Big Brother, Little Britain: Have We Suddenly Become an Intolerant Society?

Big Brother, Little Britain: Have We Suddenly Become an Intolerant Society?

What a lot of cant has been written and spoken about the Big Brother ‘racism’ row this week! For a start, it is not at all self-evident that the behaviour and remarks about the Bollywood star Shilpa Shetty made by celebrity contestants Jade Goody and others do qualify as racism. Prejudiced and insulting they may be; but racism is an extremely strong term. One can have racial prejudices without being racist. Racism implies having a hatred towards an individual or ethnic group simply because of their race or religion. I don’t think Jade Goody’s antagonism was motivated – at least not primarily – by race hate. Channel 4 was right to state that they were unsure whether the hostility shown towards Shetty Shilpa wasn’t more to do with cultural and class differences. And I believed Jade herself when she disowned any racial motivation in what she’d done. Of course, there can be unconscious fear and dislike of other races; but I don’t think any human being alive is totally immune from that.

The reality of whether or not Jade and her co-contestants have acted in a racist way has become less important than the need to banish any appearance of racism from our TV screens. For once, reality TV has done its job and exposed racism for what it mostly is: petty, bound up with silly cultural stereotypes, and just part of the language and coping mechanisms through which people of different classes and backgrounds vent the frustrations of having to live together. But it’s not race hate, in this instance at least.

The irony of it is that it’s some of the champions of Britain’s supposed intrinsic tolerance that have been most up in arms condemning the behaviour of the contestants as symptomatic of – in Archbishop John Sentamu’s words – “an ugly underbelly in society only too ready to point the finger at the foreigner, or those who might not fit in”. Well, I’m sorry; it’s condemnation of Jade in these terms that shows Britain up as an intolerant society just as much as her actual words and actions. Those remarks are classist and prejudiced in their turn: based more on a stereotypical image of ill-educated, working-class racism than the reality of what went on. I think the biblical injunction applies: do not condemn the splinter in your brother’s eye until you remove the plank from your own.

Jade has become if anything more of a scapegoat than the scapegoat she supposedly made Shilpa into. As with any scapegoating, it’s been necessary to distort and exaggerate the supposed evil Jade represents; and then cast it onto an acceptable object for our derision: an ignorant, ‘undeserving’ celebrity from a ‘white-trash’ background. In this way, she can be fully separated out from the mainstream of tolerant, educated, middle-class Britain to which people of all races – such as Shilpa Shetty or John Sentamu – have the right to aspire.

There’s a word for this: inverted racism. But let’s not confuse it with race hate. Let’s just call it verbalising class and cultural prejudice. A necessary outlet, indeed, to ensure we can all still get on together.