[QatzelOk]

She went on, instead, to say that he was 'half-golliwog'

But she didn't say that she hated him, or respected him less because of his skin color.

She compared him to a doll that was a staple of British culture. And we could actually learn more about how media fabricates racism (in order to charm rich, white consumers) is we examined that doll, instead of scapegoating this well-paid ditz.

[Zyx]

But she didn't say that she hated him, or respected him less because of his skin color.

QatzelOk, I do not think that I need to explain to you that laughing at someone's expense due to their skin color is an example of implicitly saying as much. I mean, where in calling someone a half-golliwog is there any respect?

Again, the golliwog is an image created to be grotesque.

She compared him to a doll that was a staple of British culture.

The thing is that it was not a particularly neutral doll. It was a doll, likely, founded on the idea that Blacks were ugly, like how Barbie proposes that Whites are beautiful.

And we could actually learn more about how media fabricates racism (in order to charm rich, white consumers) is we examined that doll, instead of scapegoating this well-paid ditz.

Indeed, but there are better methodologies for this much. There is the adage, "What you say is as important as how you say it." Here, it is questionable whether or not she 'says it,' but how she said whatever she was saying was undeniably punishable. She seemed to more foster an area of racial privilege than anything else, hence she was dismissed. I think that methodology is very important, QatzelOk. It's the basis of good communication, in fact.

[QatzelOk]

Kumatto, you didn't notice how I used the word "ditz" in order to make the male readers of this forum feel charmed so that they are more likely to empathize with my opinion?

That doll is an example of the embeddedness of racism in the texts of hegemonic cultures. Carol's remarks simply forced Brits to confront the skeletons in their own national closet. For this, she was sacrificed so that other media racism can live on.

[sploop!]

Carol's remarks simply forced Brits to confront the skeletons in their own national closet.

You sounded a bit like PBVBROOK, there...

[Zyx]

Kumatto, you didn't notice how I used the word "ditz" in order to make the male readers of this forum feel charmed so that they are more likely to empathize with my opinion?

I thought that it was a peculiar word. It just struck me as peculiar, though. In searching the word's definition, I did not see it as sexually exclusive.

Carol's remarks simply forced Brits to confront the skeletons in their own national closet.

There is a certain methodology, QatzelOk. It does not seem as if she was truly as noble as you are making her out to be. One thing about methodology, though, is that one is supposed to try not to offend.

A slave narrative that I particularly like has the author say that her parents fought for American freedom and were like mulattos (though she says 'like.') This was not true, but seeing how she is writing about the horrors of slavery, she starts out with a racially neutral claim and often intersperses her narrative with global compliments to Whites even if she internalizes a strong hatred and regret. It's called good methodology to communicate something.

This can be seen in that thread on the doctor. He doesn't curse the Israeli, not because he's not angry but because it hurts his cause. It's about methodology. I agree that there is a racism in the hegemonic culture, QatzelOk, but I do not agree that this lady is some sort of noble person who deserves to remain in her higher status. She said something wrong, so now she's to be put away. That's how our rulers rule us. She did not know the rules, I guess. This reminds me of "Malkin."

[QatzelOk]

I do not agree that this lady is some sort of noble person who deserves to remain in her higher status.

Well then, Kumatto, you are trying to indiscreetly put her down (dominate her), which is what you are accusing her of having done discreetly.

Your transgression is blatant, while hers is nuanced and perhaps non-existant.

This is the nature of a scapegoat.

[Zyx]

QatzelOk, I am not trying to do anything to her. Let's not bring me into the discussion. I just can not imagine that she is criticizing capitalism (and it's aim towards proletarian divisions through things like race, SES and gender) insomuch as she is espousing capitalism (by going for those aims). That's my point. According to her methodology, she is espousing it.

[QatzelOk]

QatzelOk, I am not trying to do anything to her. Let's not bring me into the discussion.

No. Instead, let's make this all about Carol Thatcher, the person.

Rather than criticizing golliwog dolls (which might offend today's purveyers of idolatry) or British Imperialism (which created the perfect environment for this kind of racism-for-kids), let's just crucify this single solitary person because what she said in an aside was just so much more harmful than racist toys for kids or British Imperialism.

[Zyx]

The thing is, QatzelOk, that she was not criticizing golliwog dolls. I criticized golliwog dolls in my original post, just as sploop! asked. She did not, however, and despite her quality of returning golliwog to the international dialog, it was more of a criticism of an Black Englishperson than a criticism of England's racism. The apolitical and isolating criticism of the former does not do my ideological beliefs any justice; therefore, she does not gain my defense.

[sploop!]

Here's another point of view...

For me, golliwogs have lost their juju

The meaning of words and objects shifts - what is interesting is whom we allow to say what, and where


* Darryl Pinckney
* The Guardian, Saturday 7 February 2009

An Englishman once told me that a golliwog was for him what a teddy bear was for Americans, an object of love, a magic creature that he didn't see as an African or a black man or connect with human beings at all. Now he can trace the image back and see what it means, but back when he was a child a golliwog was just his friend. He can remember Robertson's Golden Shred marmalade and the golliwog labels that he collected and sent off for badges. He can also remember that golliwog was a derogatory term for somebody black - but not as malicious as wog, for some reason.

