h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Let's see what Britain's Head Racist has to say about things.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/2304563/Britain's-most-popular-television-programmes-'too-white',-says-Trevor-Phillips.html

"Some of Britain’s most popular television programmes including the Vicar of Dibley and Who Wants to be a Millionaire have been criticised for being “too white” in a report led by Trevor Phillips, the equality chief....Mr Phillips, the chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, said that all the evidence showed that television was still “hideously white where it matters”, a reference to those in senior roles."

"hideously white"

Now what would happen if he had said the BBC Asian Network was "hideously brown" or the Cosby Show was "hideously black"?

Some of the comments to the story hit the mark.

"Do I moan when they create the MOBO awards and don't let anyone white through the front door? No. Because I'm not racist like they are.

Well as so few of the comments actually contain any arguable facts I'll take this one the rest "hit the mark" simply becuase they chime with your opinion. If you want claim that's something special please carry on. Me I'll deal with facts.

The MOBOs dont exclude white people they are for a nieche market of music Jay Kay of Jamiroquai and Mick Hucknall have both been nominees and winners of awards.

The writer is not racist like Trevor Phillips, he recognises the blatant inequalities at work and the vastly different life chances opento BME and white peole in this country. Most importantly Phillips wants todo something for other people. People like youand the respondents to the article want to parrot the phrase "level playing field and stick your heads back into your right wing rags and ignore what is really going on.

PS Im not racist, I dont even believe in race. Though I know racists are very real.

"hideously white"

If you need this explaining to you I'll help.

Greg Dyke for it was he who first uttered the phrasein realtion to the BBC thought that the corporation we all pay for was staffed at the top end in numbers that did not reflect the make up of the peolpe

1 paying for the service.

2 being catered for by the service

3 who were meant to be inspired

4 who should have equal access to employment within the corporation

He thinks that the imbalance is hideous given the way the BBC is paid for and what it is meant to do. Trevor Phillips agrees aparently. Does that explain it for you?




"Now what would happen if he had said the BBC Asian Network was "hideously brown" or the Cosby Show was "hideously black"?

Id call him an idiot for missing the point completely Asian Network, the clues in the name.

The Cosby a vehicle for the "comic" talents of Bill Cosby wherein he has a series of mishaps and "comic" misundersandings rounded of with a heatrwarming conclusion with his family. For the sake of believeability they made his family the same ethnicity as him. Have you heard anyone complaining about the lack of black characters in the equally *funny* "My Family"?

Let's get things in proportion.

According to the Census,

Black Caribbean: 1.14%
Black African: 0.97%
Black Other: 0.2%
Mixed: 1.31% not all white/black mixed

Do you think these figures are under or over-represented in the media?

Do you mean medium by medium - well there would be different answers.

In the medium of TV in different jobs there are different answers. The point Gregg Dyke and Phillips were making is that at the top end where the big important decisons are made a statutory coporation paid for by pretty much every family does not reflect the people who pay for it. Or even the people who do a lot of the work in it. Black people gravitate towards jobs in TV and entertainment because in certain jobs it is one of the few industries where you can get by or quickly get found out by talent alone (as a black employee in the UK that makes a real difference). Yet with an over representaion in some jobs there is still a lack of black people breaking through to the top jobs.

But we've been here before and as with football it would be hard for any club or indeed national side to ignore and not use the talent available but at the top end the BBC still resembles an old boys club.

Not the opinion of me or Phillips alone but one of the guys who used to be part of running it.

Let's look at what Dyke actually said -

"Mr Dyke said: "I think the BBC is hideously white.

"The figures we have at the moment suggest that quite a lot of people from different ethnic backgrounds that we do attract to the BBC leave.

"Maybe they don't feel at home, maybe they don't feel welcome."


I've worked in the arts. One of the things about people in the arts & media is it is a tremendously fluid enironment. People come & go all the time due to short contracts and project based work. Getting the top jobs in the arts & media is all about who you know and what circles you move in.

The "old boys club" does exist, but it's nothing to do with race - it's to do with class. The top jobs in every area of the arts are occupied by middle class snobs. It's a mistake to equate snobbery with racism. The primary bias these people have is against people who are working class. Never mind it being difficult to get to the top with black skin, try getting to the top if you're from a state school and your little Tarquins & Gemimas don't have their own pony.

>The "old boys club" does exist, but it's nothing to do with race - it's to do with class. The top jobs in every area of the arts are occupied by middle class snobs. It's a mistake to equate snobbery with racism. The primary bias these people have is against people who are working class. Never mind it being difficult to get to the top with black skin, try getting to the top if you're from a state school and your little Tarquins & Gemimas don't have their own pony.<


I agree. The major bias in the media is not race but class and specifically the metropolitan-London middle class. In the Guardian's recent "Maxgate" scandal, whereby a middle-class London teenager was invited to write a blog about his Thai backpacking holiday and was later found to be the son of a Guardian-affiliated travel writer, much of the understandable venom was from provincials disgusted at the London-based media's navel-gazing which had lead them to fail to understand that most teenagers do not live Max's lifestyle and could only dream of taking a year-off in Thailand. The Guardian, tellingly, prissily responded by accusing its critics of "jealousy".

