After all the hype preceding the entry of Shilpa Shetty onto crazed reality TV show Celebrity Big Brother, all the talk of her "reaching out to Brit Asian audiences" (film professor on BBC Radio4), clearing out misconceptions about India or just attempting to revive a flagging career, the last thing I expected would hit the headlines was alleged racism on the show.Today, media regulator Offcom reports over 7,500 complaints and Channel 4 received 2,000. Relevantly, part of the debate asks whether the (obnoxious) three girls also in the house with Shilpa, and slandering her, are just bullying and being generally offensive or whether their behaviour and that of Jackiey Budden's constitutes racism.
Sure, you could argue that what this is, is class difference at play, but I'm distinctly uncomfortable with the inability of the perpetrators of this alleged "racism" to imagine a world outside of theirs. What's with Jackiey not even attempting to pronounce Shilpa's name in the beginning ("I can't understand it"?!), the reluctance to buy garam masala for the house? ("... as long as I can have my smoked mackerel", "can we have some fish fingers and chips?"), poking fun at her accent?
What does it take to label behaviour as racist? Does it have to be actual race-driven slander? "that ... Paki" (which apparently was never said)? I think this refusal to see behaviour/habits/mannerisms in their context (which may not be yours), to refuse to broaden your horizon a little wider than the corner pub and to be unaccepting of difference... I think these traits constitute racism just as strongly as direct race-related verbal abuse.
And the ugly saga on BB resonated, oddly enough, at a totally different setting today: a hearing at the Old Bailey, the central criminal courts for the UK and Wales. I went in to hear witnesses testifying on a torture case and caught some of the most surreal exchanges I've heard in my life. Ever.
Witness in stand - Pakistani man, unable to understand or speak English, using an interpreter and attempting to give details of incidents of torture occuring some years ago. To an all-white jury (apparently it's randomly picked? Which makes zero sense to me because, just as randomly, they could be all-BNP members?).
Mid-way through a questioning slowed down significantly by the continuous translation, prosecution asks about a crane the witness had something to do with.
(Paraphrase)
Were you hired as a construction worker?
Were you building?
Were you using the crane to build?
Repeated No's, then the witness explains he used it for agriculture.
Lawyers teams, security, judge all twitter. It's funny to them - going along an expected track and suddenly the Hindi-speaking man in the turban throws them off guard. A crane for agriculture - who'd have thought! Giggle, smirk.
Then a little questioning about a cockerel fight. Some more raised eyebrows, apparent mirth.
You drove one hour with the men yet you don't remember what they said?
I could not hear them.
They were in the same car as you but you could not hear them?
I have an old 1974 model car; it makes a very loud when I drive it.
People shout when they can't hear each other, do they not? Could you not hear their shouting?
I was concentrating on the road, I could not make out their words.
Who will explain the clatter of loud cars, the potholes and treachorous terrain of village roads to this sceptical prosecutor untangling the facts with apparent incredulity on a quiet lane off St. Paul's Cathedral? Who will magically extend his imagination to a village square where men gather around raucous cockerel fights?
Referring to an event a while ago, the defence judge helpfully explains to the jury the witness might not be able to have the "same concept of time" as them, but they should note there is an intervening gap of 18 months between the event described and the next one being recorded.
Who decides that because the witness claimed he could not remember one event because it was "so long ago" he does not have the same "concept of time" as the jury?
You were given this man's chickens and parrots to keep whilst he went away?
Yes.
For how long did he say he would be gone?
He did not say.
Did you not ask him?
No.
A man leaves his chickens and parrots with you and you do not ask him when he will return to claim them?
I knew he would take them back when he returned.
Who will explain to the amused courtroom that perhaps notions of ownership are culturally determined? Who will explain that perhaps leaving your chickens and parrots with someone in a small village near Rawalpindi is perhaps not the same as leaving your goldfish with a friend in London while you holiday in Tunis over the weekend?
Ask the witness if he understands the term "on-the-run"?
Long exhange between interpreter and witness, no doubt trying to convey the essence of what is a pithy English phrase but perhaps has no direct translation, or one that is immediately evident to the interpreter at any rate. No response.
Does he know what it means to be 'on-the-run'? I'm sorry I don't know how you would translate that? (Helpless, understanding smiles are exchanged across the court. "What a hard case to try - no communication possible. Deep sigh".)
Another long exchange as interpreter tries to translate despite the apparent stupidity of asking an interpreter to directly translate an English phrase.
Finally the answer: Yes.
Court laughs out loud in relief.
--
Was this complete disconnect between the witness and the lawyers a manifestation of racism? Their implied superiority, their open laughs at a world they could not imagine, their insinuations against a culture that might regard ownership, friendship, community different from their own?
I'm only too aware that it is the prosecution's job to rip apart a seemingly plausible testimonial, but I also had just spent the morning listening to a case related to a stabbing incident where a young, black boy from a housing estate stabbed to death another unarmed man and although the prosecution was predictably harsh, it seemed she was wilfully pasting over considerations of the general hostility of such neighbourhoods, the possibility of violence, the need to attack before you're attacked (the boy had just been punched), the likelihood that most young men carry some form of weaponry and so on to instead play up existent stereotypes and fissures in society and broaden them in order to gain credence from the jury.
Here too, by positioning the witness as the teller-of-fantastic-tales we have an argument that is built not on the "rational" principles of justice, the bare facts, the who-what-where, but, increasingly, one that plays up difference and seeks to discount the facts told by someone who has perhaps different concepts of time than you. Who says weird things. Who participates in cockerel fights. Who is so different from you, the all-white London-based jury, that you may begin to wonder how much stock you can place on this turbaned man you've all just been laughing at.
Never mind what on earth must have been going through the witness' head as he watched a bunch of white men with wigs on their head occasionally laughing at him in a strange enclosed high security room, in a new country. If that doesn't constitute abuse, and this inability to look beyond your world to embrace wider contexts, racism... I don't know what does.
