Its nice to see a spike in my stats last week, half due to a link from the Guardian website, and half due to a few very welcome pointers from other blogs. In honour of that, here’s an extra nugget from the Clive Stafford-Smith lecture, which I didn’t work into Thursday’s report:
Apparently, it is a British company, Hiatt Corporation of Birmingham, which manufactures the leg-irons used at Guantànamo Bay. The same company used to make shackles for slaves (the front page of the Hiatt website proudly delcares that the company’s first slogan was Prisoners Handcuffs to the Trade
). This was back in the days when men and women and children were taken by force from their homeland by foreign colonial powers, with the active compliance of their neighbours, transported to a foreign country, and detained indefinitely. Thank goodness that doesn’t happen any more, eh?
More information on Hiatt can be found via Indymedia Birmingham.
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Racism in the Big Brother house is of course important. It is admirable that 20,000 people have complained about the alleged bullying, that the Indian Government has expressed concern, and that Labour MP Keith Vaz has raised the issue in the House of Commons. We can only hope that the £300,000 appearance fee Shilpa Shetty has received goes some way to cushioning the hard times she has endured.
Big Brother is an illusion. The contestants could click their fingers, and the nightmare will end. This is not so for the housemates at Guantànamo Bay, who wake each morning to a genuine Orwellian nightmare. They have no plush chairs in the diary room in which to relax. Their only solace is the blissful ignorance of sleep, or a final release through suicide.
“It is not ‘suicide’ anymore,” says Clive Stafford-Smith. “It is called ‘manipulative injurious behaviour’ now. That way, the politicians and military men can claim that there are no suicide attempts at Guantanamo.”
Stafford-Smith is speaking at the offices of Clifford Chance at Canary Wharf, on behalf of the Mary Ward Legal Centre. The title of his talk is Secret Prisons and Ghost Prisoners, about the 14,000 people detained without lawyers or a trial in the name of the ‘War on Terror’. There is apparently a certain chauvinism in the military, and it is assumed that women are not militant. Stafford-Smith only knows of three female detainees, but there may be more. Most of those imprisoned remain unidentified, beyond the reach of the media, legal aid, and the rule of law. Guantànamo is the tip of a sinister iceberg.
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Of course, I never ever watch Celebrity Big Brother, full as it is of vacuous has-beens whining about their personal life. However, yesterday evening I just happened to walk into the living room, when a freak bolt of lightning turned the TV over to Channel 4, at coincidentally the exact moment when I tripped over a wild hamster. Prostrate on the floor, I randomly caught sight of this strange TV programme out of the corner of my eye. I leapt up, and immediately turned it off after only an hour and half viewing.
I could not help rubber-necking the foreigners’ car-crash into the British class system. Neither A-Teamer Dirk Benedict, or Bollywood star Shilpa Shetty, sees anything wrong in laughing at the poor diction of some of the other housemates. They did not seem appreciate that their comments are seen as snobbish. Nor did not understand when those ‘down-to-earth’ housemates predictably turned sour, mercilessly criticising Shilpa’s naive attempt at roasting a chicken.
It is a shame some of the comments flung in her direction were disparaging to India and its culture, prompting accusations of racism: apparently over 10,000 people have now complained.
Its interesting that the celebrity version of Big Brother should prove a microcosm of the country as a whole, an illustration of the race debate in the UK. What is crucial here is that the offenders (in this case, Jo, Jade and Danielle) genuinely do not believe they are racist. They are not picking on Shilpa because she is Indian. Her transgressions, such as they are, seem real to them, and crucially nothing to do with her race or nationality.
When so-called culture wars periodically blitz the media, the examples of cultural conflict are stark, dealing as they so often do with life-changing issues such as marriage, sex, or the role of religion in political decision-making. They are noticeable. What goes unremarked are the tiny issues, the little differences, than can turn two people off each other. There is nothing wrong with using spices in food, or using your hands to eat it. This is part of Shilpa’s culture. Jade, Jo, and Danielle, who are ignorant of Shilpa’s culture, do not understand this. When they criticise her, they do not for one moment believe their comments have anything to do with her being Indian. They think they are criticising her. They do not realise the subjectivity of their criticism. They do not even realise that they are actually criticising a part of Shilpa’s culture, and others by association. The ‘racism’, such as it is, lies in these ignorances (I would prefer to call it an ‘unwitting prejudice’).
Whether one has any time for the ‘racism’ charge depends on whether you believe the invective levelled at Shilpa was directed at her alone, or her cultural practices in general. Those who said them would passionately, genuinely argue that the former is true. Those who heard them, would say the latter. Neither would be completely correct, however. Like a blunderbuss, no matter how careful and ‘genuine’ the aim, you will always hit something you did not intend. The problem is caused by shooting the invective in the first place! It is a kind of second-degree racism: the Indian viewers of Celebrity Big Brother have been caught in the cross-fire of a domestic spat. They have a genuine greivance, even if the mens rea is absent.
The same argument can, I think, be applied to the remarks about the accents of certain housemates. You can appear to be a snob without realising it. But just like culinary practices, the way someone speaks is a matter of culture and upbringing. To laugh at it is to laugh at everyone who does it.
