Protesters outside the Otago Daily Times office in Dunedin following the publication of a controversial Garrick Tremain cartoon.

OPINION: Twitter is the best place to find someone ready to pour scorn on you.

I wrote that the number of white people in this country who think white people are the best people was "quite a bloody few".

I was thinking about a cartoon, I was thinking about teenagers making white supremacist hand signals, I could have been thinking about very many things.

Someone sneered: "Curiously, white people rose to the top and ended up so privileged. How did that happen?"

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This is the way of the racist: you don't say it expressly. But your meaning is implicit.

It didn't sound like an invitation to a good faith debate but if he has any actual interest, I would start with the Guns, Germs and Steel view of history, in which Jared Diamond asks why people of Eurasian origin came to dominate the modern world in wealth and power, and finds that people have tended to confuse a race's state of development with their capacity for it.

Eurasia, having the best environment for food production, had spare capacity for other things - writing, technology. That created the opportunity to send out fleets of conquest and exploration.

Factor in the way in which germs arise and are dealt with as the evolution occurs and you find one race doing better than another, not because they're biologically superior but because the right environment has given them the spare capacity to build and grow and develop.

People will nonetheless laud the accomplishments of 'their' white race, even though you sense that had the task been theirs alone, they would have struggled to invent so much as a toilet brush.

Every school classroom I sat in had the same world map. All those countries in pink. All those lands to which Britain - 'our' people, they told us - had carried their greatness. So much inculcation, so many assumptions of superiority.

A truer telling of the story would have been ransacking from Kolkata to Kingston, living large off the exploitation. Then, having hollowed out India and Africa, declaring, after independence: "see how they fail without us."

The story is better told today, but the idea that white people are the best people - still quite a bit of it about.

A person will say "Oh, I don't see colour" and think they mean it. But unconscious assumptions endure.

Someone on Twitter writes of visitors to her art gallery, white men and women, who congratulate her on speaking very good English, and being a qualified curator, and being very beautiful 'for a Fijian'.

Otago Daily Times editor Barry Stewart addresses people protesting outside the office.

Someone posts a picture of her Māori/Fijian/Samoan nephew with little aboriginal children in the outback and her aunt writes "Love the pic all the little pickaninnies together," not meaning to offend but doing so anyway.

People respond to some te reo in emails with "Say it in English I don't speak Māori."

Besieged cartoonist Garrick Tremain makes a purported joke about the measles epidemic in Samoa and brings down a rain of denunciation. He professes to have been misunderstood, but would he have treated Pike River in that way?

There wasn't just the one cartoon. His perspective has been consistently of a more conservative traditional sort: a white culture leading humanity forward, a blinking incomprehension of people who are less "like us".

You could say there's a free speech question here, but there is no dearth of people putting the traditionalists' point of view, still coloured by the pink map. What we don't hear as much as we could are voices from other rooms.

What to do? Just let time work its course, as cartoonist and his readers grow older? Perhaps, but a photo of an aspiring MP and his teenage friends, one making a white supremacist hand signal, tells us that the kidding-but-not-really-kidding racism that runs down the sewers of 4Chan is providing some kind of creed for white teens blithely unaware of their abundant advantages. That really needs to be challenged.

For so long as we have people professing "It's OK to be white" and swivel-eyed fanatics who talk about "The Great Replacement" meaning: 'our' people are being supplanted, we have a problem.

Elie Wiesel was right: No human race is superior; no religious faith is inferior. All collective judgments are wrong. Only racists make them.