I remember golliwogs. They are a feature of my first impressions of Britain. I first came across them on jars of Robertsons jam. The colorful almost clown-like image stared at me from the label. You could even collect Golliwog badges if you sent in the wrappers to Robertsons.
Then I saw the golliwog dolls in Hamleys, who until this week continued to sell them. I found them intensely perplexing. In a world dominated by Barbie type dolls I could not — as a child — fathom why these dolls existed. They were ugly for one thing. And most perplexing of all, they represented a black person. It may be hard to imagine it now, but this was at a time when not only dolls were white but also the majority of kids and adults we saw in adverts or on the television. Yet even as a small child I understood that these dolls were an unflattering portrait of black people. They were not the equivalent of a black Barbie. They lacked genuine human features. They were colorfully dressed rag dolls, more puppet than figurine, most definitely a caricature. I never wanted one.
Then, in the playground, I first came across the word “wog”. It was an insult. White boys screamed it as they taunted a boy with darker skin. In one swoop I associated golliwogs with wogs, as did millions of others over the years, even if purists will point out that the word “wog” came later and that the golliwog’s creator, Florence Kate Upton, who came up with the character in a children’s book back in 1895, had no such thought in mind. All of that is irrelevant, because for several generations, the term golliwog has been an insult as offensive as wog.
But the moment of truth for me came a couple of years later when I saw the film Lawrence of Arabia for the first time. There is a scene where the word “wogs” is used. I sat open-mouthed as I understood that “wogs” is a term white English people use to describe Arabs, i.e. me. It is a word equivalent to nigger for black people. Not just an insult, but a term to categorize a people as beneath them, to label them as uncivilized and somehow backward, a term used to remind people that they don’t belong here, to exclude them from clubs and high-ranking jobs. In other words, wog — and by association golliwog — are among the most racist terms you could possibly use in the English language.
I had thought both words extinct; I have not heard them for years. They are no longer part of modern vocabulary, or so I wrongly thought. Carol Thatcher referring to a tennis player as a golliwog has put paid to my illusions. The sheer fact that the word is in her vocabulary, that she presumably saw a black person and thought “golliwog” is shocking in itself. Even more disappointing, though predicable, are the army of white middle class people who have been screaming that her sacking is political correctness gone mad. Why is it disappointing? Because it brings home the fact that the majority of people do not understand the pervasive destructiveness of racism.
We are all racists. I am racist. I would like to think that I am not but I admit that though I try not to be, I probably have some elements of racism in my personal make-up. The reality is that all of us have implicitly adopted, to some degree, thoughts and attitudes about people from other ethnic groups which deem them to be not only different but to some extent not quite as good or attractive. White supremacists or members of extreme right-wing groups sit at one end of the spectrum. Enlightened people who have thought about race and discrimination and who actively seek to rid themselves of racist baggage sit on the other.
When I try to conjure up two images to represent the two ends of the racism spectrum, I get on one extreme an image of members of the Ku Klux Klan lynching a black man. At the other I see not Barack Obama’s election, as important as it was, but millions of Muslims standing in prayer at Mina during pilgrimage.
All of them are equal before God, regardless of skin color, nationality, social status or any other attribute we use to categorize people. They all wear white towels and shed all outward signs of differences.
In the every day world, Arabs are unfortunately as prone to racism, if not more so, than the rest of the planet. Awareness of the role of words in enforcing racist attitudes lags behind the West. Often I have heard words like “nigger” pronounced by perfectly intelligent and kind people.
The words we use to describe people are potent in their own right. They are loaded with subliminal messages and stereotypes and play a key role in forming the associations that make us racist. What some call political correctness is not simply a Western fad, it is a critically important step in dismantling racist social structures.
But it is not just words, racism is real and concrete. It leads to two people doing the same job in the same place being given vastly different salaries just because they happen to have different tones of skin. It leads to a young man being stopped and searched by the police just because he has a dark beard. It leads to women wearing Muslim head scarves being asked to leave a plane just because they frighten other passengers. It leads to people born in poorer countries not given the respect they deserve by people who simply happen to have been born into a richer land. It leads to the media reporting the death of one white person with more prominence than the death of a thousand nonwhite people.
Racism may be a fact of life, but is one we can work to remove from our cultures. Judging people by the color of their skin or by their ethnicity is both wrong and immoral. As the US starts a new chapter in its history with the election of a nonwhite man to the White House, perhaps it is time for us too to think about how we deal with people who happen to have a different color skin to our own. Terms like nigger, wog or golliwog have no place in modern society, be it in Britain or elsewhere.
