A popular Austral-ian TV variety show called Hey Hey, it’s Saturday made headlines recently when it included a segment featuring a group of people from various ethnic backgrounds with Minstrel-esque black facepaint impersonating the Jackson Five. It prompted columnists and talk show hosts to puff up their chests and begin the finger-wagging national self-analysis: ‘Is Australia a racist country?’
It was as ridiculous as it was embarrassing. An individual, a legal stipulation or an organisation can be racist, but a country – a sovereign territory with a nation and government – obviously can’t collectively be racist any more than a field or a car park can be an open-minded liberal. Nonetheless, the national conversation went back and forth for a few days, generating plenty of heat but very little by way of light.
On one hand were the poor damaged souls who, out of that nasty, post-colonial inferiority complex we so often see in Ireland, felt the need to write off their country and nation as pillowcase-wearing, cross-burning Nazis.
For this crowd, the worst of it wasn’t even that the whole country was racist – the really crucial point was that the rest of the world supposedly thought Australia was racist. Copies of English newspapers which mentioned the row in a tiny article on page eight were brandished around studios as if they were proof of the country’s failure in the eyes of the world, and in the eyes of the English in particular.
Standing against the moral outrage were those who thought the segment was sort of funny. They reckoned it should be written off as an attempt to make people laugh rather than to cause offence. It was comedy, cultural sensitivities be damned.
Both sides went into the argument with their views deeply entrenched and, as tends to be the case in debates, came away without having budged an inch – bar maybe radicalising slightly.
It seemed very much like a storm in a teacup to me. The segment wasn’t funny, but then the programme itself is dire so I wouldn’t have expected anything else. Of course, the act of dressing up and doing a ham-fisted impersonation of a Jackson Five member isn’t racist in-and-of-itself – UK show Bo Selecta regularly featured Leigh Francis ripping off Michael Jackson, but to my knowledge remained free of accusations of racism. This reveals the crux of the issue – the act of putting dark paint on your face to appear black.
So is this racist? When the Minstrels did it, of course it was racist, because they set out to ridicule black people in general. But was this the intention of our rubbish Australian comedians? I don’t think it was. Demonstrating cultural insensitivity out of a lack of knowledge and understanding of how the things you do will come across to others isn’t racism – that’s just being a bit of an idiot. It’s ignorance.
I’ve heard the argument that someone can inadvertently do something bigoted or racist without there being any intent behind it, but I’m not sure I agree with this. For example, every now and again a word that was common, acceptable parlance is suddenly stricken from the record when somebody somewhere decides that from now on it’s going to carry negative connotations. For instance, ‘disabled person’ is now a phrase for cavemen; ‘person living with a disability’ is the acceptable, politically correct term at the moment. If you’re not aware of this change and you use the former, there are people out there who will take this to mean that you are a bigot.
To me, a word is a collection of inanimate sounds we use to portray to our audience a particular meaning. It’s the intent – the message the bigot is seeking to project – that is the issue, not the words themselves. Without the meaning the speaker chooses to attach, they are just noises – the sound of a car going past or a light switch being flicked.
I think the same goes for peoples’ actions. We all do stupid things from time-to-time and occasionally put our foot in it, but if there was no intention to hurt or offend, we shouldn’t be condemned for it.
