I Must Be Strong, Stay A Nonbeliever
Jazz starts his home leave today - he's going to be back in Bradford until Tuesday, and after that he's only got another week left in custody until he's a free man again. To celebrate, he's borrowed a few DVDs from me - The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, Grizzly Man and Transamerica. I instructed him to watch the 'Conversations' featurette on the Transamerica disc to fully appreciate Felicity Huffman's astonishing transformation - a much better way of enjoying that process than the American DVD's notorious "Everyone, it's OK! She's not ugly in real life!" cover.
So my thoughts are with him. Despite only knowing him for just over a year, we're already notorious for getting lost in densely-argued conversation about movies and politics at work, and I hope his home leave is as fun as it can be with a really depressing Werner Herzog movie about an imprisoned child in tow.
One particularly good conversation recently came with us formulating a new theory of racism - just as bad as regular racism, we felt, was the Adorable Brown People variety of racism, which white liberals are so often guilty of. This takes the form of assuming that all black, Asian or Indian people must be completely free of any bigoted or racist ideas, as all coloured folk are guilty of terrible oppression. Which rather neglects the possibility that they could be oppressed by some sectors of society while doing their best to oppress another sector.
Strong words? I don't think so. Look at the fuss over the Mohammed cartoons (or, in MediaWatchWatch's unimprovable coinage, Mo-toons) earlier this year. Until the embassy burnings started, we were all very happy in condemning the evil racists responsible for these cartoons, and their terrible effect on Adorable Brown People everywhere. But have you actually seen these cartoons? Barring the one of Mohammed with a bomb in his turban (which was the only one you saw on the news - why, it's almost as if we were trying to prove a point), they really are incredibly tame stuff. The actual controversy, it emerged, came largely from a group of frankly hypocritical Imams who sent the cartoons over to colleagues in the Middle East - complete with a few others, some from far-right websites, showing Mohammed as a pig, a Muslim being buggered and a crude drawing of "Mohammed the paedophile prophet", to add 'context'.
Needless to say, the outraged reaction stemmed largely from the latter cartoons, presented as if they too were part of the Jyllandes-Posten cartoons. We didn't know this at the time, of course, and we all thought - self included - that this was another example of nasty white colonialists oppressing the Adorable Brown People again. But it wasn't.
At which, someone would inform me that it wasn't the content of the cartoons that was thought of as offensive, it was the idea of drawing a picture of Mohammed, which is forbidden under Islamic law. Well, leaving out the fact that opinion among Islamic scholars about the 'blasphemy' of depicting the Prophet is more divided than you might think, and that much of what is referred to as "Islamic law" originated some eight or nine centuries after the book which it borrows its spurious authority from, the concept of a religion that can be rocked to its foundations by a series of unfunny newspaper cartoons is as worthy of respect as a religion that can be rocked to its foundations by an obscure stage play, or a rude musical - i.e., not at all.
Is it racist to say this? I can imagine racist people coming up with similar arguments, but that doesn't in and of itself discredit the argument. It is to be hoped that, if equal criticism does rise again, the left continues to place scrutiny on people taking advantage of that freedom to ensure they don't cross the line between legitimate criticism and racism. But right now, we're seeing a massive rise in Adorable Brown People racism that has to be weeded out.
What's racist is when a newspaper famous for its liberal social views gets chummy with a group who would quite happily execute all homosexuals. Why? Because they're Adorable Brown People, silly. How could they ever mean any harm? Likewise Iqbal Sacranie - yes, he sounds like a fruitcake, but he's an Adorable Brown Person speaking to an audience of Adorable Brown People, so we have to accept that their views will be more extreme than ours, forged as they are in the white heat of Adorable Brownness. What can be more racist than assuming an entire race is comprised of barking mad bigots?
These days, it seems that the only people willing to apply Universal Human Rights in anything approaching a universal sense are members of minority communities. The excellent British Asian blog Pickled Politics is a thrilling reminder of a left-wing ideology that seems to have rolled over and died, one which holds all oppression and all opposition to democracy as equally contemptible, whether it's practiced by evil white oppressors or Adorable Brown People.
