The campaign for racism...

Around 1,000 people set off on a march against racism in Glasgow today and yesterday. Their cause was vocally supported by a plethora of politicos - Alex Salmond, Gordon Brown, Jim Murphy, Annabel Goldie, Tavish Scott, Patrick Harvie and Grahame Smith (to name a few) - all eager to ensure that they are not branded with the politically suicidal ‘R-word’.

Racism is, of course, deplorable and must be dealt with in any free-thinking society, not just to benefit any specific minority (ethnic or otherwise) but for the good of the whole populace. However, a lot of white middle-class people are actively publicising how ‘not-racist’ they are, without really understanding what the racism they are so adamantly against is.

When I speak of a lack of understanding, I include myself in this group. I don’t feel like a racist, but I have a sneaky suspicion that I might be, and I’m finding it increasingly difficult to tell. I am vehemently against discriminating against any person because of heritable characteristics, culture, religion, background, place of birth or any other taxonomic concept of race, but I find casual racism is rarely a simple case of black and white.

When the media create a new celebrity racist, I find myself often wondering if racism is really the underlying cause. The whole furore surrounding some of the more notable wacky racists (like Jade Goody, Carol Thatcher and Anton du Beke) left me feeling, well...nothing. I found it difficult to believe that they were being genuinely racist, more ill educated, ill informed, and ill mannered than jackboot wearing xenophobes...

While alive, Saint Jade Goody was way down at the ore-ish end of the animal-vegetable-mineral scale and, as such, her comments can quite easily be considered stupid and ignorant, but racist? I’m not so sure... Carol Thatcher is a product of a different generation, many kids of a certain age grew-up with Robertson’s jams and had ‘Golliwog’ toys and, despite the term having been a racial slur for about 60-years, I don’t really believe that many people of a similar vantage and vintage think of a ‘Golly’ without their brain adding a silent letter ‘wog’ at the end. Most chose to keep it safely tucked away in their heads, but the white moral outrage smacks a bit of ‘the lady doth protest too much, methinks’, either that or an excuse to tar Carol with the same ‘evil-bitch’ brush as her mummy. As for Anton du Beke, his problem is even easier to understand – he’s a cunt.

No matter what progress is made towards societal harmony, terms of abuse will never go away. You will always have people pointing out obvious differences and using it to insult and hurt, whether it’s paki and nigger, muzzie and yid, or even specky and fatty. I believe the terms themselves are not important, it’s the intent behind it that causes the wounds. But, of course, the words then take on a life of their own and signify all the hate, spite and fear of the original intent. Simply pointing a difference is not a slur, but the inference that this makes them inferior is.

The problem now is knowing when a seemingly innocuous word could be misconstrued. I don’t mean the big, scary, obvious ones, but the more everyday words that can get confused in the context.

My social group (friends, family, colleagues, acquaintances, etc) includes a wonderfully diverse bunch of people, with equally diverse backgrounds, cultures, religions and skin colour. Those who chose to spend time with me tend (by necessity or otherwise) to have a bit of a sense of humour, and, if you have read any of my blogs before, you will probably realise that this can tend towards the...black.

I have thoroughly enjoyed watching colleagues torture themselves while trying to describe someone they don’t know to a black co-worker, describing their sex, age, height, build, hair colour, facial features, clothing and so on, desperately wanting to point out the big black guy without at any point mentioning that the subject of their mental gymnastics is in fact a ‘big black guy’:


White guy: “Someone was looking for you while you were away from your desk”
Black guy: “Who was it?”
White guy: “I don’t know their name”
Black guy: “Can you describe them?”
White guy: Thought: “AAAAAAAAAAAAARGH! Why the fuck did I open my mouth?”
White guy: “It was a guy, I’ve seen you talking to him before”
Black guy: “What does he look like?”
White guy: Thought: “fuck, Fuck, FUCK!!!”
White guy: “He’s tall and quite big built”
Black guy: “...no, don’t know who you mean...”
White guy: “He’s got a mustache”
Black guy: “...nope, still don’t know...”
White guy: “Black curly hair, brown eyes...”
White guy: Thought: “Shit! I said black! Was that racist? Oh, please don’t let him think I’m racist”
Black guy: “...did they have any distinguishing features that might help?”
White guy: Thought: “If I say the big black guy with the foot-long afro he’ll think I’m a racist, what the hell else can I point out?”
White guy: “Nah. Sorry, mate. Hopefully, he’ll come back again later...”