The big lips, the bright eyes, and the wild hair of the golliwog are derived from 19th-century minstrel images and the unhappy days of blackface entertainment. I never saw a golliwog when I was growing up in America in the civil rights era, but I doubt that my black activist parents - who gave my sisters both expensive pink dolls and cheap brown dolls, when they could find brown dolls in the early 1960s - would have let us have golliwogs. To us they would have been unpleasant images of blackness, not magic creatures.

A golliwog, as a minstrel figure, would have been an unwanted reminder from a past that we as a people were trying to overcome. Back then, when black rage was all around, black people pitied the minstrel tradition of black actors having to play happy-go-lucky darkies if they wanted to play professionally at all. Blackface dominated the American stage for a century. We have its twilight moments in the silent films of Bert Williams, the tragic black star in the early 20th century, and the subject of a haunting novel, Caryl Phillips's Dancing in the Dark. But minstrelsy, as a style, cannot be reclaimed. It isn't modern; it's pre-first world war. It belongs to the time of lynchings, of extreme political violence against blacks in the US, as well as to the time of European savageries in Africa.

The Adventures of Two Dutch Dolls and a "Golliwogg", the 1895 children's book by the Upton sisters that launched the black rag doll in the blue and red suit, seeks to reassure the children of empire that subject peoples do not wish them harm. In the story of toys coming to life, the Golliwogg, "the horrid sight", turns out to be loads of fun, a "jovial African" who leads the white children in a barn dance, while a magnate from Japan - "Poor harmless little man" - does an eastern thing, and "Sambo" sings a song. So much of cultural history since the Upton tale has been a repudiation of the assumptions that sit so casually and innocently in once familiar racial images.

I have a golliwog, jet black, made for me by a friend in Scotland who, having taken up knitting again after several years, began producing scads of golliwogs for her grandchildren. We laughed about it, because we had agreed in advance what it meant. In her aristocratic world, a golliwog is a manifestation of love. My golliwog sits in my house, not far from some mid-19th-century Staffordshire pottery of characters from Uncle Tom's Cabin and various small figures, such as an ivory tip of a cane in the shape of a negro's head. I started collecting racial memorabilia a while ago, when a friend kept sending me racist postcards from the turn of the 20th century that she'd find in second-hand bookshops. I got interested in a random sort of way in illustrated books, sheet music for what used to be called coon songs, salt shakers in the form of mammies, mammy cookie jars, Hattie McDaniel fans, coffee tins, detergent and toothpaste boxes that featured smiling black people, and those Currier and Ives prints.

The depiction of black people in the prints is amazingly crude and I cannot look at them without thinking of how the individualised portraits of black people in the 18th century gave way to the racist caricatures of the 19th - a reflection of hardening social theories that helped to justify the conduct of empire. The Currier and Ives are not for display. Their value isn't aesthetic, it's documentary.

I note that it is OK for me to have these things, even those items of questionable taste, because I, black guy, possess the proper attitude of inquiry. I used to laugh at how ridiculous they were as propaganda. Wouldn't a white person at this point in time be laughing at them in the same spirit? Royal palace gift shops aren't private concerns, but then nobody's shy about trading in images of black people these days. Venetian blackamoor lamps and imitation Florentine blackamoor chairs are offered in sales around Europe and there are even images of slaves. Spike Lee's Bamboozled demonstrated how minstrel images can still get under the racial skin. A golliwog can creep some people out. But some scholars are now arguing that far from being victims, forced to portray stereotypes, black performers in the minstrel era appropriated images of blackness, subverted them, and were early experimenters with black identity. "We wear the mask that grins and lies," a Paul Laurence Dunbar poem of 1896 begins. However, for me, my artefacts have lost their juju.

Words, like objects, can also lose their juju. They have shifting value, and much of what everyday language means has become situational. It's interesting whom we allow to say what and where. In New York, apparently antisemitic remarks made by Jewish people can shock British visitors. I don't like to hear young black guys on the subway throw around the word "N*****" as a term of defiance and solidarity. It's just not my generation. At the same time, I accept that they do. Down through the years, politicised words have become a volatile currency. Do young Pakistanis refer to one another as "Pakistanis", and are there white guys who could get permission from their Pakistani friends to say, "Pakistani"? Chances are, Prince Harry isn't one of them.

