Danny Baker should know better and was rightly sacked
It’s interesting to see that most of the people defending Danny Baker happen to be white, and thus probably wouldn’t know what racism felt like if it came and hit them in the face. To recap: Baker was sacked this week by the BBC for tweeting a picture of a couple leaving a hospital with a chimpanzee. Baker captioned the picture “Royal baby leaves hospital”. Apparently, he was making a joke about class, not race, and hadn’t realised who had actually had the baby (he’s not good at royal watching, apparently).
Baker and his acolytes have said the comedian has been “thrown under a bus”; the BBC has overreacted; Baker is not a racist, et cetera. But his downplaying of the tweet shows just how far we still have to go when it comes to racism in this country – the very fact he doesn’t realise that it’s a problem shows what a problem it is. You do not have to be an avid royalist to know that the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s baby is mixed race – you just have to have not been in a coma for the past nine months.
Baker says the day of his sacking was “the worst day” of his life (try telling that to the people of colour who have spent many days of their lives being called monkeys by racists and bigots – racists and bigots who now march through the streets of Britain, worshipping at the altar of Tommy Robinson). Baker’s friends wonder why everyone is taking this matter seriously. Because it is serious, gravely so. And if you can’t see that, then I am afraid you are part of the problem.