That said, the freedom of black and Asian people to get away with telling jokes white people would never dare to is a double standard I still wholly appreciate. When we were in an Iranian restauraunt recently, Jazz was thinking of complaining about the soup, but he stopped himself, "or next week's special will be Blood of Dissident Curry"...
So my thoughts are with him. Despite only knowing him for just over a year, we're already notorious for getting lost in densely-argued conversation about movies and politics at work, and I hope his home leave is as fun as it can be with a really depressing Werner Herzog movie about an imprisoned child in tow.
One particularly good conversation recently came with us formulating a new theory of racism - just as bad as regular racism, we felt, was the Adorable Brown People variety of racism, which white liberals are so often guilty of. This takes the form of assuming that all black, Asian or Indian people must be completely free of any bigoted or racist ideas, as all coloured folk are guilty of terrible oppression. Which rather neglects the possibility that they could be oppressed by some sectors of society while doing their best to oppress another sector.
Strong words? I don't think so. Look at the fuss over the Mohammed cartoons (or, in MediaWatchWatch's unimprovable coinage, Mo-toons) earlier this year. Until the embassy burnings started, we were all very happy in condemning the evil racists responsible for these cartoons, and their terrible effect on Adorable Brown People everywhere. But have you actually seen these cartoons? Barring the one of Mohammed with a bomb in his turban (which was the only one you saw on the news - why, it's almost as if we were trying to prove a point), they really are incredibly tame stuff. The actual controversy, it emerged, came largely from a group of frankly hypocritical Imams who sent the cartoons over to colleagues in the Middle East - complete with a few others, some from far-right websites, showing Mohammed as a pig, a Muslim being buggered and a crude drawing of "Mohammed the paedophile prophet", to add 'context'.
Needless to say, the outraged reaction stemmed largely from the latter cartoons, presented as if they too were part of the Jyllandes-Posten cartoons. We didn't know this at the time, of course, and we all thought - self included - that this was another example of nasty white colonialists oppressing the Adorable Brown People again. But it wasn't.
At which, someone would inform me that it wasn't the content of the cartoons that was thought of as offensive, it was the idea of drawing a picture of Mohammed, which is forbidden under Islamic law. Well, leaving out the fact that opinion among Islamic scholars about the 'blasphemy' of depicting the Prophet is more divided than you might think, and that much of what is referred to as "Islamic law" originated some eight or nine centuries after the book which it borrows its spurious authority from, the concept of a religion that can be rocked to its foundations by a series of unfunny newspaper cartoons is as worthy of respect as a religion that can be rocked to its foundations by an obscure stage play, or a rude musical - i.e., not at all.
Is it racist to say this? I can imagine racist people coming up with similar arguments, but that doesn't in and of itself discredit the argument. It is to be hoped that, if equal criticism does rise again, the left continues to place scrutiny on people taking advantage of that freedom to ensure they don't cross the line between legitimate criticism and racism. But right now, we're seeing a massive rise in Adorable Brown People racism that has to be weeded out.
What's racist is when a newspaper famous for its liberal social views gets chummy with a group who would quite happily execute all homosexuals. Why? Because they're Adorable Brown People, silly. How could they ever mean any harm? Likewise Iqbal Sacranie - yes, he sounds like a fruitcake, but he's an Adorable Brown Person speaking to an audience of Adorable Brown People, so we have to accept that their views will be more extreme than ours, forged as they are in the white heat of Adorable Brownness. What can be more racist than assuming an entire race is comprised of barking mad bigots?
These days, it seems that the only people willing to apply Universal Human Rights in anything approaching a universal sense are members of minority communities. The excellent British Asian blog Pickled Politics is a thrilling reminder of a left-wing ideology that seems to have rolled over and died, one which holds all oppression and all opposition to democracy as equally contemptible, whether it's practiced by evil white oppressors or Adorable Brown People.
That said, the freedom of black and Asian people to get away with telling jokes white people would never dare to is a double standard I still wholly appreciate. When we were in an Iranian restauraunt recently, Jazz was thinking of complaining about the soup, but he stopped himself, "or next week's special will be Blood of Dissident Curry"...