What does it matter whether he was 16 or 28? Although I incline towards the former. As so often, race and class mirror each other. Three years ago, people who were used to unlined faces at 50 insisted that refugees who looked like the teenage boys round here, and those had not been in a war zone, must in fact have been far older. And boys of colour, especially black boys, always "look older" to those white people who are determined to be frightened of them.
Since Blogger took it upon itself to revert yesterday's post on this subject to draft, here it is again in full:
For all Britain's faults, it is nowhere near as racist as France. And it has participated in all of the neoconservative wars, whereas France has a share in the responsibility only for the consequences of most of them.
A 16-year-old Sudanese boy has drowned in the Channel after his makeshift boat capsized, and the line is that, while this incident may be tragic, Britain is being "invaded" and "swamped" by "hordes" of these dinghy-folk. Meanwhile, Britain is to give the right of entry and abode, complete with a fast track to citizenship, to at least 300,000 Hong Kong Chinese, and possibly to as many as three million of them.
Yet holding a British National (Overseas) passport does not even entitle you to register for the Registered Traveller service for clearing British immigration. For that, you would need the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Passport, which is issued by China. These people's connection to Britain really is rather tenuous.
In the early 1960s, apartheid South Africa conferred the status of Honorary Whites on Japanese, Taiwanese and South Koreans. In 2020, Britain is doing something terrifyingly similar.
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