Filthy English, page 31
Chapter Nine
Coloured People and People of Colour
I was young. I needed the money. I was teaching English, to English-speakers, in a south-east London college. I won’t tell you its name. It wouldn’t be fair, even all these years later. It and its staff were worn down and out by years, decades, of failure and cynicism. In my experience, sad to tell, rats don’t leave the sinking ship, they hang around moaning to each other about the state of the staff room.
I can’t remember how I ended up there, or even when really, just that it was sometime after leaving university and sometime before I convinced enough people to pay me money for thinking and typing up my thoughts. The very fact that I was hired at all was an indication of the college’s despairing desperation. I was completely untrained, hopelessly unprepared. The best that could be said for me was that I was young and honest enough to be wide-eyed aware of my own incompetence and lack of interest.
When the college and I talked about education, we pretended we were both serious but we both knew we were lying, to ourselves, to each other. We knew, too, of course, that we both knew the other knew we were lying. It was a marriage of lazy, 1970s convenience. I wanted the cash. They wanted a body – anybody – in the classroom.
I was hired to teach an evening class of teenage girls who wanted to be secretaries. They worked in shops and factories, mostly, I guess. I’m not sure I even bothered to ask. The idea was that, in addition to learning to type and take shorthand – oh, distant world – they’d brush up their written English skills. The equation was meant to be simple. I was literate: I could transfer some of my literacy to them. It didn’t work out that way. It couldn’t have worked out that way. I might have grown up on a council estate but I also grew up surrounded by fluent Latin readers and science students who could parse Milton.
This was not these young women’s experience. Mostly, they’d left school at fifteen, with little or nothing in the way of qualifications. Their interests were elsewhere. In boys and make-up and haircuts and stack-soled, peep-toed shoes. I taught them the only way I knew how – the way I was taught. I did things like getting them to read out loud or write and correct short sentences. Or rather, I tried. They could barely read. They couldn’t write at all. Their sub-literacy was so distant from my own experience that I think I thought for a bit that they were winding me up, trying it on for teacher. They gave off an air of uncaring, of profound lack of interest in what they were meant to be learning. In good part, this was a sensible, extremely grown-up reaction to my consistent, undeviating uselessness. Partly, it was a deep-ingrained habit from years of schooling in which the main focus of any lesson was waiting for the bell to end it and deliver them back into the world. But it was also fear, of failure – rooted in genuine understanding of their predicament.
However much they tried to camouflage it, they had a shared wish to transform themselves, move on up the social ladder a rung or two. Shop girl to secretary: it’s a vast self-reinvention, its magnitude virtually incomprehensible to anyone who hasn’t done it or grown up alongside people who’ve done it – or not done it. It’s a move into the world from its shadows. Deep down, they understood both the stakes and the odds. They knew their chances weren’t great, even with the kind of self-dedication and seriousness of purpose they’d spent their life avoiding – for the usual bundle of social and familial reasons. So, as we all so often do when faced with a similarly vast problem, they got their failure in first. Try hard and failure is something that comes to you from outside. That can be tough to live with. Don’t try at all and failure is something that comes from inside – you’ve still failed but it was your decision. For some, failing everything is a last, flailing gambit to achieve something. It works, too – as long as you don’t run it by that awful, serious, blindly honest judge we call reality.
If I’d thought about it much, I’d have felt more than passing clouds of guilt. The college had taken these young women’s money. Or maybe the course was free. I can’t remember. Still, these young women were allowed to sign up for a course which promised to fulfil their dream. No-one told them it was a fantasy: that even if they’d had a decent teacher, rather than me, their chances of self-improvement on that scale were scant. Sadly, I don’t think they even appreciated the gap between my reading and writing skills and theirs. They were caught in that terrible, terrible trap of not knowing what they didn’t know. And so not understanding why the world wouldn’t deliver their dreams to them.
