One of the most alarming images that was seen on television in the days following the Stephen Lawrence verdict was of a burly man, about sixty years old, using explicitly racist vocabulary about black people. The BBC newscaster apologised in advance, but so unused are we now to hearing such language in any controlled environment - whether on TV, radio, film or stage – that it jolted me considerably. There even seems to be a cordon sanitaire around all the f*ing and blinding that one routinely overhears on public transport or in public spaces, making it rare that one encounters undiluted racist language.
The BBC clip made me wonder what the man who was caught using such words on television would have thought when he saw himself on screen. Acute embarrassment and mortification, or a sense of pride that he had expressed on behalf of thousands what they themselves were too nervous to say? I suspect he was quite pleased with himself. The fact that he was in every other way inarticulate does not get away from the fact that in using the N word of black people he expressed his position with greater clarity than any more judicious phrase would have done. When Alan Hansen recently applied the term ‘coloured’ to a black footballer he was roundly castigated and obliged to apologise, even though the usage of that word in a racial context was originally euphemistic, an attempt to speak with respect of non white people. There are times when a Ph.D. in linguistics might not be sufficient to keep up with nuances of acceptable speech. A ‘coloured person’ is wrong, but a ‘person of colour’ is right.
It is easy, therefore, to mock political correctness by showing up its inconsistencies. How much better it is, though, that we live in a society where a slip of a word can become the subject of public disquiet. I am always astonished how people of any level of educational attainment, basic or advanced, can usually in times of extreme crisis - after witnessing an accident, perhaps, or surviving a tsunami - find words to describe it which might defeat the best novelist alive. I am convinced that language is something, especially in times of anxiety or extreme provocation , which wells up subliminally. We begin sentences unsure of how they will finish. Of course, the sensitive, aware or intelligent person, will also bring an element of conscious disciplining to his or her choice of words, but the core of what we say is spontaneous. That is why racist vocabulary is usually a true guide to gut beliefs, even when apologised for, as in Hansen’s case, or more recently Diane Abbott’s. We have come a long way since our immediate forebears spoke routinely of other people in language that would today be intolerable. These recent examples, however, coming as much from those who are paid to appear on camera as from those caught in a momentary ‘vox pop’, show that deep down there are instincts of difference and superiority in many of us which may yet take generations of patient educating to eliminate.
Alastair Niven
