3 posts tagged “racist”

Since I posted about the use of the word coon on radio in New Zealand, I did get a reply from the plumbing firm which it advertised.
   It was very short:

It is raccoons the ones in the woods. Of course there is no limit to the number of interpretations.

   Fair enough: we now know the intent. I would have written more in response (e.g. signed the thing with my name), but that is another issue. I still wonder if the alternative, racist interpretation was in the back of the copywriter’s mind. I guess we won’t know.
   However, every time I have talked about this radio commercial, most people are shocked. No one seems to come up with the raccoon explanation. It’s a 100 per cent response to the notion that the advertisement is racist.
   Sure, this is nowhere near scientific. I must have mentioned it to about 15 people. That’s hardly representative of the population. And on this blog, opinion was divided among an international audience.
   A check back then did reveal that the word was also a racist term used to describe Aboriginals in Australia by certain Australians, and it came up again when Lucire covered Naomi Campbell’s sentence last Friday.:

Capt Doug Maughan, a pilot of 28 years, had filed a complaint [against British Airways] after the use of the word coon during a training session. He also claimed Saudi Arabians were referred to as ‘rag-heads’ on one flight.

   This was in relation to Campbell allegedly being called a ‘gollywog supermodel’ by airline staff.
   In this context I don’t think I was being too sensitive, since I get the feeling the racist interpretation is more commonplace than the animal one, even in the British Commonwealth.
   It’s hard to believe the ‘gollywog’ comment, too. Campbell’s words could have been dismissed if it had not been for Capt Maughan’s own evidence that British Airways allegedly, and casually, used racist epithets. (The airline denies the allegations.)
   I won’t add more as I think the two points of view were well covered in the earlier post’s comments.

[Cross-posted] I’ll keep the identity of the company secret, but I was invited to a do on April 3 here in Wellington, relating to the “Asian” community. Guest of honour: the Foreign Minister-outside-Cabinet, the Hon Winston Peters. The question one has to ask is: why?
   I know they probably don’t read this blog, but surely inviting a man who has slagged off almost all 3·7 billion Asians on the planet (and perhaps more specifically the billion-plus of us with yellow skin) for political gain is dangerous, and does their brand harm from the outset? Unless they tell me they are “building bridges”, but then again, Ahmadinejad had some Jewish fellas at a Middle East conference he hosted.
   I am in Auckland that day anyway, and wrote back to say that if they wanted me there, then their guest of honour should expect to be upstaged!
   Back on Bruce Robinson’s case on March 1. I’m doing the Foreign Minister’s job at my own expense and I could have sought compensation rather publicly!

I keep wondering if Michael Richards would have gotten as bad a rap in New Zealand for his racist comments last week, or would we have moved on? He seems to avoided the press here, but strangely, Mel Gibson did not for his anti-Semitic tirade. Given how race is a contentious issue in the US—for instance, most Americans still have not seen the old BBC documentary about O. J. Simpson and the Nicole Brown–Ron Goldman murder (likely conclusion: O. J. didn’t do it)—I would have expected the use of the n word to have made the American-driven news more substantially.
   The fact that it hasn’t outside the US suggests that being an anti-Semite is more serious than being anti-black.
   So are blacks disadvantaged more Stateside? I mentioned O. J. purposely above. His new book, If I Did It, as many Americans know, was pulled by Rupert Murdoch during the week. The belief was that he should not be allowed to profit from his estranged wife’s and her friend’s murders, even if he was innocent in the criminal trial.
   However, most whites—not just American whites—believe that O. J. did it. Most blacks believe that justice was served in the criminal court and that O. J. didn’t do it.
   After seeing the BBC documentary and learning about Jason Simpson’s (O. J.’s son) tendency to violence, his accessibility (as a chef) to the very type of knife that killed her and Goldman, information about a plot to kill Nicole, and the way the police investigated the case, then it is very easy to come to the same conclusion as most African–Americans. British experts believed that most of the evidence submitted in the Simpson trial would never have been accepted in the UK: that the crime scene was heavily contaminated and that vital blood samples were not taken.
   But the white view seems to have got its way with Murdoch; never mind that an American court of law found the elder Simpson not guilty.
   I personally do not know any racist Americans. So the above is totally conjecture based on how the Michael Richards item was treated by the international press, and the public outcry over O. J.’s attempts to earn dollars off his story—as so many others have done.
   No, I don’t find what Michael Richards said acceptable at all. Nor do I find the murders anything but despicable. However, outside the United States, these items make for very interesting viewing, especially how they travel through the wires. I personally found Richards’ tirade as bad as (possibly worse than) Gibson’s, and question how one race’s viewpoint can so greatly affect whether a book written by a member of another race—yet the powers-that-be in the US, with its constitutional presumption of innocence, don’t seem to agree with me.