The death of the dream my family fought for

Before plunging into a vexed question, it’s sometimes wise to point out that one is aware how vexed it is. I haven’t been living in a cave these past few years. Even as I speak, doctoral theses are doubtless being written on ‘identity politics’: whole books have been devoted to what has become very much the topic of the day, and (without always being precise about what we mean by the term) we in the world of politics and the political media sometimes seem to talk of little else.

But during a recording for my BBC Radio 4 Great Lives programme this week, it came home to me what these ideas have displaced. Out have gone the beliefs and ideals that meant so much to me as a boy. The dream for which my family fought in what was then Rhodesia is now not so much unfashionable as forgotten. The ‘dream’, I mean, of multiracialism; a growing irrelevance of skin colour or ethnic origins; the gradual convergence of the world’s peoples; the building on our planet of a shared culture, shared values, a shared membership of our human race; and a slow but steady dissolving of our differences.

I mean, in short, the warm, fuzzy but powerful feeling we had when I was young, and we listened to Three Dog Night singing ‘The ink is black, the page is white / Together we learn to read and write…’ or Stevie Wonder and Paul McCartney singing ‘We all know that people are the same wherever you go…’: ‘Ebony and ivory live together in perfect harmony / Side by side on my piano keyboard, oh Lord, why don’t we?’

I remember the New Seekers’ recording of ‘I’d like to teach the world to sing / In perfect harmony…’ Or Oscar Hammerstein II’s lyric in South Pacific: ‘You’ve got to be taught to be afraid / Of people whose eyes are oddly made / And people whose skin is a different shade / You’ve got to be carefully taught.’