Clive Davis

MINORITY VOTES

Shaheen, one of the contributors at the estimable group blog, 'Aqoul, doesn't sound like a natural-born Sarkozy supporter, but she's distinctly underwhelmed by the Socialists. Ségolène Royal, she reckons, belongs to an outmoded statist tradition which actually has the effect of keeping the country's "Beurs" in their place:

Largely a working class population, French Arabs are doubly hit by discriminations which slow economic growth only aggravates. The many small businesses owned by Arabs are also hindered by such inefficiencies. Even though there are many issues to consider, French Arabs will not be able to defend any of their important concerns (civil rights, migration laws ... foreign policy, etc.) if their general economic (and resulting influence and educational) level is not improved in the first place.

Meanwhile, across the Channel, there's a sighting of an extremely rare breed: a black conservative. Shaun Bailey, the west London activist and community worker, speaks his mind in a compelling interview:

When [David] Cameron wants to know what is happening to the economy, he calls shadow chancellor George Osborne. When he wants to know about the deepening urban crisis - the crime, the drugs, the guns, and the warped moral codes that hold sway in many inner cities - he turns to Bailey.

And what Cameron hears about those estates, about the black communities and the impact upon them of the caring professions, has an uncompromising tone. "When you do a job like mine and the community work I do, you start to see lots of people in pain and living badly," Bailey says. "You see well-meaning people around them trying to help, but what they do is that they support them so much that they take over their lives. They rob them of the will and the skill to look after their own. They make them dependent. We get all these people who are parachuted into poor communities who manage that community and then go home to their lovely lives. It's just horrible for that community because it means all of us continue to live in this horrible dark world that we can't navigate without someone leading us from it."

This part of the profile is even more frank. Kudos to Bailey for being so honest:

He was born in north Kensington to parents who split when he was very young. He lost contact with his father, a lorry driver, for several years, but says that his mother - aided by his uncle - made it her mission to shield him from the crime and disorder around them. With an iron will, she kept him away from troublemakers and kept him busy. He recalls: "I did karate for a week, I did football for a week, then she found me a gymnastics place."

He says, without hint of embarrassment, that she even kept him from much of his own community. "She had seen how black people interact with black people - what they say to other black people - that means you can't go forward, that you get trapped in your own poor community..."

Brave words. I just hope he doesn't become just another Tory token rolled out for special media occasions.

SHADES OF LONGING

While fashion-conscious Caucasians go out of their way to get a tan, fake or otherwise, some brown-skinned people spend their money trying to go in the other direction. Pickled Politics has the depressing evidence.

BLACKSHIRT, BLACKFACE

A fascinating article about Lawrence Dennis, a driving force in America's home-grown fascist movement, who was, in reality, the son of a black woman:

"As a boy he was a famous child preacher, spreading the gospel first among black American congregations and then later abroad, even in Britain. But at some point in his adolescence, he did something quite dramatic: he cut all ties with his family so that he could attend the prestigious school of Exeter, and then Harvard, as a white man. After that he briefly pursued a career as a diplomat and broker, and then in the wake of the Wall Street Crash went on to become the public face of American fascism."

Echoes of Philip Roth's The Human Stain, no? "Passing" is one of those subjects that is, even now,  little understood. One reason why the film adaptation of Roth's novel bombed was that critics and audiences alike thought the idea of Anthony Hopkins playing a black man was absurd. But that, really, was the whole point of the story. I thought Hopkins gave an excellent performance, as a matter of fact. The Nicole Kidman character was much harder to take, but then that's also true of the lover in the book.

So much has changed since the days of the colour line that it's almost impossible to conceive how it affected even the closest family relationships. Here's a reminder from a Times piece that I wrote prior to The Human Stain's release:

The Washington Post columnist Donna Britt recently described how, after taking her septuagenarian mother to see The Human Stain, she was appalled by her reaction: "If I’d had a child back then who could have passed and wanted to, I’d let him go. We’d just have to meet secretly every year." 

A thought worth remembering next time you see Barack Obama's face on your TV screen.

NOTEBOOK

After coming down from Oxford, Morley joined Independent Television News and worked as a newscaster, reporter and scriptwriter, covering two elections, the funeral of Sir Winston Churchill and the birth of Milton Keynes. He once interviewed Mrs Thatcher when she was a junior minister for pensions. "It has been said, Mrs Thatcher," he began, "that England is a great place to live if you are neither very poor nor black." "Well, I'm not, am I?" she replied with finality.

Obituary of Sheridan Morley, Daily Telegraph, 18 February 2007.

IN THE DAYS BEFORE THE "RACE RELATIONS INDUSTRY"

 

Short of ready cash - the rag-and-bone trade is in a slump - Albert Steptoe decides to advertise for a lodger:

"To let. Room in fashionable mews cottage. Clean linen. Suit professional person. Five pounds a week. No wogs."

UPDATE: Sunny Hundal finds that Albert's prejudices linger on:

The BBC’s Inside Out programme did a little test to see if people in South England were willing to break the law to discriminate against Asians. No problem there. In fact the estate agents sounded as if they had requests for ‘No Asians please’ all the time.

MIXED UP

So Trevor Phillips is a racialist because he "thinks that your race is the most important fact about you"? Oh, please... Jamie Whyte's op-ed about ethnicity in Britain is an example of how a clever person can be logical and wrong-headed (not to mention smug) at the same time. Besides, basing a column on the life experiences of your three-year old mixed-race daughter is, let's say, stretching things a little. Good for her that she's growing up in "a nice bourgeois suburb"  (as are my sons). But most people aren't. End of conversation.

