Jews and the trouble with BAME
Ahistorian friend who is doing a project on Jewish art dealers in the 19th century and the multi-faceted antiSemitism that shaped their careers was told that she could not be part of a forum on modern BAME experience at her university: Jewish “voices” were not the priority, sorry. Given that BAME stands for Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic, a club to which Jews surely belong, this was odd.
But my friend immediately, if disgustedly, understood – nobody cares that Jews are technically an ethnic minority. Many of them, at least in Europe, are white, are therefore privileged and, with the offensive irony so often applied to us by the woke, are the oppressor class themselves.
The fact is Jews have never really, in practice, been included in the term BAME. So speaking as a member of the chosen tribe, last week’s news that the BBC, ITV, and Channels 4 and 5 have decided to drop the term left me unmoved.
Feelings of less equanimity only set in when I consider the reasons for dumping the term. The Beeb and co are scared of lumping together ethnic minorities and thereby causing still more offence, and stoking “white anxiety” over use of the term. Thus the media giants making the change are still firmly obsessed with causing offence to particular minorities.
That the term has both pretended to include while totally ignoring Jews has not been flagged as a concern, even though this fact highlights one of the key problems with the whole BAME caboodle: the obsession with dividing people along crude racial lines only, while showing zero interest in differences among the visibly of colour, nor other groups getting sidelined. Indeed, despite frequent jibes, snarls and snubs, Jews in Britain are doing OK, thank you, as are most other ethnic minorities, including Black and Asian.
Those less welcome in the inner circles of elite culture: the outspoken, ideologically nonconforming, the fat, the ugly, the old, the smelly… if media bosses were really keen on fairness for all, perhaps they’d come up with a clever acronym for them.