Oh, and they were all black. Big hair, loud, teeth-sucking, swaggering and striding south London black. All of them. Except they weren’t. That was my unknowing assumption. There was, in fact, a fault-line running right down the middle of the classroom. On one side were the West Indians – of Jamaican descent mostly. On the other were the Africans – Nigerians mostly, if I remember right. And the West Indians and the Africans didn’t like each other. They really didn’t like each other. They called each other ‘jungle bunnies’.
They meant it, too. The first time I heard it, I went to laugh, thinking I’d caught a nice, unexpected turn of irony – a forerunner of the social and semantic transformation of ‘nigger’. But no, it was for real. When they called each other ‘jungle bunny’, they were out to wound. It was a low blow that was intended to land and hurt. By jungle bunny, they meant pretty much exactly the same as a member of the National Front or any other run-of-the-mill white racist would have meant by it: that the target of their insult was several rungs further down the evolutionary ladder.
It was offensive and meant to be. Yet offensive as it was, it would be far more so nowadays. As distaste for sexual slang has undeniably fallen in the English-speaking world so revulsion at racial insults has self-evidently risen. As cunt and fuck etc. were once hidden secrets of the common language – known by all, used by many, printed or broadcast by no-one – so the same has become true of racial (and religious) epithets. This is the period when that change began to gather pace, sometime between the debut of the TV sitcom Love Thy Neighbour (April 1972) and the National Front march through Lewisham in south-east London (August 1977). The ‘hero’ of Love Thy Neighbour was Eddie Booth, a white socialist. The ‘neighbour’ was Bill Reynolds, a black work colleague. Eddie referred to him as a ‘nig-nog’, a ‘Sambo’, a ‘choc-ice’. The show finished in January 1977, six weeks after the Sex Pistols swore on TV. Seven months after that, the National Front march was attacked and disrupted by young anti-racists – organised and, to an extent, co-opted by the Socialist Workers Party. Rock Against Racism, which played a central role in changing the casual use of racist language, already existed but it was this violent confrontation which brought it to life, gave it a sense of purpose. It happened just down the road from both Don Juan’s Shooters Hill and the college in which I was faced with those young women’s casual use of off-hand racist language.
I was shocked into thought. I’d never heard anything like this before. I thought about it obsessively over time, talking about it with black friends. I did it obliquely, though, never telling them the actual story. Rightly or wrongly, I decided they’d rather not hear it. It’s not the kind of thing that anyone wants to hear about their own group.
There was nothing subtle or sophisticated in these young girls’ use of jungle bunny. It was just the standard hatred thing. It was a phrase they’d taken from white racists. Most likely, they didn’t even realize the accusation of sexual looseness in ‘bunny’. They just recognized that it gave a nice, powerful, bounce to the insult. That’s because of its rhythmic structure. Like many another insult, it’s two pairs of syllables, with an accented and an unaccented syllable in each pair. Jungle bunny. Motherfucker. Total wanker.
I also came to realize – slowly, sadly – that the two groups had subtly different thoughts in mind when they told the others they were jungle bunnies. When the West Indians said it to the Africans, they were being, essentially, literal. To them, Africa, all of it, was a jungle. They knew nothing of savannahs, rift valleys, deserts or veldts. They hadn’t had – or perhaps just hadn’t paid attention to – the kind of education that helped you gain a working knowledge of pan-African topography. They also had no way of knowing, or caring, whether or not there were any actual bunnies in the continent. They just knew Africa was a place that they had left behind sometime in the past, long before they moved on up from the Caribbean to London SE16. And therefore, the people who they left behind in Africa must be rubbish.
When the Africans said it to the West Indians, they meant something slightly different by it – though it came down to the same thing in the end. Maybe they’d seen pictures of Jamaica’s lush, jungley verdancy. Maybe not. It doesn’t really matter. They were quite happy using the word in a metaphorical sense. They were working on the cognitive – or, at least, mental – basis that if the phrase could be launched at them venomously, like a transatlantic missile, then it must have real import and killing-power. We all know an insult when it’s lobbed at us, even when it’s in a foreign language. We’re all humans. If we couldn’t figure out strangers’ voice tones, we wouldn’t have got far at all. Even if the African girls didn’t know quite what it meant, they could hear it was meant to hurt them. So it did hurt them. And, therefore, they reasoned it must be just as capable of hurting the ones who’d launched it at them in the first place. So they lobbed it back.
