111. PC Nonsense

After my last post, someone (and I will not name him/her because he/she is employed in a field where he/she must get these things right or else there would be dire consequences for him/her and he/she might be out of a job) sent me an email:

‘Afro-Caribbean’ in your last blog is very non-PC now!

I replied to him/her:

I can't think of any PC term to describe someone whose origins are from Africa via the Caribbean.  What is it?

He/she wrote:

Nowadays we refer to these groups as Black African or Black Caribbean. 

And to that I replied:

Why?  In Cayman there are black people whose origins lie in Africa, South America and South East Asia.  If they are all Black Caribbean, it's a nonsense and misleading.

PC is bollocks!

Maybe it’s an age thing.  Does political correctness come more easily to those who were born after a certain date?  I often seem to get it wrong and consequently, whenever I come across it and do get it wrong, I tend to think that political correctness is bollocks.

John Cleese, the actor/comedian, is older than me and he finds it difficult:

“It starts out as a half way decent idea and then it goes completely wrong.”

My problems probably began when I was 5 years old when I saw a Black man for the first time.  My Infant school had visitors from Nigeria.

(See, Voting Tips and a Solar Eclipse)

In 1952, teachers never needed to worry about political correctness but they did know what was polite. 

“Don’t stare and don’t call them black,” we were told.

“That’s rude.  They’re coloured.” 

Describe someone as ‘coloured’ nowadays and all hell is let loose.  But to talk about ‘a man or woman of colour’ as Viola Davis did in her Emmy award acceptance speech a couple of weeks ago, is PC and acceptable.  

I don’t get it.

Classifying someone by their appearance can rarely be PC and can lead to all kinds of problems and anomalies.  A friend in Cayman, who in the UK would be described as Afro-Caribbean, went to work in the US where he was designated as ‘African-American’.  He was somewhat annoyed because, as he said, “I’m neither African nor American.”

When I was young, the peoples living in the Arctic region of Siberia, North America and Greenland and who existed by nomadic hunting, were known as Eskimos.  However, ‘Eskimo’ is now considered as pejorative and a non-PC term.  Only ‘Inuit’ is PC and acceptable and is in common usage there, here and everywhere.

But ‘Inuit’ is just one of the tribes not all of them - the Yupik, Inupiat, Aleut, Kalaallit, Naukan, Alutiiq and the Inuit - and it is certainly not a descriptor accepted by the Yupik tribe.

Consequently, ‘Eskimo’ is the only generic term that encompasses all the relevant tribes, but to use it is very non-PC.

I don’t get that either.

The United States Government has a department called the Bureau of Indian Affairs.  It does not have Bureaus of Chinese, German or Russian Affairs.  The Indian Affairs Bureau never has dealings with the country of India or the Indian government but is in fact responsible for the welfare of the American Indians.  

Yet, there are no American Indians any more.  Those people are correctly known nowadays as Native Americans or Amerindians.  Those are the PC terms and don’t you dare call them Indians!

Unfortunately, nobody seems to have bothered to tell the Indians – sorry, Native Americans.  When my sister-in-law and her family were taken on a tour of a Cahuilla Indian reservation in southern California in March this year, their Amerindian guide always referred to his people and ancestors as ‘Indians’.

I am not even going to start to try to attempt to explain why it is all right for a Black man to refer to another Black man as a ‘nigger’ but that is the worst possible word that a White person can ever utter – worse even than that word that rhymes with punt. 

In a tangentially similar vein, and this has bothered me for more than 40 years, how did it come about and happen that ‘Paki’ is extremely racist and non-PC, while calling an Australian an ‘Aussie’ is almost a term of affection?  Maybe the hard ‘k’ makes it sound aggressive and threatening.

It’s some people’s reaction to a breach of PC etiquette that really pisses me off.  I can still remember the haranguing I received from a feminazi* on the staff of the school where I taught, when I referred to a 23 year-old teacher as, “that girl in the art department.”  

I was 50 years old at the time and to me, that art teacher was a girl.  I am not saying that I was right and the harridan was wrong.  Technically, she was correct, I suppose but the venom, volume and vehemence of her admonishment was absurd and way out of proportion to the supposed offence - in my opinion.

In 2004, it was reported that staff at the coffee shop in the Mitchell Library in Glasgow refused to serve a customer who had ordered a ‘black coffee’, because it was a racist phrase.  He would only get it if he asked for “coffee without milk”.  Apparently, a member of staff was offended by hearing “black” coffee.

I don’t know what that affronted barista would have thought of a coffee drinker in Alderley Edge some years ago.  As a student during a summer vacation, Caroline, my wife, worked in a coffee shop.  A regular customer when asked how he liked his coffee would always say, “I want it the colour of Shirley Bassey.”  

In New York recently, as a result of allegations of racism over the use of non-PC ‘yellowface’ make-up so that white actors appear Japanese, a production of The Mikado by the New York Gilbert & Sullivan Players has been cancelled and replaced by The Pirates of Penzance.  I hope that they can find genuine Cornish actors to play the pirates! 

Does that mean that the only productions of The Mikado that White British actors may take part in from now on will have to be like the 1987 production that set the action in an Edwardian country hotel with all the actors appearing in English costume?  

Will it ever be politically correct again for an actor to ‘black up’ to play Othello or for a gentile to play Shylock?  

Will a white impressionist ever again be allowed to impersonate a black celebrity’s voice and accent?

Student Unions sometimes seem to blur the PC line.   In May this year, a ‘Diversity Officer’ at Goldsmiths College, University of London banned all men and white women from a meeting of ethnic minority women.  Imagine the furore if ethnic minority women were banned from meetings of white people.

This week, The Students’ Union at the University of East Anglia has banned students from wearing sombreros on campus.  These straw hats were distributed as part of an advertising campaign by a Tex-Mex restaurant in Norwich.  Apparently, the sombreros were symbols of  ‘cultural appropriation', whatever the hell that means!

I suppose that next St Patrick’s Day, the students at UEA will be barred from drinking Guinness.

Thank God that kind of attitude didn’t prevail when I was a student.

Definition of ‘Offence’

Annoyance or resentment brought about by a perceived insult to or disregard for oneself.

Some people are just too thin skinned.  I have sometimes experienced annoyance by what someone has said to me but I have never felt resentment.  Just because someone is annoyed can hardly be taken to mean that they are offended.  Consequently, I don’t think I’ve ever been offended in my life and I have had opportunities. 

In 1975, when I was the only white person queuing at a beach bar in Tobago, one barman told the other barman to, “serve the honky.” 

I was surprised and I assumed that it showed how the barman felt about me but I wasn’t offended because he didn’t know me and he had no evidence with which to vilify me.  I just shrugged it off and let it pass.

So, to those of you who have tried to offend me in the past, I regret to inform you that I wasn’t.  You will just have to try a lot harder in future - but if anything I’ve written here has offended you, I’m sorry.  

It wasn’t intentional.

*          Nine years later we were married.

**         It is just possible that you may not have come across this word before.  ‘Honky’ is a contemptuous term used to refer to a white person.  Black Power militants who were looking for a rebuttal for the word ‘nigger’ adopted ‘honky’ as an uncomplimentary, derogatory term in 1967.  Its etymology is uncertain.  When I was referred to as a honky in Tobago, a Trinidadian told me that its origin lay in the fact that a white person’s skin is the colour of a pig’s and ‘honky’ is based on the sound made by pigs.

I have found at least three other theories as to its origins but none that mentions pigs.  There seems to be no definitive explanation.