Missing the point

I’d like to endorse the posts written by Anders Hanson and GingaNic.

I read a letter in yesterdays metro which totally missed this simple and obvious point.

As I stated earlier, it’s the degree of the individual act of bigotry that makes it good or bad, not the topic of it. The letter said people should learn to deal with small minded abuse and not suffer from it. Which, taken out of context, is good advice. But the letter went on to imply that different kinds of bigotry hold different weights, just because of the topic. This is grade A nonsense.

Patrick Mercer is a grade A twit in condoning racism, but then so are those who are making fun of his statement of fact, that it is no worse to call someone a “black *******” than a “ginger *******”.

It is not the topic of bigotry that makes it acceptable or unacceptable, it is the treatment that results from the bigotry. All bigotry, (excepting of course bigotry against the ignorant and bigoted), is unacceptable, whatever the reason. One shout of “black *******” is not in any way worse than one cry of “ginger *******” or “specky *******”, and anyone suggesting otherwise needs to get a sense of perspective. However one cry of anything can and should be shrugged off. It’s unlikely that the people Mercer was citing as crying racism were reacting to such isolated one-off taunts, but a consistent pattern of abuse.

I find it a bit worrying that some people who have condemned Mercer believe that if you exchange a racial group for a group identified by similar, but no racial, characteristics, abuse becomes somehow less bad. It’s not.

I don’t find Mercers suggestion that the taunts ginger soldiers receive come with greater or equal frequency and vehemence than those directed against black soldiers, credible and sensible, and his suggestion that racism is OK because others are treated equally abusively is abhorrent. Maybe I’m just a soft case who doesn’t understand what it takes to make an army, but if this is what it takes I’m proud to be soft.

Making fun of whom?

I’m genuinely perplexed about Borat.

I thought the character had the same motives as Sacha Baron Cohen‘s Ali G character, a ridiculously obviously untrue spoof character who’s purpose is to make fun of the idiots around him, and to either wind up his audience, get them to display their prejudices to what they think will be a like minded audience, or even in the case of the rodeo scenes both. While Ali G is a spoof Gangsta Rapper, the character is not making fun of black people, but the targets that don’t even notice that Baron Cohen isn’t even Black. Similarly with the character of Borat Kazakhstan was, I thought, not being made fun of.

Borat’s wikipedia article states: The differences between Borat’s fictional homeland in Kazakhstan and the actual people and way of life in the country are so far apart that some speculate whether Cohen made it that way to be a satire of American views of the world. Some people speculate? Surely this is the point writ large, not people reading things into the performance?

However, having said all that, like Ali G on Children In Need, Borat is often performed to people who really ought to be in on the joke. In the film there is linking material without a stooge to laugh at. Many are up in arms, especially the Kasakhs who aren’t helped by having the character brought to their attention by the more hard of thinking end of the press. Are we laughing at foreigners, rather than those who would laugh at foreigners?

Mind you people thought Alf Garnett was a mouth piece for racism, rather than as the character actually was, fighting such prejudice by sending it up.