People who called Gap racist? They’re a bunch of Muppets

LAST week, Gap was forced to withdraw its ad for children’s clothing, which showed a white girl resting her arm on the head of a smaller black girl. There were complaints, too, that only one of the four girls was black. That the black girl was passive, while the others were doing gymnastics, DJing, or using a telescope.

One woman tweeted: ‘GapKids proving girls can do anything… unless she’s black. Then all she can do is bear the weight of white girls. #EpicFail.’

You wonder whether any of these modern-day Mary Whitehouses get any housework done, so busy are they being outraged. If the black child had been the one doing gymnastics, Gap would have been accused of reinforcing the fact the only way out of the ghetto is through sport. DJing? Well, that’s making the girl a cliche right there.

Sometimes, overzealous PC culture has a point and in the past has changed real wrongs. This is not a real wrong.

And Gap scurrying to acquiesce is dangerous. The problem with all this outrage is that because people can vent their spleen on social media, they are able to enjoy the illusion that they are participating in the world, and changing things.

But you have to pick your target or you become like Statler and Waldorf in The Muppets: heckling everything. I could have called Channel 4 and complained about the cartoons of monstrous horses promoting the Grand National, but I saved my energy for demonstrating in Liverpool on the day. We are not allowed to utter one questionable word about minorities, Muslims, people who are transgender, or gay, or disabled. But we shouldn’t mete out special treatment for fear of being insensitive. After I wrote about how I told off a Somalian boy for beating his donkey with an iron bar, I received death threats. In Ethiopia, when I was about to fight several men in a market square who refused to give their mules water or shade, a charity worker wailed: ‘They need more time!’ To which I replied: ‘They’re the oldest civilisation in history!’

I remember working on an evening newspaper, and being sent to interview a white pop star. I asked about her black boyfriend. I put the fact he is black in the story. Back in the office, my editor made me take the reference out. ‘But it’s interesting,’ I said. ‘If he were Spanish, I would have asked her about that, too, how it works.’ It’s as though we don’t know whether race is irrelevant, or everything.

You can tell the police have been drilled in misplaced sensitivity of late. When I told an officer that I ‘feel sorry’ for a deaf neighbour, he replied that that was wrong, and how would I like it if the deaf man said he felt sorry for me as I’m ‘a rich woman with no friends’?

AFTER I called a woman fat the other day, she retaliated that I have a ‘flat, bony a***’ and threatened to take me to a tribunal because I ‘attacked a medical condition’. I had a row on Facebook a week or so ago with a woman who criticised my age, grey roots and facial hair, but I have no recourse. While even white van men are sacrosanct (viz, the sacking of Emily Thornberry), you can say what you like about post-menopausal white women.

I don’t know what it’s like to be black. I married an Indian, but that’s no defence because perhaps I merely found him exotic? In my case, I married a man because he was funny and clever. We learned from each other. He gave me King Leopold’s Ghost, I showed him how to put on a duvet cover.

Maybe the girl in the advert was the right height for a bit of affectionate leaning? Oh, Buddha, am I being size-ist again?