My OperaPolitical Correctness Gone Mad
Sunday, October 11, 2009 11:19:12 AM
Instead of doing any preparation for Fridays interview or tidying the house or sorting out my tax that's owed or basically doing anything of use, on Thursday I spent the day on the computer, and Peter Serafanovic very early on put up a tweet of this disgusting footage which I'm sure everyone on the entire planet has seen by now, but just in case you haven't here it is once more, as illustration...
I live in Britain so have never seen "Hey, Hey It's Saturday" before but it appears to be a kind of Noels House Party type of affair which has been on Australian TV for ever and came back for two shows. It seems to be a very long show full of segments such as the "Red Faces" one above. A bit like grown up Saturday morning TV.
I don't think I need to go into how shocking and appalling blackface routines are do I? In short, I agree with everything Harry Connick Jr said.
At first one of the most shocking things is how the people involved in the show are totally clueless as to how this could be deemed offensive. Even the preface to Harry Connicks opportunity to have his say, once a slight penny has dropped, is (paraphrasing) "I understand that blackface routines can be seen as offensive in America."
Only in America mind! Everywhere else it's fine, apparently! Oh, every weekend we dress up as minstrels round our way - it's a right giggle.
Now you would be forgiven for thinking this is a one-off very stupid programme in Australia, but unfortunately a lot of the great and good citizens of Australia have got onto the news blogs comments and the Youtube comments and the vast majority appear to believe it's the rest of the planet that have got this wrong and we should all lighten up and have a laugh. A number of people even using the phrase "political correctness gone mad" with absolutely no irony! And a trawl through the TV archives in Australia shows this kind of casual racism to not be a one off event. Ignorance in the purest term of the word, really.
The show also shows a brief clip of when the troupe appeared on the show in 1989 and won! This brief clip looks even more hideous and is the stuff of nightmares and if this is a fair representation of telly in the late 80s then as Charlie Brooker put it on Twitter "I was aware that Australia was in a different time zone to us. I didn't know it was still 1972."
Also on the clip there is a brief illustration shown of a black stereotype with the words "Where's Kamahl" which gets a big laugh from the audience. To a British audience this "gag" is "whoosh! over our heads."
However on the next day Kamahl came to the media to say that he was offended. And it turns out that Kamahl is a kind of Malaysian Des O'Connor in Australia. Okay - Malaysian. So not only are all people of brown skin categorised by the thick black of "blackface" but this triggers a pavlovian response that a Malaysian easy listening star should be included with the troupe (??)
Kamahl was "a great friend of the show" whose catchphrase was apparently "why are is everyone so mean to me" (sic - I'll check the quote!) which doesn't seem to indicate the most fun of banter and the only two clips I've found which link Kamahl and Hey Hey are someone on "Red Faces" doing a "hilarious" impression where he replaces certain words with "curry" etc. (This gets a rave review on Red Faces by the way) and this clip from 1984, where they speed up the backing tape, throw powder in his face and then the voiceover guy says "Kamahl in negative" - Ho!Ho!Ho! Excuse me while my sides split.
The Jackson Jive troupe are defending their actions by saying they are multi-cultural. But multi-cultural people can be racist too. This next clip is from Fox News which is right wing propoganda pumped into the mainstream mind;
Possibly the most disturbing clip I found is this chap who doesn't appear to agree with the recent American election;
Now I'm sure that represents the extreme of Australian radio and most people in Australia would be as shocked as me but IT'S STILL ON THE BLOODY RADIO. Another thing on Australian radio that I didn't blog about was the host "Kyle something" who also appeared on Australian Idol wiring up a 13 year old to a polygraph machine so that her mum could ask her whether she had had sex recently when out. The distressed and angry girl then spits at her mum that she has already been raped as she well knew.
The world is getting smaller and things like this now get noticed on the World Wide Web and twitter almost as soon as they happen, and things don't slip under the radar like the original 1989 Jackson Jive did. And all it goes to show is that the Australian media seriously needs to get it's house in order.
I'll end this rant with the fascinating and moving ending to Spike Lees Bamboozled film showing the blackfaces and black stereotypes of old - I would have liked to have thought that we'd moved on a little from this in 2009!
I live in Britain so have never seen "Hey, Hey It's Saturday" before but it appears to be a kind of Noels House Party type of affair which has been on Australian TV for ever and came back for two shows. It seems to be a very long show full of segments such as the "Red Faces" one above. A bit like grown up Saturday morning TV.
I don't think I need to go into how shocking and appalling blackface routines are do I? In short, I agree with everything Harry Connick Jr said.
At first one of the most shocking things is how the people involved in the show are totally clueless as to how this could be deemed offensive. Even the preface to Harry Connicks opportunity to have his say, once a slight penny has dropped, is (paraphrasing) "I understand that blackface routines can be seen as offensive in America."
Only in America mind! Everywhere else it's fine, apparently! Oh, every weekend we dress up as minstrels round our way - it's a right giggle.
Now you would be forgiven for thinking this is a one-off very stupid programme in Australia, but unfortunately a lot of the great and good citizens of Australia have got onto the news blogs comments and the Youtube comments and the vast majority appear to believe it's the rest of the planet that have got this wrong and we should all lighten up and have a laugh. A number of people even using the phrase "political correctness gone mad" with absolutely no irony! And a trawl through the TV archives in Australia shows this kind of casual racism to not be a one off event. Ignorance in the purest term of the word, really.
