Guest 640- Registered: 21 Apr 2007
- Posts: 7,819
#1
Racial confusion reigns: I saw a news story on the ceefax service that said a woman councillor had called another female councillor a "coconut" and has been seriously pursued and penalised for it...in fact not only did she suffer and endure the wrath of all sorts of committees following the remark, she was even suspended as a councillor, and eventually a year later ended up before the Beak charged with racial harassment under the Public Order Act. She got a 12 month conditional discharge.
The councillor using the term "coconut" was a woolly Libdem and it was adressed to an Asian Conservative.
This is a bit worrying all round because even from my own point of view I am unaware that the term coconut is offensive. Totally unaware...so you can see how easy it is to make an editorial error these days and cause widespread offense. To me a coconut is a bloody coconut with horrible white bits.
Can you comprehend this incident though...going all the way to the Courts, probably pursued by the Crown Prosecution Service. While Im aware we should be sensitive on obvious racial issues this kind of case is a waste of public time and money...at a time when we have no public money. The nation is hamstrung by over-sensitive red tape and in some cases fear. Fear to open one's gob.
Ah..as I write the item has just featured on R4. Its gone national!
Guest 649- Registered: 12 Mar 2008
- Posts: 14,118
#2
howard mcsweeney1- Location: Dover
- Registered: 12 Mar 2008
- Posts: 62,352
#3
the term refers to black people that are considered too british by other black people.
brown outside, white inside.
Guest 655- Registered: 13 Mar 2008
- Posts: 10,247
#4
The law is an ass. This should never have been a legal or court issue. it is not as if the person doing the name calling was encouraging violence.
Brian Dixon
- Location: Dover
- Registered: 23 Sep 2008
- Posts: 23,940
#5
so if this is right where does this leave the chap who runs a coconut shy,and what would he have to call it now.
Guest 693- Registered: 12 Nov 2009
- Posts: 1,266
#6
During my time in London, the term 'coconut' was very much offensive, used to mean white women who slept with black men. As in the band 'Kid Creole & The Coconuts'; rumour had it that they took their name from exactly that source.
True friends stab you in the front.
#7
How about if they publish an official list of words that we are allowed to use in every day life which are in no way offensive to anyone? Probably because our language would be reduced to about fifteen words if they did.
We've already been bullied senseless into avoiding certain phrases such as fat, skinny, ginger, bald, etc. But we're now falling into traps with words that we may not necessarily realize are offensive. Before reading this thread I had no idea whatsoever that calling a person of ethnic origin a coconut could land someone in court. It reminds me of a certain scene in a movie called The Human Stain in which Anthony Hopkins referred to a couple of absent students as "spooks". In his mind there was a bolt of sarcasm aimed at the absent students who were either missing or invisible, like ghosts. Little did he know that his words would land him in deep trouble defending his career, as the term (he later discovers) is also a racist term and the absent students were black. Despite the fact that his "insult" was totally generic, non-racist and ironic, the authorities went hell-for-leather on a career wrecking fetish. This "coconut" incident sounds like a very similar thing to me.
We've been conditioned (or should that be "bullied") into a state of over-sensitive, defensive political correctness which make normal exchanges between people virtually impossible. We actually live in an age where a person can be compensated to the tune of thousands for "injury to feelings" and there is a general level of fear to express free speech which is almost as insane as the current health and safety regime. Before long, people in office may consider conducting risk assessments before engaging in conversations with colleagues.
It really is ridiculous and stupid. And, of course, with so much fear to use free speech, the only people left doing it are people such as the BNP who receive a lot of bad press for being Nazis and so on, but when you break it down into its component parts, they're only doing what we should ALL be doing - expressing our true views! I absolutely agree that a level of responsibility should go alongside that ethic, which the BNP seem to disregard, but we're not allowed. Even a guarded or innocent remark can land us in a world of trouble these days.
Certain ethnic groups, certain sexual orientations, and certain religious factions have managed to impose a type of "language fascism" on the rest of us, backed up by institutionalized bullying with a political agenda.
Guest 655- Registered: 13 Mar 2008
- Posts: 10,247
#8
Well said Rick
Guest 696- Registered: 31 Mar 2010
- Posts: 8,115
#9
PaulB. That's nuts! It should never have got that far. To the courts!
Guest 696- Registered: 31 Mar 2010
- Posts: 8,115
#10
Next they would send one to prison for saying: if you pay peanuts, you get monkies!
#11
And as for calling a spade a spade.....
Meanwhile I read on a teachers' blog of a teacher getting so exasperated with her class that she called them a load of Philistines. She was called into the headteacher's office later that day and asked to account for her racist language.
Guest 690- Registered: 10 Oct 2009
- Posts: 4,150
#12
The daft prat who had this all taken to court should be named, and have a bounty put on his head.
Tell them that I came, and no one answered.
#13
But, if the term were used in reverse, what would have been the outcome? Or am I just being the nigger in the woodpile?
Guest 670- Registered: 23 Apr 2008
- Posts: 573
#14
If you're called a 'honky' Sid, you'd have to put up with it nobody would take any notice.
#15
FFS. What we need is the American first amendment. Lets grow up!
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.[
howard mcsweeney1- Location: Dover
- Registered: 12 Mar 2008
- Posts: 62,352
#16
the thing is if we had sent all the philistines back to philistinia, none of this would have happened.
#17
I used to quite like Phylis Stein, a very affable Jewish lady I must say. Trouble is, she likes to build houses on other peoples land. Also heard she got stoned with boy David awhile back. Tut tut, that won't do her image any good at all.
Guest 675- Registered: 30 Jun 2008
- Posts: 1,610
#18
Some years ago there was a fluff-piece in one of the national papers refering to a conference of bi-sexuals. In searching for a word to describe themselves, just as homosexuals have taken over 'gay', the conference apparently decided to call themselves 'nice'. Wouldn't this take on all sorts of new meanings the next time you went into MacDonalds and the cashier suggested you "have a nice day"?
Politics, it seems to me, for years, or all too long, has been concerned with right or left instead of right or wrong.
Richard Armour
#19
Chris, you sure it wasn't a conference of bi-cycles?
Guest 641- Registered: 12 Mar 2008
- Posts: 2,335
#20
Whats the world coming too, I've been called Honky, Snowflake, WASP or worse in the past, have never taken offence and always taken it in good humour, as it was meant
The law is an a**, come to think of it could I have made LOADS of money (was that a racial comment?) you never know these days
