UCT was right about racist speaker
Wren contends that the “ways in which cultural racism has been articulated in Denmark are similar to the Thatcherite anti-immigration rhetoric in 1980s Britain, as public discourses have consistently portrayed Denmark as a country overrun with foreigners”.
In his analysis of the Prophet cartoons, cultural theorist Simon Weaver says the cartoons are examples of liquid racism, his adaptation of Zygmant Bauman’s work on liquid modernity.
Weaver writes: “Liquid racism is a racism generated by ambiguous cultural signs that encourages the development of entrenched sociodiscursive positioning, alongside reactions to racism, when reading these signs. The images are ambiguous because they combine the signs of older racisms alongside those of political and social issues that are not necessarily racist.”
Liquid racism offers an interesting way for us to make sense of the opposing responses to the Danish cartoons. Rose played this ambiguous cultural racism game; I am certain this did wonders for his magazine’s circulation. He could hardly invoke free speech defences when his cartoonists generated racist stereotypes that fed into anti-immigration sentiments in Europe — sentiments that just happen to be racially inflected. This kind of editorial practice does not serve the public interest. It is reckless.
This raises the question: Why did the committee decide to invite Rose at all? Why import this brand of racism? If they want to host a journalist who champions free speech, why not invite an investigative journalist who elected not to compromise his or her ethics by becoming an embedded journalist during the US