Goody & Shilpa: Class or Race?

Though I don’t watch Big Brother at home, it’s hard to avoid, friends relatives, news clips etc. it’s everywhere. I was visiting a friend when I saw the episode in which Jade Goody made apparently racist comments. If anything, Jade’s calling her housemate “Shilpa Poppodom” was a very mild remark considering the two women clearly disliked one another. And that’s what all this is really about - two people who don’t get on, to take their issue out of the house and apply it as a racial slur on all Indians is completely ridiculous but really, only what we’d expect from those middle and upper class medias, who are currently on a mission to portray all poor/working class people (especially those who grew up on council estates), as the primary cause of all the evils in UK society.

Jade has had little or no input, intellectually, she’s malnourished, like most kids of her class who attend shoddy schools and have little or no access to higher education, not because they’re too stupid but because there are no places for them. Jade has not created herself, she is a reflection of UK society – the poor bear the brunt of the harsh and cruel reality of surviving in an economic system with very little income. Recently, UK workers have experienced redundancy, cuts in wages etc. because of a massive influx of cheap labour from abroad and jobs being transferred to places like India, where workers think them selves lucky to earn a fraction of the salaries UK workers need just to pay their household bills. One man complained on a radio two phone-in, that he’s actually earning less now than he did three years ago, because prices have risen, but his wages have not. He and many others who phoned in, believed this was directly due to businesses moving overseas and employment of immigrant workers, who are prepared to work for 2-00 an hour or less (though it is illegal to pay less than the minimum wage, this crime is not deemed high on the police agenda, far more important are poor-kids wearing hoods). All those who phoned in and complained were accused either of racism or of demanding too high a wage i.e. the UK workforce are too expensive to employ: This, in a society where 1% of the population own one quarter of the country’s wealth.

Shilpa Shetty comes from a privileged background, she’s a Bollywood super star; “She’s a much better class than Jade, she has dignity…” said the media. And really, that says it all doesn’t it? Except it doesn’t, take a look at Shilpa she’s treated like a princess and lives a sumptuous existence in a country where millions – entire families – starve on the streets; India’s Caste system makes it impossible for the poor to ever work their way out of poverty – if you’re an untouchable, you will always be an untouchable and you must marry an untouchable and your children will then be the next generation of untouchables. To Indians of Shilpa’s class, Jade is the social equivalent of an untouchable. Shilpa lives in a fantasy and fiction, fantasy provides her daily bread – if only the poor Indian woman living on the street with her five children was a fictional fantasy. No one can blame Shilpa for her privileged upbringing and neither should Jade be blamed for her unprivileged background.

But, there’s an agenda behind this media frenzy, UK power circles are anxious to butter up India’s elite – India’s been forecast as the next world super-power and naturally, those power circles are eager to show themselves as anti-racist, not only that, they wish to show that racism in the UK is an inherently working-class attitude and that racial abusers are severely reprimanded. So we’re treated to Jade in tears on a Sunday morning, apologising for her “racist” comments and her “bullying”. People like Shilpa don’t exist without bullying: Go to India and see the police with their sticks, see how they beat and batter the poor when they cry out against injustice, when they band together to demand their rights to dignity and respect.

For too long now, the UK elite and their bottom-licking medias have used the issue of racism to avoid publicly confronting the real issue of class/economic oppression which affects the poor no matter what their ethnicity. The media now feels free to portray white working classes as inherently anti-social and racist – a portrayal which is designed to divide the poor and which undoubtedly increases tensions in poor multi-cultural communities. Given the vast chasm between Shilpa’s upbringing and Jades, it’s hard to imagine them behaving any differently towards one another if they’d both been British. If Jade had ever even tried to imitate the likes of Shilpa, she’d have been ridiculed as a “stuck-up-cow”, meanwhile, someone like Shilpa, being exceptionally wealthy and successful in her career, is allowed and expected, to carry herself with pride.

Shilpa has her “class” and Jade is deemed a common, “foul-mouthed slut“. You get what you pay for don’t you.