I'm not saying there's no race issue in the media but I feel the class issue is more insidious and (importantly) far far more acceptable.

"Positive discrimination works on getting people who are able into jobs and studying even if sometimes their *paper* qualifications do not match up, but this is not always the case. As has been proven time and time again in white dominated countries like the ones most of us live in many white employers subconciously discriminate against job seekers from other ethnic groups and sometimes actively discrminate against them.

Its an attempt to redress this imbalance."

This is basically true. Positive discrimination is not about getting underskilled workers into jobs in order to make-up numbers but about circumventing conciously or unconciously racist employers. Lose the legislation and leave everything to the employers (as the pro-business wonks would have it) and you end up making it far far harder for someone non-white (or Catholic, or Jewish etc etc) to get a job and create a very large underclass followed by the people causing the problem to attack them for "not working". Postive discrimination isn't a Good Thing in itself (it is, after all, discrimination) it's simply better than the alternative.

I have no doubt that you and I are alike SWL. We dont want some relative stranger shoving his fingers up our fundaments and another masked unknown drugging us into unconciousness so that Mister Fingers can cut little bits of our insides out. However if we had colon cancer....

That's roughly how I feel about positive discrimination.

It would help if the medicine worked. Four years after Dyke made that comment, the number of BMEs in senior management roles in the BBC had dropped by half.

Positive Discrimination is to race relations what drilling holes in skulls to release evil spirits is to medicine.

>Positive Discrimination is to race relations what drilling holes in skulls to release evil spirits is to medicine.

As I said, it comes with problems (and I assume it's these you're alluding to). For example, it does mean that if a white and non-white person of equal ability apply for the same job the employer might pick the non-white person in order to make up quotas. That's discrimination without question.

The thing is, this must be balanced alongside the fact that a) the white person is not actually disadvantaged *in general* from getting a job, only if he is in the specific situation mentioned above and b) the non-white person might be (in fact, most probably would be) severely disadvantaged generally if the law didn't assist him/her. On the small scale it looks (indeed is) unfair, but as part of a much bigger picture it's balancing things out and preventing a much greater evil (that of a situation where a talented non-white has much less chance of getting a job than less-talented white people).

Those who oppose this instintively tend to focus on the small picture and the obvious logic (it's discrimination) whilst ignoring the big picture that refutes it or pretending the big picture isn't real and was invented by social scientists. Scratch the surface of "we just want businesses to get on with it" rhetoric, though, and you find complacent privilege.

Thanks for the figures, SWL. You wouldn't think they were so lo, the way race obsesses you so.

Hey Ed, I'm not the first person to ask, but do you *ever* meet white people on your travels? Or do you just find the ethnic ones noteworthy? Now *that's* obsessive.

Of course I meet - and work with - white people. In Scandiwegia, for example (I assume those are the travels you're referring to). And very nice they are, too. However - I tend to travel to urban centres. It doesn't take much obsession to meet People Of Colour in such an environment: simply a late-night drouth* and a decent bar.

Of course *on this site*, I end up discussing encounters abroad with people of colour. This tends to happen when - for example - some obsessive erroneously refers to (I quote) 'Race Problems' in Sweden. In that convo, you clearly fail to recall that I reported comments from both white and BME Swedes on their 'problem', as you but not they call it. It takes an obsessive to forget the comments from white people.








*Useful Scots word: 'thirst for alcoholic beverage.'

Bollocks Ed

In so many convos you go out of your way to say you "met a lovely Ethiopian lady" or chatted to a "nice Asian". You're trying to impress with your multy-culty credentials. It's like so much of the bull you spout - all "look at me, I'm so clever".

I once extended a hand to you by e-mail. You reacted with profanities & insults then started gobbing off about it in threads.

Blicky & I can fundamentally disagree on basic principles, but we can communicate civilly here & elsewhere, something you are inherently incapable of. Your tactics are to insult, belittle and abuse those with whom you disagree. You sir, are the obsessive. You sir, are an inadequate. Your sneering condescension is that of an elitist snob.

Ach....away with yer.

>>I once extended a hand to you by e-mail. You reacted with profanities & insults then started gobbing off about it in threads.

For clarification:

I once lost it with SWL on a thread. I regret that. It (clearly) gives him easy ammunition.

*Later* he invited me for a pint, by e-mail. I have not accepted.

I may have mentioned it to others in personal messages - I didn't think so.

Just to be clear.

Actually...It's quite amusing. I can't work out if I'm being accused of lying or treason against The Aryan Race.

>> ...can't work out if I'm being accused of lying or treason against The Aryan Race. <<

It's not your race; it's your species that has some of us wondering in a meaningfully concerned way. I know you have been trained to use a keyboard but turning it on your betters is no way to earn bananas.

~jwf~

Was it I who first implied an obsession over race?