Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
Tories are the losers in racism course refusal
THE seventies sitcom
Mind Your Language was a prime-time hit for ITV.
Based on a guy teaching English as a foreign language at a night school, it allowed the nation, on a weekly basis, to form stereotyp e s ab out dif ferent people and cultures around the world.
Google it and let your jaw drop. It would never in a million years be broadcast now with its casual racism. Likewise, Love Thy Neighbour and Ri sing Damp.
All of them – and more – disappeared from our screens as the nation woke up to the offence that made life a misery for millions of people across the country.
Language matters. The way we characterise people matters. So it’s a shame – though not unexpected – that up to 40 Tory MPS are refusing to sign up to courses on racism.
Why would you not want to know whether you were doing something that could offend someone? I’d be mortified if, inadvertently, an aspect of my speech upset a colleague or a friend.
That has nothing to do with Black Lives Matter – it is just common decency. The idea that it panders to a ‘woke’ agenda indicates a misunderstanding of the word.
The term goes back as far as Sixties and Seventies America in which people talked about becoming enlightened to society’s ills around them.
The trouble is, history tells us that whenever you have any kind of movement fighting for us all to live on a level playing field, you will always have the inevitable establishment pushback. We
operate in a state of delusion if we believe working with someone, employing someone or being friends with a person means that we cannot – at some level – still harbour levels of unconscious bias.
When England footballer Raheem Sterling spoke in December 2018 about black players not wanting to be judged differently to white ones on the basis of the colour of their skin, sports writers up and down the country were honest enough to explore the ways in which they may have been culpable.
Education is never a punishment.
It isn’t sitting in the naughty chair or like going for a speed awareness course.
And yet there appears to be sad triumphalism about the refusal of said Tory MPS to even countenance the idea that they could be helping some of the constituents they represent by learning about some of the issues that matter to them.
One of the MPS proudly trumpeted his position as “taking a stand”.
Instead, unfortunately, he is taking away his own opportunity to understand the world around him.
Why would you not want to know you were offending someone?