Thursday, November 24, 2005

The BBC - Still Institutionally Racist

The BBC must be feeling sensitive about criticism of the remarkable contrast between their coverage of murders where the perpetrators are white and those where the perpetrators are black or Asian.

Alright, so the murder, and trial of the killers of Christopher Yates received no national news coverage. just one local BBC story before the verdict, while the ongoing trial of the Anthony Walker accused is the subject of daily national news updates.

But someone's conscience must be pricking a bit. The BBC News website has decided to take a detailed look at the case. The conclusion ? The killers were acting like white people.

"Three young men get very drunk, shout racist abuse, assault a waiter in a curry house and get involved in a series of brawls, climaxing with an attack on a innocent man who crosses their path.

It sounds like an all too familiar night of violence of the type which blights many city centres in Britain.

Except that the victim, 30-year-old graduate Christopher Yates, was white."


How very odd. For the BBC is a stronghold of what Marian Fitzgerald calls "the Seventies model of racist behaviour, which meant all racism involved the white community" - so how can non-whites be racist ?

The BBC analysis appears to be that these chaps have gone native, with the inevitable unhappy results.

"Maqsood, Bashir and Zulfiqar eschewed their parents' religion and culture - although they paid lip service to it - and chose instead to imitate their white English peers with binge drinking, sex and consumerism."

One mustn't be too critical. It's progress that the piece even appears at all. The BBC have a mental narrative in which half the globe is still pink and England is covered with 'No dogs, blacks or Irish' signs. Strangely, it's they who are having difficulty coming to terms with a multracial, multicultural society. If anyone there ever looks at the Home Office figures (table 3.6) which show that in inter-racial murders white people are much more likely to be victim than perpetrator, they probably put it down to poverty or the legacy of colonialism.

It's not deliberate - it's rooted in their culture. It's "unwtting and unconscious" as someone once said.

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