Friday, June 08, 2007

Just how stupid would you need to be?

Let's imagine there is a television show in which contestants enter a house and are observed constantly. Let us also imagine that in a previous series of this show, some of the contestants made comments that were considered racist, and drew enormous criticism for this. Further, let's assume that the channel who broadcast this show had been forced into a humiliating apology for the events of the previous series, and were fairly clear on the consequences of racist behaviour this time out.

Under those circumstances, just how stupid would you have to be to go and make racist comments on the show?

6 comments:

Amy said...

Ooh, a tricky one... My response would be that it would take a very special kind of stupid...

MommyHeadache said...

You'd have to be a very special type of retard indeed.

Chris said...

You would have to be very stupid indeed, maybe a particular kind of upper middle class insular. You would also need to have never encountered serious racism before.

And you would also probably have listened to a lot of hip hop and be woefully ignorant of context.

But it should be noted that stupid does not equal racist.

Steph/ven said...

True, that. Although it could possibly be argued now that this 'low-grade' racism is actually more harmful now than the big and obvious examples, because the bog and obvious examples are clearly wrong and should be stamped out, while the odd comment here and there could perhaps be tolerated... it's back to the analogy with the unmarked minefield vs. lying in a road at night, I'm afraid.

Still, it does appear that Ms Parr was just stupid, where the contestants in the other series don't get the luxury of that defense.

The other thing I wonder about: why is it considered acceptable for black folks to use that word, where it is not acceptable for white folks? I must say I'm rather inclined to agree with "Coach Carter" on this one, and so might suggest that perhaps it should not be considered even in the former case.

Anyway, I've given way too much thought to Big Brother this year, so I think I'll stop there.

Captain Ric said...

Huzzah! I have only seen a single bit of big brother this year. The apology at the start. I then turned off and have never turned on again. I have also not read anything about the contestants or watched any of the reviews or associated shows. I am glad. :-) So I'm only vaguely aware of this. Bliss! Join me, all you intelligent people and say "no" to big brother.

Julietbec said...

I win, I didn't even realise it had started!

The whole Jade thing shows us up as a country more than anything else. The fact that we're prepared to build such a preson up just to throw her back in the gutter. And it wasn't about what she said really. It was a knee-jerk reaction and she was the scapegoat. 'You must think this is racist or you are racist yourself'.

But let's face it. Channel 4 does a lot of selecting of people to go in Big Brother. We could be generous and say they weren't careful enough when selecting candidates or less generous and suggest it might be yet another publicity stunt...