I've been sitting on this post for the last couple of weeks. I was pissed of the other week by this twitter user. He reports on the vagaries of the press. How they lie and distort etc. For the record he does a very good job of it.
He posted a tweet suggesting that anybody who reads the Daily Star must have the intelligence of a slug. I took umbrage and replied that my dad reads the Star and he's no idiot. I received a pretty dismissive response. But I didn't know where to go with the blog so I just put it to one side.
Then I listened to Jim Davidson yesterday on Fivelive with Richard Bacon. I was going to turn off but decided to give him a hearing. I was quietly impressed. He said that people have a perception of him and he realises there is nothing he can do about that. People assume he is racist and homophobic and he said really there is little he can do to change that perception of him because people had made their mind up before they got to know him.
He said he regretted doing Chalky White, the crude stereotypical Jamaican he did in the 70s. He refused to apologise for it. But again his reasoning was sound. It was the 70s and essentially he knew no better. He was being told to do it and nobody around him considered what he was doing at all out of the ordinary.
He did make the regular rant about political correctness but was open to the notion that it was what Richard Bacon described as institutionalised politeness. And again made a good point in saying that if somebody is so ignorant to call a black person a nigger then telling them they should call them black is an exercise in futility. Only generational change is going to affect that. A good friend of mine put it right years ago when he said 'My dad is less racist than his dad, I'm less racist than him, and my son will be less racist than me.' but I digress.
He was happy to say that he was going to mock 'fat women on the dole' and frankly he could not care less if they objected. As the interview neared its end I think I could feel the mask slipping slightly as he became irritated by the constant questioning of his ideologies.
It sounds like I am Jim Davidson's cheerleader and I'm not at all. I just think listening to him is a good lesson in how wrong it is to prejudge a person. He probably isn't the nicest person you are ever going to meet but he is also nowhere near as one dimensional as we would have been led to believe. Nobody is really.
And that is why I took umbrage at the suggestion that Daily Star readers are morons, or that anybody who likes Jim Davidson or Chubby Brown is a misogynist racist. This is only one aspect of the person. Sitting here I can think of a dozen people who I know would love Chubby Brown or read the Star or the Mail. But that doesn't define them.
When we (left and centre left types) dismiss people in this manner we do run the risk of being as bigoted and myopic as the people we are rushing to condemn.
2 comments:
Fair point - we do need to be careful. But two things strike me in response:
1. Telling people not to call Afro-Caribbeans or Africans (or whoever) 'nigger' is not, I think, an exercise in futility. That's making precisely the same sweeping generalisation that you're chastising others for. Sometimes, all it takes is one person to point out the offence that may be being caused to enable the change in attitude to be made.
2. I'd argue that there is still a qualitative difference between denigrating people on the basis of their skin colour or sexual orientation (something they had no say in and no way to change) and denigrating people on their (perceived) ignorance. Ignorance can (almost) always be corrected with (usually) very little effort, so calling people on it is, I'd argue, worthwhile.
Of course, the broad brush is carpet bombing, and innocents are going to be caught along with the guilty, but unlike carpet bombing, the innocents can always just say, "well, that doesn't apply to me".
I agree that pointing out appalling use of derogatory language is right in of itself. I guess the point is that it has to come from the right place for that person. Being lectured by liberals is not going to change any skinhead attitudes. It has to come from within that 'community'
Thanks for your comments though.
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