I’m in shock. I’ve been watching RTÉ’s Sunday Politics just now and Áine Lawlor showed a clip of Eamon Ryan, the Green Party leader, talking in the Dáil. Ryan was pointing out how minority ethnic groups are disadvantaged in the south and sometimes abused, and he gave an example of somebody using what Áine Lawlor later called ‘the n- word’. When the clip was played, the word was bleeped out of Ryan’s speech and apparently he apologised profusely later for having used it.
My shock comes from the fact that the word ‘nigger’ apparently cannot be used even when you’re condemning the people who use it to abuse black people. Why is that? Is it assumed that if you use the word, you approve the word? Well, I certainly don’t approve of it being used to denigrate black people but it’s a mad world we’re living in if the word can’t be used, or if it is used it’s bleeped out, even when racial prejudice is being denounced.
It’s a similar case to the BBC’s decision to ‘withdraw’ – i.e. censor – the Fawlty Towers episode where John Cleese is doing his ‘Don’t mention the war’ routine. In the episode, Basil Fawlty is shown as a screwed-up, absurd figure, and the Germans in the sketch are shown as reasonable, decent people. But the episode must be removed, apparently, because Cleese did a comic Hitler walk and made a mockery of stereotypical racial thinking. No wonder Cleese said in response:“BBC decisions are made by persons whose main concern is not losing their jobs… That’s why they’re so cowardly and gutless and contemptible.”
I don’t agree with Cleese on a number of things and besides, he stopped being funny about thirty years ago; but I think he’s nailed it exactly on this one.
I mean, the ‘n-word’. It’s as if we were all still in the fucking kindergarten ( or maybe I should have said ‘the f-wording k-word’. It’s a German word, after all. Kindergarten, I mean. Not fucking.’Fucking’ is Middle English. Probably. )
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