Being a not particularly PC kind of guy, I admit I like to say things amongst the people who know me that will create an effect, whether it’s casual swearing, sarcasm or generally being offensive, my puerile little brain enjoys the ‘laugh followed by tut’ or ‘teeth sucking’ that invariably follows.

I call an esteemed co-conspirator a nigger and in return he calls me a honky,(actually while he does often call me a honky, he more usually just calls me a cunt, but we both know that it’s meant with a great pulsating affection). There is a back story to all this that can be enjoyed fully here, but suffice to say, I would never think about using a racial slur towards anyone else, and I would be beyond anger if I ever heard anyone else calling him this, or any other, racial epithet. The context, the history, and crucially, the intent is important. We have a shorthand that is mutually agreed, and anyway, he’s my nigger...

(...wait’s for the tutting and tooth sucking.... yup, there it is...! Nice!)

I don’t believe that there is an excuse for racism other than ignorance, but between consenting adults of any creed, colour or ethnicity, casual racism can be socially and if the parties are happy with the shorthand, and the intent is to bond rather than to hurt, it can even be a good thing.

While we shy away from recognising that there are obvious differences between people, we also shy away from accepting and celebrating the important similarities. We are missing out on an opportunity to enjoy having a great multicultural society. We are not all the same, but who wants a homogeneous McCulture? These same differences can make for a stronger, healthier society.

We seem to focus more on educating people against using the words themselves, and less on educating people not to feel the intent. If we work towards removing the hate and harm behind the words, perhaps we can get back to black being just a colour.

Fuck the dwarves...

As any regular reader may have grasped already, I don’t aim, or profess, to be the most Politically Correct (PC) blogger on the web. However, there are times where I veer towards a socially unacceptable viewpoint. This is one of those times.

I don’t like disabled people.

I should possibly elaborate on this. I don’t dislike all disabled people, but I know a few disabled folk who are just pains in the arse so I can’t say I like disabled people – much in the same way I can’t say I like white people, black people, Christians or Muslims – I like and dislike individual people, not groups.

I have known a fair number of people who have a disability of one form or another; deaf-mute, blind, cerebral-palsy, autism, dwarfism, schizophrenia, Welsh, etc . The only thing that unites all of these people is not disability; it’s that they have the same range of diversity as the able population.

It is ridiculous to lump people together with any generic term. I’m short and fat, but I don’t speak for all short and fat people, I am not an example of a type of human epitomised by shortness and fatness. If you like me you don’t necessarily like all short, fat people – unless that’s your fetish, in which case, each to their own...

To give an example here, I know a dwarf. He is a racist, bigoted, angry little shitbag. He’s not a lot of fun to be around, and so, I try to avoid him. I couldn’t give a shit about his height, or lack of it, I just don’t like the views he espouses every time he opens his tiny little mouth. A prick is a prick, however high he can reach.

I suppose the point I am trying to make here is that while the PC PCs are patrolling our thoughts, they are forgetting the principal point of PC-ness – people with disabilities are just people. Some are fabulous, wonderful people who enrich the lives of the people around them and, conversely, some are cunts.

Abide with me...

Yesterday saw another Summer Solstice pass with little incident at any of the major Pagan sacred sites. Having seen images of the 36 thousand-odd Swampy-like revellers at Stonehenge peacefully witness the overcast dawn of the longest day in the northern hemisphere, I wondered in what other circumstances would such a diverse cast of individuals get together to joyfully celebrate the religious ceremony of a small minority at their sacred place of worship.

I don’t know for sure, but I don’t expect most of the people gathered at this event were card-carrying Druids or Pagans of any sect, but they shared a moment together where the diverse belief structures, moralities and ethical frameworks didn’t matter – they just wanted to enjoy a spiritual act together, whether it belonged to their belief structure or to someone else's. (Although, I expect some of them thought they were at Glastonbury and were actually just wondering when The Prodigy were coming on).