There was also a subtext, one that – I’ve learned over the years – can be found in nearly any African–Caribbean face-off. For West Indians, it’s a straightforward thing. When they look down on Africans, it’s simple class disdain. That lot are poorer than us. They wear loincloths, you know. The women don’t have bras – look in National Geographic if you don’t believe me. Jungle bunnies, the lot of them. When Africans look down on Caribbeans – or African-Americans – it’s less straightforward. It’s essentially a historical thing. To this African mindset, Caribbeans and African-Americans are the ones who got caught. They secretly think that Caribbeans and African-Americans are the descendents of those Africans who were too stupid or slow to outrun the slave-catcher-man. Sometimes Africans’ thoughts are not at all secret and they actually call Caribbeans ‘sons of slaves’. Never daughters of slaves, though. Perhaps there’s a sex differential thing going on there. More likely, it’s just the sound of the words. Sons of slaves is alliterative and has an almost Biblical cadence. Rhythm and rhyme are always important tools in the insulter’s manual.
There was also, of course, an element of feminine judgement in the barbs. The West Indians were telling the Africans that they were snobs. The Africans were indicating that the West Indians were sluts. They would have had no idea that the word bunny is obliquely linked to ‘cunt’ but they would most likely have sensed the most obvious rhyme for the central vowel sound. They would certainly have known the phrase ‘at it like rabbits’. It was common enough in 1970s TV sitcoms, invariably said by a middle-aged man – a denouncement of the morals of the young, deep-coated in envy.
I was, I must say, a bit taken aback. More than a bit taken aback. In their own way, these young women had dragged me into the world from its shadows. I had been brought up to disdain and disregard racism and racists, leaving me with a firm and forthright sense of anti-racism, but one that had barely been tested by actual reality. There was one black boy at my school, a Nigerian if I remember right, who told us he was a prince. He’d come to us because his father, a government minister, had been ousted in a coup and, unable to pay his son’s boarding school fees, had been reduced to dumping him in a state grammar school. There was also a boy from somewhere in the Middle East. He wore handmade suits and paid other boys to wash his car.
I did, however, get a far broader racial education at university. Among my fellow students were a considerable number of what would become a generation of leaders of black London – particularly if you use the word ‘black’ as it was used then, to include anyone who wasn’t white. Politically minded sons of Pakistani immigrants, Maoist Tamils, Labour-voting Brahmins: in the left-wing circles and circlets of the early 1970s, they all called themselves black. Now they wouldn’t. They may also have referred to a South Asian-run corner shop as a Paki. Now they certainly wouldn’t. Yet the idea that everything not white is black is still around. If anything it’s broadened to include things that are clearly white. Here’s an example I found in guidelines for working with pre-school children, written by a highly regarded ‘advocate worker for racial equality in the early years’. In a footnote, the guidelines say: ‘I use the term black to include all people from black and other minority ethnic groups.’ Asians, Japanese, Philipino, Roma, Lebanese, Russians, all black now. Jews, as well. Should we let them know? You first. I’m still coming to terms with the possibility that my 100 per cent Irish genetic heritage might mean I’m actually black. Also that my wife is apparently black. My children, too.
As much as anything else, it was that interracial, trans-oceanic solidarity that instilled in me a mostly unthought-about conviction that racism was something white people did to others. What we did to others. Though not what I personally did to others, of course. A student, I lived in a world of interracial, transoceanic solidarity. Or rather, perhaps, an illusion of interracial, trans-oceanic solidarity. In this small, small world, I – as a determined non-racist – was not-white, if only to myself and my fellow not-white friends. But not, I suspected even then, to those of my fellow students who were clearly not-white sons and daughters of the new Commonwealth.
