Bryan Murphy's Blog - Posts Tagged "racism"

You know how everything is supposed to get worse, at least worse than it was back when we were in our prime? Well, very often it doesn't. Take racism in the UK. When I was a lad in the 1960s, people here were expected to be mildly racist. The football club I blindly followed (and still do) was one of the first in England to hire a black player, Gerry Francis, a man from South Africa. He was a very skillful player who soon earned enough respect and affection from the fans for them to refer to him by his name rather than as “the darkie”. Fast forward a few decades and the whole town is in the streets to welcome home a black sportswoman, Kelly Holmes, and her two Olympic gold medals. There is still far too much racism in the country, and it is still exploited by unscrupulous politicians, but its focus has shifted. The grandchildren of immigrants with “black” skin are now generally accepted as bone fide Brits, and something similar is happening with the children of immigrants from South Asia, if they opt for integration. The Other now comes dressed in “white” skin and hails from Eastern Europe. For the pleasure of being nasty to them, we have just given our European partners the V-sign and are preparing to chop those two fingers off. Silly really. Which brings me to Paul Beatty's comic masterpiece of anti-racism and anti-idiocy, “The Sellout”
[to be continued]

The daftness of racism is mirrored in the categories used to describe a “race”. In the UK, for instance, “Asian” refers only to people from South Asia. I'm not sure where that leaves people from East Asia, West Asia or Central Asia. In the USA, things seem to be even more bizarre. The term “Caucasian” can be applied to people born on the other side of the globe to the Caucusus. I think it means “white”. Then there is “Hispanic”, which implies you're not white, even if you come from Spain or Portugal. And anyone with the tiniest trace of African heritage is deemed “black”, irrespective of the evidence of one's eyes. In “The Sellout”, Paul Beatty makes riotous fun of the whole shebang surrounding “blackness” and pours cold water over the self-righteousness of racists of all persuasions, while leaving the reader in no doubt that racism is still pervavasive and still pernicious. He is a master of language endowed with rare insight into human society and the human mind. I hope that one day he will turn his attention to this far side of the Pond.