To: Carol Malone, UK Sunday Mirror columnist and "Big Brother" TV contestant (undoubtedly recruited by Big Brother and Channel 4 to do damage limitation for the show)

RE your Sunday Mirror column:

HIDEOUS, HATEFUL BUT NOT RACISM
21 January 2007
THE INSIDE TRACK ON BIG BB ROW
 http://www.sundaymirror.co.uk/news/carolemalone


Dear Ms. Malone:

I read your mostly thoughtful commentary, "HIDEOUS, HATEFUL BUT NOT RACISM", 21 January 2007, in the Sunday Mirror. Why is it that white people (in the UK or the US) often bend over backward (as we say in the US) to 'prove/claim' that someone's atrocious behavior, such as Jade Goody's on Big Brother, may be bullying or nasty, but it's NOT *racism*? This, in a single word, is called _denial_.

For example:

When someone is cross-culturally/-ethnically and negatively made fun of, put down or bullied for their ethnic physical features, it is *racism*, a form of *racism*, or *racial/ethnic bigotry*.

When someone is cross-culturally/-ethnically and negatively made fun of, put down or bullied for their native accent, it is *racism*, a form of *racism*, or *racial/ethnic bigotry*.

When someone is cross-culturally/-ethnically and negatively made fun of, put down or bullied for their ethnic/cultural name, it is *racism*, a form of *racism*, or *racial/ethnic bigotry*.

When someone is cross-culturally/-ethnically and negatively made fun of, put down or bullied for, generally, their ethnic cuisine, it is *racism*, a form of *racism*, or *racial/ethnic bigotry*.

When someone is cross-culturally/-ethnically and negatively discriminated against, harassed, made fun of, put down or bullied for anything inherently connected to their race/ethnicity, it is *racism*, a form of *racism*, or *racial/ethnic bigotry*. When done within cultures/ethnicities, such as over skin color, it is *internalized* racism/bigotry. (So that, perhaps, you might understand this more clearly and more personally, the same woud be true of gender and sexism -- historically and customarily against females.)

[And it's racist when someone uses racially charged or loaded "code words/language"... (like "untrustworthy", in England, or "uppity", in America, contextually/subtextually applied to minorities of color).]

The fact that Jade Goody might otherwise, in other circumstances, even be a nice person doesn't change this. I come across nice white (even liberal and/or educated -- many in the US/UK media) racists all the time.

And this, from your words in the Sunday Mirror:

"If CBB has sparked a international row about racism perhaps the place we should next look to is India itself - where the caste system is a damn sight more racist than anything that happens on these shores."

This is also a crass form of denial and an inherent attempt by you to play down not only the racism that exists in the UK (most of it, I'm sorry to say, with all due respect, you're probably oblivious to, as are the majority of whites in the UK and US), but also to play down even the bullying by Goody and her nasty allies. Not, because you said there is racism in India -- which needs to be examined too (especially that of light-skin Indians against dark-skin Indians, other people, and the caste system) -- but to say it in such a snide, smug way as to play down the racism by Goody, her allies, and in Britain.

One African American sociopolitical comedian once said, "It's not just the depth of the river that drowns you; it's the water." That there is substantial racism in some less developed, and supposedly less generally educated, countries does not excuse (and excuses it *less*) the still very substantial racism in more developed, and supposedly more generally educated, countries (and not only blacks and Asians, but especially the Irish too may have something to say about racism in the UK). This, in addition to the historically genocidal racism in US/UK/European imperialist and militarist foreign policy (as in Iraq over the past two decades or so, or in Israel over the past 60 years or so).

Martin Luther King said that it was the denial about racism by the liberal and supposedly educated whites that hurt him the most. (E.g., see King's "Letter from a Birmingham [Alabama] Jail".) I see/hear this all the time in the US and the UK.

Hopefully, you will understand what I am saying here, but if you don't, then that's, unfortunately, what I would expect from the majority of whites in the US and UK.


Sincerely,

Joseph Anderson

Berkeley, CA, USA


(It's the university town of UC Berkeley, across the bay from San Francisco.)