'Don’t let our society creep back to the racist 1970s'

17 April 2023 , 19:19

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Adil Ray was attacked on social media for speaking out on racism (Image: ITV)

We stopped trotting out women in their bras and knickers to sell products for a reason.

Advertisers now wouldn’t go near the ‘It’s not for girls’ slogan that accompanied the Yorkie bar as recently as 2011.

And we most certainly would not see racist 1970s sitcoms such as Love Thy Neighbour or Mind Your Language on any mainstream TV station these days.

So why would you defiantly display a Golliwog in 2023? We wouldn’t countenance any kind of debate as to whether the word ‘b**ch’ to describe a woman is offensive. So why would we actually ask whether a British pub is racist for hanging a doll that openly represented racist attitudes?

Robertson’s stopped using the Golliwog image on its jam labels in 2001 – after 91 years – for a reason.

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Essex pub at centre of offensive dolls row (PA)

That we are even entertaining a conversation about it (there is no debate about the racism it came to represent) says much about where we are as a society.

Cards on the table, I have the utmost respect for Good Morning Britain’s Adil Ray as a friend and a broadcaster.

To see him attacked last week for explaining what the doll brought up for him underlined the fact that even supposedly well-meaning people would put likes, retweets, viewing/listening figures and their general entitlement ahead of the the scars left by the bullying that accompanied taunts symbolised by the doll in the 1970s and 1980s.

Those people have zero idea about the word’s history and the doll’s characteristics, applied in a degrading depiction of Black people. Also the widespread shortening of the word to casually insult us.

It was sobering – and yet, not – to read the number of people equating Adil’s (our) pain with their red hair, their glasses or their weight.

Those people need a history lesson, to be reminded of the generations enslaved and violated on the basis of their skin colour. Not their hair, glasses or their weight.

We lived back then in a society where the racism it symbolised flourished. We are creeping back there again.

Adil’s success and that of many others since then is due to their ability to triumph in the face of adversity.

But there are millions of others who didn’t. Millions who have had enough of being gaslit by people who want to legitimise the kind of thing we thought was long gone. No chance.

Rishi Sunak would do well to heed Adil’s advice to distance the Tory party from what sources claim was Suella Braverman’s predictable support for the pub at the centre of the doll row. He won’t, of course, but then what’s new?

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It isn’t political correctness gone mad to stand up to it. It is basic human decency.

Darren Lewis