Were their beliefs all that different?

I was born into a working-class family in the West of Scotland and, like everyone around me, my moral structure was actually a reflection of my parents, and their parents before them. So, for the young SpiderBoz, Protestant Christianity was it. I was baptised into the Church of Scotland before I had a voice to object, and was handed my chalice of guilt to carry with me until I sought escape.

I quickly grew to understand that there could be a choice of more than simply left-foot or right-foot Christianity. My friends had a wide variety of different belief structures (Buddhism, Hinduism, Islamism, Mormonism, Sikhism and so on), but to my forming mind this was simply semantics. Anyway, they still believed in ‘God’ so difference did it make?

The main thing was, irrespective of culture or religion, we had a commonality of morality. Albeit different, we had a moral framework from which to hang our ethics. For most it was based on differing theistic beliefs but we, on the whole, got on. As far as I can remember, there were no Crusades or Spanish Inquisitions, there were very few witch-burnings and nobody declared a holy war on anyone, with the exception of the Rangers-ites and Celtic-ists, but that was mostly fought in an orderly fashion on the battle pitch.

These days I don’t believe in god, but I still thank my parents for this part of my upbringing. Not because of the long, tedious hours spent in church and Sunday School on Sundays, or at bible school and Boys Brigade during the week. I thank my parents for the moral and ethical standards that they instilled in me.

More and more parents are looking to the state to provide an ethical framework in schools, while the schools are struggling their way through the increasing burden of bureaucracy with little, if any, power to enforce discipline within their walls. As I look at the news reports of children forming delinquent gangs, assaulting each other and attacking disabled people, I can’t help if morality is solely taught through post-watershed TV, the internet and the Xbox.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying that religion should be adopted or taught in schools, nor am I saying that religion in itself is a good (or bad) thing. What I am saying is that people need to be shown right from wrong before they have been nurtured by society into delinquency. And, frankly, this is the parents responsibility. If you don’t feel you can provide a decent, loving, respectful, moral and ethical upbringing for a child - keep your junk in your pants.

Seriously. If you try to get an animal from the RSPCA, you have to fill in a questionnaire to assess your knowledge and suitability to look after the animal, subject yourself to an interview to ensure that will provide an acceptable level of love, patience, time and commitment, have a home visit to ensure that your house is ‘good enough’ for the pet, and they will even ensure that you have sufficient income to pay for it’s care and upkeep, too. If you want to bring a child into this world, all you need to do is down enough lager or Bacardi Breezers to convince yourselves that getting jiggy without any protection would be a fine and dandy idea. You need a license to own a gun, or to drive a car or even to own a TV, but you can drop a multitude of future ASBO recipients without even knowing the name of the other parent...

We need to get back to a state of morality. Bringing gods into the equation seems to be a recipe for high-horse ranting, politically correct wankness, or exploding backpacks. Well-intentioned Humanists seem to have gone too far down the Richard Dawkins organic, fair-trade, free-range, tie-dyed ethics route. So what does that leave us?

Well, after an entire morning of agonised soul searching I have finally found a religion I can relate to. The good book is an uplifting 2-hour long film, so you don’t have to spend years dedicated to it’s learnings, the ideology could fit easily on a postage stamp but it gives a better moral education than can be found in the ethics teachings of all the schools across the land.

Dudeism

By the middle of the first afternoon on my quest for faith, I had even taken the oath to become an ordained Dudeist priest. So, if you’re reading this from the good-ole U, S of A, and you want the Reverend SpiderBoz to officiate at your wedding (subject to legal confirmation from the local County Clerk) as long as you’re happy to pay for my travel and accommodation expenses, don’t hesitate to drop me a line...

For all the world religions, faiths, belief structures, moral frameworks, and so on. I can find few who can sum up what I have been trying to say so succinctly and eloquently:

“Life is short and complicated and nobody knows what to do about it. So don't do anything about it. Just take it easy, man. Stop worrying so much whether you'll make it into the finals. Kick back with some friends and some oat soda and whether you roll strikes or gutters, do your best to be true to yourself and others - that is to say, abide”

Amen