Catriona Stewart
BBC has given a platform to racism
AN unqualified shyster who inveigles his way into a fancy house and then wreaks utter havoc, leading to death, destruction and a breakdown in otherwise civil relations.
You’d think Donald Trump would have been all over the South Korean film Parasite.
But no, our parasitic occupant of the White House is deeply unimpressed with the subtitled Best Picture Oscar winner. Cue jokes about him being unable to read.
I know we’re supposed to be immune to shock these days but it was still unutterably gobsmacking to see the leader of the free world playing to a lowest common denominator crowd by expressing his naked distaste at something foreign – shudder! – beating something All-American at the greatest American awards show on earth.
“How bad were the Academy Awards this year?” Trump asked the crowd at his Colorado Springs campaign rally. “And the winner is a movie from South Korea. What the hell was that all about?”
“We’ve got enough problems with South Korea with trade. On top of it, they give them the best movie of the year?” Trump, not one to try to put a corrective veneer on his own stupidity, revealed he hadn’t actually seen the movie.
“Was it good? I don’t know.” He doesn’t know, he purely dislikes it because it is from deepest, darkest abroad.
I’d say he went on to show his true colours but we know his true colours.
This is the thing about the current populist right – they aren’t trying to hide anything, they’re coming out dressed in their colours. He went on to ask if we could “get Gone With the Wind back please?”.
What a revealing choice: a film that romanticises the good old days of Southern supremacy and slavery where black characters are demeaning stereotypes.
Trump is not alone this week in unabashed foreigner bashing.
Michael O’Leary, popular business owner, if by “popular” we mean “leaves the populace aghast at his ever increasing anticustomer antics”, has advocated profiling Muslim men. “You can’t say stuff, because it’s racism,” he said, immediately undercutting his point, “But it will generally be males of a Muslim persuasion. Thirty years ago it was the Irish. If that is where the threat is coming from, deal with the threat.”
Is that where the threat is coming from? Those who nod along with Mr O’Leary, who see nothing wrong with a bit of institutional Islamophobia justified by the rationale that by condemning a minority we protect the majority, never think how they might feel were they to face some casual racial profiling.
Police figures show the rise of the far right is the fastest-growing terrorist threat in the UK. The man who killed nine people in attacks on two shisha bars in western Germany last week was a white man, a far right racist.
At the end of last year the Met said it and MI5 were carrying out 80 investigations to stop violence fuelled by ideologies such as white supremacism and Islamophobia.
It added that a quarter of all terrorism arrests in the year up to September 2019 were linked to far-right violence and a third of all terror plots to kill in Britain since 2017 – seven out of 22 – were connected to extremeright causes. Where are the calls for racial profiling of white Christian men? You will not find them, you will only find acceptance of racial profiling of Muslim men, and not even of Muslim men but of men who “look Muslim” or “sound like they might be Muslim”.
From the president to one of Europe’s most prominent businessmen to the state broadcaster, racist views have been platformed without shame. An audience member on last week’s Question Time was able to spout bigoted nonsense about the need to “close the borders” of Britain.
This become more problematic when the BBC clipped the segment and put it on Twitter – a standalone showcase of these abhorrent views without any challenge, as though the existence of migrants in Britain is a valid topic of debate.
It later transpired that the woman who was given such prominence is believed to be a former National Front parliamentary candidate and Britain First supporter. If only the BBC racially profiled its audience.
At the same time as this triumvirate of racism, we have the likes of Joaquin Phoenix making impassioned speeches – his was at the BAFTAS – about how “those who benefit from a system of oppression [must] be the ones that dismantle it”.
It is fear of that dismantling which causes outbursts such as Trump’s and the Question Time audience member. It is fear that a dismantling might reveal those in power to be entirely undeserving of that power. It is fear of being lesser that creates a climate in which Michael O’Leary might persecute a section of his customer base as “other”.
These views – that those of different races are less deserving, a threat, should be banned from our shores – are mainstream. When even the BBC gives them an unchallenged airing it shows that action is needed, not just worthy BAFTA speeches.
Where are the calls for profiling of white Christian men?