us in that respect.