Racism, as far as we were then concerned, was a whites-only thing. A naïve, unworldly, even stupid notion but it seemed to fit the facts of the day – at least, the facts as we then construed them. The facts such as the overt racism grown in the compost heap of the decline and retreat of the British Empire – apartheid in South Africa, white rule in Rhodesia, the National Front in Lewisham. The facts of global politics, especially as they were shaped for us by lecturers with drooping moustaches and shoulder bags full of Marxisms – Vietnam, the civil rights struggle in the US, the civil rights struggle in Northern Ireland. And that, of course, is where the white-thing-only theory should have started to bring itself up short. Whatever else was happening there, Northern Ireland wasn’t about white-on-non-white racism.
Swearing is a human universal. So are hatred and fear. And the swear words used to express that hatred and fear. Those young black women in south London taught me that – in a way no book or lecture ever could have. If I’d thought about it, I would have expected them to turn their hatred and fear on me, as the in-room representative of the post-imperial white hegemonic power structure (or some such). But, no, they turned it on each other. Freud called it the narcissism of small differences: we load most of our fear and hatred on those who are close to us and, truth be told, quite like us.
Racism is not just something English people do to non-English people, though. It’s a thing people do to people. Racist words are not an anglo preserve, either. They’re a human universal. If it’s not a nig-nog or a jungle bunny, it’s a chav or a pikey. Or a suit — that modern day equivalent of the favoured insult of my university years, bourgeois. Or even fascist – too often directed at people whose beliefs are no more than traditional and whose politics are a little right-wing. Whenever you go, wherever in the world, there are always words that one group uses to disparage another group, racially, culturally, socially.
Even before my encounter with those young black girls in south London, I should have known better than to think racism was a whites-only thing. I’d travelled in Yugoslavia. Two decades before its civil wars erupted into reality, I’d seen those fratricidal battles being fought out inside people’s heads and mouths. Wherever I went, Croats would regularly tell me Serbs were stupid, filthy pigs while Serbs would regularly tell me that Croats were greedy crypto-fascists. Both Serbs and Croats, of course, told me that gypsies were scum.
I didn’t ask for their opinions. They were volunteered, not as contentious suggestions or with evident malice but as statements of the self-evident, particularly to a well-educated, fair-minded Englishman such as yourself, sir. Remember, too, that these were people whose education had taken them at least as far as being able to convey a few essential concepts in English. I was shocked when I learned that the Serbian racial cleanser Radovan Karadžić was a poet and a psychiatrist, but I shouldn’t have been.
Racism and racist words are there somewhere inside us, so deep set that it might well be in our DNA. Herodotus, 440 BC: ‘Everyone without exception believes that their own native customs are by far the best … there is plenty of evidence that this is the universal human attitude.’ In the musical Avenue Q, one song gets more and longer laughs than anything else. It’s called ‘Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist’.
We all hate. We all fear. And we condense those thoughts and emotions into language. And sometimes we act on those words. Sometimes.
The caption from a 1854 cartoon from Punch magazine, of two blokes on a bench:
‘Who’s ’m, Bill?’
‘A stranger!’
‘’Eave ’arf a brick at ’im.’
To English-speakers, despised and hated others are (or have been) variously kikes, dagos, chinks, gooks, spooks, spics, micks, guineas, honkies, spades, wogs, wops and greaseballs. Many, though not all, of such words emerged from the waves of early-twentieth-century transatlantic passages. Kike did. According to Rosten’s Joys of Yiddish, it’s an anglicisation of the Yiddish word for circle, ‘kikel’. In the Eastern European world from which Jewish immigrants came, the illiterate’s equivalent of our ‘X’ mark was an ‘O’, a circle. The OED disagrees, seeing it as a reference to the common ki (or -ky) ending of eastern European names. (Jews have also been called chopcocks.) Dagos are western Mediterraneans – from the Spanish Christian name, Diego. The word dates back to 1700. Chink is a corruption of China and is at least a hundred years old. Until very recently a Chinese restaurant was invariably a chinkie. Now, it’s not, it’s simply a ‘chinese’ – as an Indian restaurant is an ‘indian’.
