Both my parents were alcoholics. I don’t expect sympathy when I am just stating a fact. Growing up as the child of the town drunks I know what it was like to be the target of scorn and contempt because of someone elses actions.

‘ Everybody knows you Dad’s a drunk’

‘ I saw your mum on her way home, she’d get there quicker if she didn’t stagger so much’

‘ I bet you house stinks of beer’

‘ Did your parents put milk in your bottle as baby or did they give you beer?’

I also know what it is like to be blamed for the actions of others, my parents and others making it clear their drinking was my fault.

It took many years of therapy and self help to undo the damage of a childhood being held responsible for something I had no control over and the problems I was somehow supposed to fix. Eventually I was able to come to terms with the truth that it wasn’t my problem, my fault or my place to fix it and no one should have laid those burdens on me to begin with.

Just like my parents alcoholism being white is not my fault. It is not something I did on purpose to annoy or offend and it doesn’t make me responsible for the behaviour or complicit in ,by our modern standards, the disturbing attitudes and bad behaviour of white people past or present. Nor does the colour of my skin mean I automatically condone the aforementioned disturbing attitudes and bad behaviours past or present.

It has been the fashion for a long while now to accuse anyone who is white of being racist, as if it comes as a standard feature and not an optional extra with all white models. If you look at what racism really is, not the screaming left wing version, it’s a belief in the superiority of one race over others based on prejudice and bigotry. In other words, I think I’m better than you because of my preconceived ideas of who you are, what you are, how you act and what you believe and my obstinate adherance to those beliefs. Accusing someone of being a racist simply because they are white is a pretty racist thing to do.

Some time ago we were sat in church and the discussion turned to the treatment of indigenous people a countries like Canada and Australia by the European settlers. At one point on of the people declared

‘We really are horrible people aren’t we’ and while others nodded in agreement I spoke up

‘No, we aren’t. We didn’t do those things and we may very well have been the people who spoke out against the principle of Terra Nullius in Australia or the policy removing children from their families to residential schools. Just like we may very well have been abolitionist who campaigned against the slave trade’

It took people by surprise, the idea that we aren’t guilty of what we didn’t do.

History is not an exact science with definitive answers. Though a more rigorous attitude should be applied to gathering facts and information regarding history, it’s recording and reporting and understanding the influence of the bias of the person doing the gathering and recording has, what sources they use, primary and secondary, and what sources they discard, what information is missing, it often isn’t. We need to be aware of this just as we need to understand how a person, including ourself, understands and internalizes what someone else has written about a historical event influenced by their personal bias. History is written not just the victors but also the people who value their lives and livelihoods, consider Shakespeare writing Richard III during the reign of the granddaughter of HenryVII.

There are so many questions that need to be asked when considering the why and wherefore surrounding a moment in or a person from the past like the prevalent attitudes of the people involved and the social and economic factors behind an event. Nothing and no one from history is isolated from what has gone before or is happening then. The only constant a history is there are rarely out and out good guys and bad guys.

People who work to the agenda that white people were always the bad guys and people of colour always the victims ignore the many subtle and not so subtle nuances of history based on facts. White people were enslaved as well as the enslavers in the new world. White people were sent by white people to Australia as punishment, many lived enslaved lives and died there. In Africa indigenous people captured and sold people from other tribes into the transatlantic and Arab slave trades and kept slaves themselves. Slavery was practiced by native people throughout the Americas long before Europeans arrived. Discrimination and bigotry was not a new concept taught to indigenous people by the Europeans.

The inconvenient truth is white people started and supported the Abolitionist Movement, white people helped freed slaves make their voices heard. In 1808, following the abolition of the slave trade in the Empire, the British Navy formed the West Africa Squadron tasked with enforcing the ban on the slave trade based in Free Town, Sierra Leone. In 1862 the Lincoln administration granted full permission to the British navy to intercept American ships. Also in America white people were conductors and station masters on the Underground Railroad one of the earliest being 15 year old Levi Coffin in 1813. History isn’t like the old Western movies where you can tell the good guys from the bad guys by the colour of their hats.

Slavery is alive and well today with people of all colours, ethnic backgrounds, nationalities and religious persuasions if not taking part then turning a blind eye to out right condoning it. At the same time people of all colours, ethnic backgrounds, nationalities and religious persuasions have joined in the battle to end modern day slavery,rescue and give safe harbour to it’s victims and prosecute those who profit from the practice.

No one is 100% virtuous, no one is 100% wicked, no one ever was or ever will be. Good people have and will continue to do bad things and bad people have and will continue to do good things. What we consider right and wrong in the 21^st century is very different to what was acceptable in the 20^th let alone in the centuries stretching back to when slavery was considered acceptable. Would I have supported the enslavement of people if I lived in 17^th through 19th^th century Britain? I don’t know, maybe I would have, maybe I would have joined the Abolitionist movements, maybe I wouldn’t have cared much as I strove to keep body and soul together. I suspect knowing a small bit of my familial history, especially the Scottish side, I would more than likely have been a candidate for selling into slavery/indentured servitude in the new world or possibly transportation to an Australian penal colony.

I am not a racist, I don’t look at a person and automatically assume I know what they think, believe or how they will act based on the colour of their skin, their features, the name they are known by mainly because I know how it feels to be judged in this way and treated in a negative way based on another person’s lazy stupidity.

I am not responsible for the actions of others now and I am certainly not going to be held accountable for the actions of the long dead just because a racist thinks my being white means I should be.