That was fun. At a UN conference on racism, the racist president of Iran made a speech calling Israel racist - which seems fine to me, given Israel's treatment of the Palestinians within Gaza, the Occupied Territories and within its own borders. Then the racist countries of Germany (Holocaust, Turks), Britain (Empire, slavery, 'institutionally racist' police, mass ethnic minority unemployment), the United States (slavery, segregation, Jim Crow, 80% of black men with criminal records) walked out.
This is a matter of representation - does being vocally upset about particularly poisonous racism make up for structural, ongoing, silent racism? Are we meant to think that speeches are more important than the discrimination which ensures that our black boys leave school less qualified, less likely to find employment and more likely to go to prison with conviction for which white people don't? (It's the same for women, by the way: they are disproportionately imprisoned for crimes such as non-payment of TV licences and fines, for which men tend to receive non-custodial sentences). Naomi Klein makes the point in No Logo that worrying about representation of race has diverted the left from the clear real racial problems - the Ahmedinejad case demonstrates the effect of this kind of tokenism.