I'm in favour of political correctness, because it is a policy of consideration for others - why should social tolerance be ridiculed? But for Carol Thatcher to lose her job at the BBC because of a green room conversation in which she referred to tennis player Jo-Wilfried Tsonga as a golliwog seems to me here in Obamaland a harsh punishment. In the debate about what Thatcher said, and in the desire to attack the BBC, there is an element of unfinished class warfare from 1910, that very British undertow in public discussion. Thatcher is not upper-class, but in this instance she is a stand-in for the type of person who too breezily and proudly pulls out the prickly old words and provocative postures. We don't want them to behave with the same old sense of licence and entitlement. They know full well the mischief they are up to, and how obnoxious it is not to make an adequate apology, but how much offence and insult can they truly cause? Socially, we're so far beyond them. They are almost irrelevant and the urge to police conversation is nearly as retrograde and unsophisticated as Thatcher's willfully obtuse remark. To focus on a TV correspondent's careless chat diminishes the problems stemming from racism in Britain and the colonial legacy in Africa. If people such as Thatcher can't grow up, then surely they can be left behind.

source

[guzzipat]

Try to make sense of things using your own mush, and not the fabricated mush of the media-owning elites. Those same elites used media to market those racism-creating dolls.

I won't follow your lead in constructing elaborate theories based on nothing but my own thoughts, thanks all the same. I prefer the use of evidence to intelectual masturbation.

The facts are simple, in the UK the term "golliwog" has been a racist insult for many years, nobody but a racist would use such a term. Thatcher not only used it but repeated it with an even more racially explicit way, by calling the tennis player "half golliwog". She then refused (till much later when it became clear it would cost her) to appologise for using racist language.

You somehow turn this absolutely clear example of racism into anti-racism, based on nothing, no evidence just your owm desire to complicate issues.
Your allegations about the media driving the condemnations are false. The right wing papers with a record of racist attitudes, all backed Thatcher.
As usual you confuse your own mental gymnastics with reality. You never seem to accept that a theory without evidence is worthless.

[Dave]

I didn't read the articles until now. It's pretty sad that you can't even be racist safely behind the scenes anymore these days, and that there are so many traitors looking for any opportunity to brand someone a racist and ruin his career. I commonly call Obama a half-negro all the time, which I assume means roughly the same thing as a half-golliwog.

[NoRapture]

I commonly call Obama a half-negro all the time, which I assume means roughly the same thing as a half-golliwog.

I'm sure it does to you, Dave.

[Dave]

What does it mean to you?

[NoRapture]

What does it mean to you?

Well. Did you look at the picture examples? Wog and Golliwog seem to associate the so-named with something that is kind of silly, ugly and unflattering, wouldn't you say? In fact referring to anyone first, specifically by race isn't a friendly thing to do in my opinion. You seem to differ on that. I was just pointing it out.

[Zyx]

NoRapture, why bother?

sploop!, your source disregards the mentality of Carol Thatcher just as QatzelOk does. It is not more insightful, it is just another person who is trying to see beyond the event. What happened was clear: someone tried to ridicule someone else based on his race, and proper society said that, that was a 'no, no.' End of story. This event does not offer a criticism on England, unless England refused to do anything over it. To see a criticism in Carol Thatcher's comments is to not be looking at Carol Thatcher. She meant to ridicule the tennis star because he was Black, and her angle of attack was that White was a normality that she and her surrounding were good for. That is British racism, not British anti-racism or even racially neutral. I am surprised that you would even cite that person's delusion. guzzipat has it right. As to her class, your source and QatzelOk seem to be under the impression that the proletariat can not be racist. That is idiotic, especially since Black people can be racists. What one wants is to crush racism everywhere, even if Blacks or poor Whites espouse it.

[QatzelOk]

Wog and Golliwog seem to associate the so-named with something that is kind of silly, ugly and unflattering, wouldn't you say?

Our current media's representation of color and ethnicity is equally unflattering and ugly. Firing Carol Thatcher won't change this at all. This is why I say she has been scapegoated by a media that is anxious to look PC.

proletariat can not be racist

Carol Thatcher is hardly proletariat. Her mother dealt with her menopause by invading a poor country in South America.

[Zyx]

Carol Thatcher is hardly proletariat. Her mother dealt with her menopause by invading a poor country in South America.

Thatcher is not upper-class, but in this instance she is a stand-in for the type of person who too breezily and proudly pulls out the prickly old words and provocative postures.

How idiotic for this person to include this lie, then.

Firing Carol Thatcher won't change this at all. This is why I say she has been scapegoated by a media that is anxious to look PC.

Is PC bad, QatzelOk?

[QatzelOk]

Is PC bad, QatzelOk?

It's not bad. It's just fake.

You don't change the world by just changing your vocabulary and by performing a few high profile "cleansing" acts of contrition.

Real change would mean media being seriously questioned. Carol Thatcher was lambasted and fired so that media can "look" good without really changing in any significant way.

Regurgitation of this media "cleansing moment" just lets media off the hook for its ongoing crimes against human connectiveness.

[sploop!]

There's a lot of interesting stuff in this. I'm still trying to unpack it. But consider this. The last article I posted - Darryl Pinckney, he's a black guy, a writer who lives in the UK, and whose experience brings a valuable perspective to the debate. I think we need to be cautious about dismissing his viewpoint, although I must admit to struggling with it myself.