The US diplomat, newly arrived in Haiti some time in the 1930s, was interested in learning more about his posting. What percentage of the Haitian population, he asked a local official, was white? "About 95 per cent," the Haitian told him. Certain that his question had been misunderstood, the American rephrased it - but still got the same reply.
"Then how do you categorise someone as being white?" he wondered. The Haitian turned the query back on him: "How do you categorise someone as black in the United States?"
The American explained the rule of thumb: anyone with a black ancestor was considered black. "We use the same rule," the Haitian concluded. I don't know if I actually believe this yarn, told in the course of her Reith Lecture, "The War Between the Worlds" (BBC Radio 3, Thursday), by Professor Patricia J. Williams - who herself made no great claims for its historical veracity. But it makes her point perfectly: racial categories are, at best, arbitrary - "dangerous nonsense" might get closer to the truth. She cited even the occasional liberal pieties about racial harmony - "Mixed marriages show the way forward", etc - as missing a crucial fact: much of the world's population is already quite "miscegenated".
Her words reminded me of a car journey game our parents once inflicted on us when the I-Spying prospects got thin: take our four grandparents (a Spagnolo from Sicily, an Alaia from Naples, a McCormack from Wexford and a Browne from Laois) and speculate as to what this might say about our background - apart from screaming "New York!" With the help of the adults' knowledge about migration and conquest, we'd covered both sides of a sheet of paper, and were still listing countries where distant ancestors might have come from, when we arrived at the motel. Mongrel that I am, I'd fancy the brilliant African-American Professor Williams in a fair fight with any of the self-appointed "scourges of political correctness" and decriers of "cults of victimhood". However, as she pointed out, a fair fight is difficult in an environment so infected with racial and sexual pseudo-science; on a slow day, no newspaper is immune to the temptation of "Study shows blacks/ women less proficient at/more inclined to" etc. (Scientists, too, are hardly immune from the temptation of getting results that get headlines.) Explanations of inequality drawn from biology are so much simpler than ones from history and politics. Intriguingly, Professor Williams suggested that a "global surplus of black people" in the world economy is making such pseudo-science more useful for elites and further marginalising "black" populations. Perhaps a happier prospect will emerge from her concluding lecture.
The final marginalisation of Cliona Ni Bhuachalla happened last Friday, when Cliona (Radio Ireland, Monday to Friday) finished in a flurry of champagne corks. This column was harshly critical of the programme in its early weeks, and in spite of a livelier, more youthful feel to it in more recent times, I can't claim to be disappointed at its passing. Her colleagues rightly praised Cliona's dignity and professionalism in the face of "public speculation" about her future, but they might have put the blame more squarely where it belonged: with the station's management. After chairman John McColgan told the assembled hacks at the February launch that Cliona - in spite of the heavyweight opposition - was "going to win" in her time-slot, this relatively inexperienced broadcaster was dropped into a ill-prepared programme and was as poorly promoted as her more wellknown colleagues. The "public speculation" was based upon what everyone knew to be true: from early on, management was manouevring to replace, rather than improve, Cliona.
Earlier this month, I defamed Radio Ireland's John Ryan (host of Sunday Supplement) when over-enthusiastic station-hopping left me with the mistaken impression that he comes from Athlone; his dulcet tones are, of course, south county Dublin in origin, without a trace of miscegenation.
His dignified reply in the Letters page to my mistaken accusation has left me feeling so benign that I hesitate to mention what I heard last Sunday, but here goes: introducing a tribute package to the late, lamented Vincent Hanna, Ryan gave the distinct impression that it had been "cobbled together" by his programme team from tapes lent by the BBC. However, the rather touching 10 minutes that followed would have been highly familiar - to within an edit or two, anyway - to anyone who'd been listening to Mediumwave (BBC Radio 4) just an hour earlier. Ah, but good, dear John realised his error, and anyone who listened through the tribute and the adverts that followed would have then heard Ryan read a list of credits to the folks in the Beeb who had actually cobbled it together for Mediumwave. Sure, it could happen to a columnist.