As a matter of fact, I feel quite optimistic about the way the next generation of mixed-race kids will cope. Things have improved no end since the days when Ronnie Barker's fellow con, McLaren was just about our only role model on TV. But it's still a leap to pretend that race doesn't matter at all. Which is partly why I was a little testy in the Celebrity Big Brother discussion on 18 Doughty Street last Tuesday. [Thanks to Iain Dale for supplying the video link.] I often get the feeling that some conservatives are so intent on scoring points against the bien pensant establishment that they airbrush genuine problems out of existence. For instance, as I tried to explain after we came off air, I would have major problems dealing with a friend who was a Stalinist, but I could probably find some way of coming to terms with that affliction. A friend who decided to join the BNP, on the other hand,  would instantly become an ex-friend: it would be personal. I don't see a way around that. I was surprised to find that other panellists had a hard time grasping the point.

(As for Big Brother, I'm glad Shilpa took the high road in the post-release interview last night. Turning Jade into a public enemy would just have been counter-productive. In the end I watched a full hour of the climactic programme last night. Amazing to see how a frothy entertainment can turn into a vehicle for serious issues. And, no, I don't think the controversy was a result of the "success of militant multiculturalism", as Joseph Loconte puts it. The British public isn't that gullible.)

BIG BROTHER'S SISTERHOOD

Last night was the first time I'd ever sat through a whole programme of highlights from Celebrity Big Brother. The things I do for the sake of this blog... On the basis of what I've seen so far, the Shilpa problem boils down to class and culture, but with unmistakeable racial overtones as well. Shyama Perera has a very good piece on the dynamics.

What was particularly interesting last night was the way Danielle responded to the rebuke she was given in the diary room. (She'd told Shilpa to "Fuck off back home" or something similar.) I'd expected her to brazen it out when she was confronted with her words, but she didn't; she shrank into her chair and apologized. That's an important victory, one that the many viewers who share her outlook won't be able to ignore.  I just hope the producers don't make the mistake of becoming too censorious. Jade and Co are stupid and blinkered, but they deserve a chance to ponder and acknowledge their mistakes. Push them too hard and you risk turning them into BNP pin-ups.

Sunny Hundal's latest post puts matters in perspective: 

A wise person once said - let the person who has not sinned cast the first stone. Similarly, let the Asians who are not racist against other races or xenophobic against other religions complain. I know their numbers aren’t that large.

When I was watching The Last King of Scotland at the weekend, it occurred to me that the scenes of the Asian exodus from Uganda didn't make any mention of the Africans' resentment at the racial prejudice that some Asians displayed towards them. That's a well known fact, as Yasmin Alibhai-Brown has acknowledged. Yasmin came from Uganda; my wife grew up in Kenya, so I'm pretty familiar with the background.

UPDATE: What constitutes acceptable language on TV? If you haven't seen it before, the 1970s clip from Love Thy Neighbour is quite an eye-opener. It was never my favourite show, but I'm beginning to think the humour was braver than it seemed when I was thirteen.

TV & TABLOIDS

At last, Big Brother becomes public service broadcasting. I was just listening to the Five Live phone-in about the Shilpa business, and realized it's ages since I've heard such an open debate about race. (Although I see that Bryan Appleyard takes a dimmer view of the whole thing.)

BTW, good to see that The Sun has finally retracted that story about Muslims attacking the home of Army officers near Windsor. [Via Pickled Politics]

THE G-WORD

All right, people who spit venom over a gollywog exhibition may be trying to push their own far Left agenda. But as I was subjected to every variant of gollywog joke on the school bus in my teens (believe me, it becomes wearing after a while) I also happen to think there's something slightly off-putting about people who get annoyed about other people complaining about gollywog exhibitions.

And when one of Iain Dale's commenters says...

I never even knew Golliwogs were a representation of black people before it became an issue.

... I really do feel like reaching for my knuckleduster.

As for bashing the BBC over that story, well, the original news item wasn't particularly well written, but it's hardly worth going to the barricades over something so trivial. Especially as the Daily Mail had run the same item three days earlier.

Being an optimist, I think the time will come when gollywogs will shed all their racial connotations. That time may not be too far off, but we're not there just yet, so the polite course of action to take, I think, is to tread carefully around the subject.

All I'll add is that I now have a better idea of why David Cameron is trying to re-invent his party. He has quite a task in front of him.

A GLIMPSE INSIDE A FRENCH GHETTO

A reporter rides the bus to an underclass housing development on the outer fringes of Lyons. Lots of different root causes -  economic, cultural, religious - and they still have a Communist mayor, not to mention a main boulevard named after Lenin:

Anyone who has work leaves. Ghassan goes to the airport St-Exupéry, where he has a job at the luggage counter, un boulot CDD, which means contrat à durée déterminée, a job with an expiry date. With a CDD under your sleeve, you're likely to stay in the kid's room in France. The bank won't give you a loan, the landlord not a single cell. 73 percent of all first jobs are CDD, and only half of them turn into a long-term job, a CDI or contrat à durée indéterminée. Ghassan would actually like to get away from the luggage and become a steward for Air France. But to do that, he would need a few things that he doesn't have, like a high school diploma.