THE RACIST PROBLEM.

 As someone of Irish Origin, whose ancestors came to this country to earn money to feed themselves and their families, I have a sympathy with the struggles of the Black Community.    Yes from my own experience I can relate to intolerance and injustice.    Lodgings and seaside resorts carried the notice 'No blacks, no Irish, no dogs'.   But there was not the bitter fighting as there had once been in places like Liverpool, where the bosses  in the docks, paid low wages as the English and the Irish dockers fought one another for jobs.   What is happening with the Black Community is the very same as my Irish ancestors faced.    Jobs were being taken away from the native population and there was resentment.

However let me be clear on this.   The English working class had nothing to do with the treatment of the Irish in Ireland.   Yes there was large amounts of money being made in the growing and transferring of corn to mainland Britain, but the profits were not shared with the working class, who in the 19th Century were herded into factories to work in appalling conditions up to 14 or 15 hours every day with only Sunday a day of rest.   The first Factory Act of 1833, described how children as young as eight were giving the job of going down the mines with the ponies to collect coal   Machinery in factories had few safety checks, and even there the children were employed.   And you can forget the story that these people who lived with families in one room and kitchen in slum tenements, with little water and toilets, which were soon over run by mice and vermin, fleas and lice, gained from the slave trade, they were little better than slaves themselves.    Yes, there were men making themselves rich from the selling of slaves in America, but they used their money for their luxurious mansions and ways of life.    The Cotton Mills in Lancashire bought their cotton from India, not America, and I feel no guilt whatsoever for the slave trade, my ancestors were not living off black slaves, and I will not bend my knee in any form of guilt.    Yes, I will bend if it is to acknowledge the hurt done to blacks by slavers, and the guilt of the upper classes.    And yes there are whites who hate blacks whom I do not support, but racism today is a two edged sword   There are black racists also who hate whites.   I saw it in videos from America where  people who thought they were educated went into bars and forced people to apologise for their privilege.    They even went into white areas to shout at white people to give up their homes to blacks.    All this is not seeking justice, it is manufacturing hate. 

When I go to my Catholic Church on Sundays, I sit beside black people, Asian people, Eastern European people and I thank God for them.    We pray together as one people in our Catholic Church.   Could I then hate anyone when I know how much they mean to God.   And that is the Christian answer to the problem of race.     Jesus Christ died for all of us.