Industry | 2009.10.19
Joking aside, racism lives | Joseph Harker
If overt prejudice as aired on 1970s TV now draws censure, its modern form often goes unchallenged
What\'s the difference between good family entertainment and racism? The answer: time. The latest "race rows" (where white people argue over how offended they are by a bigot, with barely a black or Asian voice to be heard) have highlighted above all how attitudes change over the years.
American musician Harry Connick Jr slates a blacked-up white group performing a "tribute" to Michael Jackson on Australian TV, and explains how his own country has struggled to end the portrayal of black people as buffoons. Neither the programme producers nor the studio audience, it seems, had even considered this thought. They probably have now.
And in Britain, our own race controversy involves a white Strictly Come Dancing performer calling his partner a "Paki" , with veteran entertainer Bruce Forsyth at first claiming that it\'s a shame people have lost their sense of humour. He later retracted, but still couldn\'t help making a dig at "political correctness".
Most British people watching these shows would be shocked to see the dancer utter those words, or the "Jackson Jive" promote that imagery. But turn the clock back three decades and the opposite would be true. On a Saturday night they\'d be settling down to watch the peak-time Black and White Minstrel show. After that they might tune in to Till Death Us Do Part, to hear the racist rantings of Alf Garnett. Over on ITV they could be watching Mind Your Language, in which an English teacher struggles with his class of overseas students, filling every cultural stereotype from headswinging Sikhs to camera-obsessive Japanese, all "hilariously" failing to grasp the language. Or even tune in to the popular series The Comedians, starring that hero of the race equality struggle, Bernard Manning.
All of these shows were, at the time, good family fun. And if we could go back, Life on Mars-style, to any of those involved, they\'d be sure to say they weren\'t being racist; it was only a bit of fun. And, of course, "Some of my best friends ..."
Brucie\'s formative years were, as we know, well before even this era, so it is maybe a bit harsh to blame him totally for carrying his views forward into this millennium.
Twenty years ago you couldn\'t go to a football game without hearing a mass of monkey chants whenever a black player kicked the ball. TV and radio match commentators would make no mention of it. It took a microphone malfunction by Ron Atkinson for the rest of us to realise that bigoted comments were also being voiced, and tolerated, within the commentary box itself. That was in 2004. Again, Atkinson denied he was a racist and called his comments an aberration.
So, many things have changed with the passage of time, but many others haven\'t. Now, as then, no one is racist, it seems. Not Prince Charles, who calls his friend "Sooty"; nor Prince Harry, who refers to his army chum as "Paki"; nor even Carol Thatcher, who dismissively refers to a tennis player on the TV as "golliwog". The remark was "in jest", she said. "I just happen to have the opinions of a normal person."
And I\'m sure, if we asked them, the denials would come from the Spanish motor-racing fans who did their own black-up when goading Lewis Hamilton at the Formula One circuit in Barcelona; or the European football crowds which still abuse black players; or Australian singing doctors.
And in case anyone thinks that here, in the enlightened west, such attitudes and beliefs are now the preserve of a beyond-the-pale minority: what about the media, which gives out a daily dose of Muslims-as-terrorists propaganda (instead of giving the true picture, that al-Qaida is a crackpot group with a tiny number of fanatical followers and no base in the community)?
Yes, of course things have changed, and mostly for the better, since the 1970s. And I\'d like to think that in another 30 years we could be looking back, for example, at today\'s xenophobic attitudes towards migrants with disbelief. Or in an era when "political correctness" is no longer a term of abuse against those who wish to treat minorities with respect.
But with the ongoing rise of the far right, and the infiltration of both casual and organised bigotry into the popular discourse, we might just as easily be living in a nation where the Black and White Minstrels are back in their old slot on Saturday night peak-time TV.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]1/racism-strictly-come-dancing
