I posted on W&T the below response to this story, regarding a home video taken by Prince Harry who was filming his army comrades and referred at one point to “…our Paki friend…” Ahmed, trigerring a firestorm of self-righteous moralising. For those of you who don’t know, Paki is a slang term for someone from Pakistan in the United Kingdom.
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*Sigh* The comment wasn’t racist.
On this rare occasion I’m happy to agree with Smasher. The comment referred to race, yes, but it contained no prejudice, discrimination or antagonism toward a member of another race: it was not racist. People think it was racist only because we’ve become so sensitive about racial issues and we’re so paranoid about being labelled that way that, without thinking about it much at all, we’ll jump on the politically correct bandwagon out of sheer paranoia. That is the opposite of progressive. It’s flat-out reactionary.
And by the way, language is a strange thing. Many liberal people I know have agreed about the importance of context in language: a word uttered in many contexts is not even remotely offensive or deserving of contempt when said between two old boys in a pub on a Friday night; then it becomes a term of endearment. These same liberal people are the bandwagon-jumpers when it involves race, not because they’ve thought about it hard but precisely because they haven’t (and couldn’t, for fear of what their peers would think!).
In short, Smasher is right: we’re just touchy about it. But the validity of that fact in no way justifies this bandwagon. ”Our P### friend…” [*] is not more or less than a term of endearment between army comrades. It’s how Harry thinks of his friend Ahmed, in much the same way as someone else may spring to mind by their features; a big nose, a bald head, being tall, being short, being ridiculously good-looking, or anything else. Had Harry referred to Ahmed in any of those ways, we wouldn’t even be having this ludicrous conversation.
I refuse to be bullied intellectually into jumping aboard this bandwagon of thinking people who are in these instances unthinking, merely towing their brains behind them lest they think enough to conclude something other than their peers, for fear of breaking the ranks of the liberal elite which, out of paranoia, feels it must scream at every available moment, “I’m not racist!” This faux outrage is beginning to get very, very old.
[* In case you haven't been persuaded of how pathetic the reaction to this is, consider that I was prevented from even citing the term used by Harry in my comment here. Not only are most of the bandwagon-riders content to leave their brains behind them rather than analyse this properly, the BBC feels you are incapable of considering the term yourself too. How very... progressive.]
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