Political correctness strikes as Walliams gets it ‘Wong’
ICOULDN’T resist digging out a few old books after another example of political correctness made headline news this week. Publisher Harper Collins announced that it was removing a character from the forthcoming update of David Walliams’s book The World’s Worst Children.
Out goes Brian Wong, Who Was Never, Ever Wrong, after podcaster Georgie Ma complained that the character was “normalising stereotypes on minorities from a young age”.
Poor Brian is portrayed as a Chinese boy with glasses and small eyes. “The overall character,” said Ms Ma, “plays on the model minority myth where Chinese people are nerdy, swotty and good at maths, we’re not confrontational and are high achievers”.
I can think of worse stereotypes. The book’s other characters, for instance, include a victim of head lice (Nigel Nit-Boy), a girl let down by her parents in the personal hygiene department (Grubby Gertrude) and a sensitive soul called Bertha the Blubberer.
But I’m from a different era and hate to think what Ms George would have made of some of the characters in my 1972 Dandy annual, featuring the likes of PC Big Ears, Corporal Clott, a teacher called Greedy Pigg and two Chinese spies named Wun Tun and Too Tun, who said things like “velly good way of getting over big fence into seclet Blitish Base”.
Language changes with time. Words and phrases that seem acceptable in one era are deemed offensive in later, more enlightened times. Imagine the understandable outrage if old shows like Till Death Us To Part and Love Thy Neighbour appeared on prime-time television schedules today.
I have a cherished set of books called Lands And Peoples, published almost 100 years ago.
They strike me as being very sensitive – of their time – in their vivid descriptions of a world that white British youngsters in the 1920s could only imagine, long before televisions in homes, yet they are littered with descriptions that would have been deemed offensive even in my school days.
One picture shows a “fuzzyheaded Fijian”; another describes a band of “half-breed musicians” in
South America. We move on – thankfully so.
There are some rather silly and worrying examples of the language police use at work, however. Author and former teacher Kate Clanchy has been forced to rewrite her award-winning memoir Some Kids I Taught And What They Taught Me because she referred to “chocolatecoloured skin” and “almond-shaped eyes”. Objectors said such language was “dehumanising” and commodifying”. As one put it: “There are many plenty of ways to describe POC [people of colour]… that don’t need to be related to food. It’s delicious but we’re not edible. We’re people!”
Good job my parents aren’t around these days or they’d be in hot water for calling someone or other a “silly sausage” or a “good egg”.