We’re all guilty of second order prejudice on some level, because it is impossible to know what is going on everywhere in the world, or how everyone lives. The key to reducing this, is to make an effort to learn more about the people who you live with (whether you live in a multi-ethnic democracy, or the Big Brother House). To avoid learning more about others, or to declare it unnecessary, is the real prejudice.
India actually has its own version of the TV show, called Bigg Boss. I haven’t seen it myself, but those who have tell me it is actually more interesting, with nudity and frolicking at a minimum, and the contestants getting stuck into political debates instead.
Perhaps I am being too diplomatic. Apparently slurs like “Paki Bitch” are being bandied about. That’s first order racism, and certainly didn’t make the cut yesterday evening.
Amid all the distractions that this utterly insane world presents to us, it is worth reminding ourselves of the looming crisis in Zimbabwe.
Of course, I use the word “crisis” in a very anglocentric sense: I mean some violent series of events that will catch the attention of the world’s media. More afrocentric analyses have had Zimbabwe in crisis for many years. Inflation is at 1,281%, the rule of law has been all but abandoned by Mugabe and his henchmen, and many people are forced to subsist off vermin.
Via Zimbabwe News Update, we hear that as many as 22,500 miners have been arrested since November, who have been illegally mining minerals such as gold and diamonds. The sheer scale of this lawlessness is worth considering. Like the growing of opium or coca for drug use, setting-up and operating an extra-legal mining operation requires huge confidence, and no small amount of weaponry. In this case, the government seems to have asserted itself before such operations become organised, but it does not bode well for the future. When the revolt finally comes and the government breaks down completely, it will not simply be a popular revolution of the starving with (say) the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) at its head. It will be a battle between emerging war-lords, seeking to control the country’s mineral wealth.
The argument over the proposed gay rights legislation, already in force in Northern Ireland, has been brought to the boil once again. Much of the debate centres around a hypothetical Bed & Breakfast, where the ‘deeply religious’ proprietor would be having to go against their own beliefs in order to legally provide serivces.
Critics say the regulations would mean hotels could not refuse to provide rooms for gay couples
This is a popular argument for those arguing against the laws, because it conjours sympathy for a single person (probably white and middle-aged) being persecuted for their religion. However, it is a highly problematic hypothetical, for several reasons, and should be questioned.
First, it is not just homosexuality that all the major religions label immoral. They also say that any sexual intercourse outside of marriage is immoral too. So, the aldulterers who sneak away to a seaside hotel for the weekend are also offending religious beliefs of the owner, and could be denied service on this basis. For the sake of consistency, we would expect that the same hotel would also ban a couple with children who were not married.
To this, the ‘deeply religious’ proprietor might say “well, I didn’t know that the first couple were adulterers, or that the second couple were not married.” This would be an unwittingly ironic, since it evokes the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. If it is good enough for the US Military, it should be good enough for the good old British B&B! If they do not know for sure that those two men will be having sex, then it cannot be said that the proprietor endorses such behaviour, unless it is also said that they endorse the extra-marital heterosexual activity mentioned earlier. There is a definite hypocrisy here, and ‘religious belief’ is merely a politically correct shield behind which plain bigotry can hide.
If the claim to religious belief is genuine, then these service-providing adherents might find themselves in even more trouble. There are passages in the bible and Qu’ran which forbid inter-religious marriage and can even be interpreted to mean a ban on inter-racial marriage (for example Deut. 7). Are such couples – immoral in the eyes of the religious – to be denied services too? If not, why not?
The debate, as framed, grants the religious a special privilege which is not extended to those with other kinds of beliefs. If an exemption were made for those of a particular religious creed, an aetheist proprietor who also happened to disapprove of same-sex relationships would still be subject to the law, and would rightly claim to unfair treatment under that law. Whether or not one subscribes to the effectiveness of anti-discrimination laws, one must concede that they be applied equally. If the religious complain that their beliefs are under attack, then we who support this legislation must begin by saying “well, yes, necessarily”.
Next, supporters must assert that the debate is not between two minority groups (gay libertines and religious prudes, say)… but between the majority view (which says homosexuals should be treated equally) and the minority view (which says homosexuals should be treated differently). The onus is on those who support the legislation to explain why the values of the population as a whole trump the values of those with religious belief. Unity at Ministry of Truth has already taken a tweezer to this issue.
In balancing the respective rights in such a case; those of the hypothetical plaintiff, who has a ‘public right’ not to be subjected to discrimination, against those of the hypothetical defendent, who has a ‘private right’ to manifest their personal beliefs, one must first consider whether the matter at the heart of the complaint belongs to the public or private domain. If the matter is ‘public’ then the public rights of the complainant take precendence, if it is private, then the private rights of the defendent should win out.
I am inclined to the idea that if you charge money for people to stay in your house, you are opening it up to the public realm. I think it is difficult to argue the opposite, since you will be bound, and indeed protected, by the public laws of commerce. Furthermore, the regional development agencies will have spent tax-payers money to encourage punters in your direction – an especially pertinent point in the case of the rural or seaside B&B. If you choose to provide services, then you have to give equal access to all tax-payers, even the gay ones.
Update: bookdrunk at the Rhetorically Speaking blog is always lucid on gay and women’s rights. ‘Revisiting Asymetrical Prejudice’ was written last year, reposted as the cherry atop a couple of other blogs on this issue.