The show also shows a brief clip of when the troupe appeared on the show in 1989 and won! This brief clip looks even more hideous and is the stuff of nightmares and if this is a fair representation of telly in the late 80s then as Charlie Brooker put it on Twitter "I was aware that Australia was in a different time zone to us. I didn't know it was still 1972."
Also on the clip there is a brief illustration shown of a black stereotype with the words "Where's Kamahl" which gets a big laugh from the audience. To a British audience this "gag" is "whoosh! over our heads."
However on the next day Kamahl came to the media to say that he was offended. And it turns out that Kamahl is a kind of Malaysian Des O'Connor in Australia. Okay - Malaysian. So not only are all people of brown skin categorised by the thick black of "blackface" but this triggers a pavlovian response that a Malaysian easy listening star should be included with the troupe (??)
Kamahl was "a great friend of the show" whose catchphrase was apparently "why are is everyone so mean to me" (sic - I'll check the quote!) which doesn't seem to indicate the most fun of banter and the only two clips I've found which link Kamahl and Hey Hey are someone on "Red Faces" doing a "hilarious" impression where he replaces certain words with "curry" etc. (This gets a rave review on Red Faces by the way) and this clip from 1984, where they speed up the backing tape, throw powder in his face and then the voiceover guy says "Kamahl in negative" - Ho!Ho!Ho! Excuse me while my sides split.
The Jackson Jive troupe are defending their actions by saying they are multi-cultural. But multi-cultural people can be racist too. This next clip is from Fox News which is right wing propoganda pumped into the mainstream mind;
Possibly the most disturbing clip I found is this chap who doesn't appear to agree with the recent American election;
Now I'm sure that represents the extreme of Australian radio and most people in Australia would be as shocked as me but IT'S STILL ON THE BLOODY RADIO. Another thing on Australian radio that I didn't blog about was the host "Kyle something" who also appeared on Australian Idol wiring up a 13 year old to a polygraph machine so that her mum could ask her whether she had had sex recently when out. The distressed and angry girl then spits at her mum that she has already been raped as she well knew.
The world is getting smaller and things like this now get noticed on the World Wide Web and twitter almost as soon as they happen, and things don't slip under the radar like the original 1989 Jackson Jive did. And all it goes to show is that the Australian media seriously needs to get it's house in order.
I'll end this rant with the fascinating and moving ending to Spike Lees Bamboozled film showing the blackfaces and black stereotypes of old - I would have liked to have thought that we'd moved on a little from this in 2009!
MossMan # Sunday, October 11, 2009 3:19:23 PM
For a black person(*) in the USA it's obviously racist (* I'm not going to use "African-American, since that in itself is slightly ignorant - excluding as it does people of darker pigmentation who don't have recent roots in Africa - beyond the fact that we all came from there in some way or other).
To you or I, or a white person from the USA it's also racist - but only because we grew up in a culture which first *had* blackface, experienced the feelings of our society's minorities, felt the collective guilt and then rejected it. For us to do blackface would be racist, but ironically only because of *our own* background!
For other cultures it just doesn't have that extra meaning and it's just people imitating the Jackson Five. (very badly and completely un-funny, mind you)
Moving on to Kamahl, however, I think that segment he was on was not only racist, it was insulting to the guy himself and completely not funny (again).
Linking that history to the "where's Kamahl?" cartoon in the Jackson Jive segment (since ethnic Malays obviously have a lot in common with black people living in the USA, right?
MossMan # Sunday, October 11, 2009 3:29:14 PM
P*nutP*Nut # Sunday, October 11, 2009 5:54:13 PM
Whatever the history I'm sure they have enough common sense to know that it could be offensive. I'm not that angry with the dumb black-facers by the way. I'm more angry with the idiots and the processes that allowed them to be put on the show.
As I said it's "ignorance in the purest term of the word" i.e. a lot of Australians just can't see what all the fuss is about. Maybe for the reasons you mention above, or maybe the country is just inherently racist! I don't know which.
MossMan # Monday, October 12, 2009 12:07:05 PM
Blackface only has any kind of negative meaning if you are of a certain generation and with a certain cultural background - everyone else is literally blind to our problem with it. That includes most of Asia and India, who would just see people literally clowning around.
Having said that, Australians must be aware of the issue since they have been exposed to American culture during the last few decades. But it seems at least some of them consider it an American issue instead of recognising the same stereotyping and insult that is happening to their own South-East Asian, Indian and Aboriginal subcultures.
I suppose Australian society just needs a few more years to grow up... at least this case shows that Internet exposure will make certain it does happen eventually.
P*nutP*Nut # Monday, October 12, 2009 12:27:29 PM
I remember America seemed to indulge in Indian/Pakistani stereotypes, of the type we phased out in the 80s, until recently. But in Britain we are probably less sensitive about "native americans," maybe as you say as we don't have that heritage so much.
What we need is a great big melting pot!
MossMan # Tuesday, October 13, 2009 12:20:47 PM
And it's true that there are all sorts of *other* local prejudices that irk JazzMoss no end but which I'm not sensitive to. From discrimination/insensitivities in France to racial stereotyping in South East Asia. But then she can also say stuff that *I* find politically incorrect...
I do believe that the big melting pot is happening - and that this kind of mild racism will become a thing of the past. The only disadvantage of the melting pot is that it also means that individual cultures, customs, food, music, etc. will also blend into a single monoculture over time.