Can A Racist Ever Change Colours?

When the courts ruled in 2010 that the BNP had to start accepting non-white members, the nation waited with held breath to witness the influx of Black and Asian members into the racist Party. Two years down the line and we’re still waiting for the new multicultural and diversified BNP. With the exception of the highly vilified Sikh member, Mr Rajinder Singh and the equally maligned African, Reverend James Gitau (who joined and promptly left a week later), there are hardly any fully non-whites members of the BNP. We have some Jews and some half nationalities here and there as members (half Armenians and half Turks etc); but that’s as far as it goes.
This makes one to wonder – Is this because Blacks are reluctant to be associated with a Party whose core essence is based on racism or because the BNP has retained its leopard skin of discrimination despite the ruling, thereby ensuring no non-whites register, except of course our token Asian? This leads to the question – Can a racist ever change colours and be forced by a court judgement to abandon his ingrained prejudices against a different race and culture? Is it possible for a racist to wake up one morning and see the light or, forgive the pun, the dark?

This is why the new novel by Alex Stranger-Onoh, Brown Plague, makes for a highly fascinating read. Brown Plague, which incidentally translates as the viral infestation of non-whites within an indigenous white population, has been described by one reviewer as, “offensively racist, but scarily true…racism at its worst and mankind at his best.” The hero is an ex-serviceman with a grudge against Moslems. When his daughter is raped by two Moslem asylum seekers, he joins the ultra-racist English National League (E.N.L,) and soon becomes their MP for Coventry North East Constituency. But this guy has a dark secret, literally. He has a black mistress, who has a brown son for him – the antithesis to his Party’s racist ideology. But our hero is crazy in love with his black “Cleopatra” and takes some pretty crazy risks, even for a politician. When his wife discovers the secret, she goes on a rampage that puts to shame the famed adage, “hell hath no fury as a woman scorned.”

The novel is totally gripping, not just because this hardcore racist has a black mistress and son, but because the black mistress actually ends up becoming a member of the E.N.L under some really dubious circumstances, following a court ruling that is strikingly similar to that ruled against the B.N.P in 2010. Despite the wealth of pro-BNP ideology in this novel (which is inundated with Islamophobic, homophobic, xenophobic, sexist and racist themes), Brown Plague nonetheless comes across as a powerful love story, (with some pretty steamy love scenes), as well as a masterpiece of political satire. But here’s the amazing twist – This unbelievably racist work of fiction is actually penned by a black author, Alex Stranger-Onoh, a Writing M.A post-graduate student at Warwick University! So much for our BNP conspiracy theories! A truly must read.

Brown Plague will be released in March 2012 and is now available for pre-orders from all good bookshops and Amazon.co.uk.