The shifting shape of the slur

Words used to insult – whether racist, classist or sexist – can change meaning over time, morphing from hateful to silly and vice versa

Racist language evolves like every other kind. Modern racists have the added pressure of being forced to use code words, to avoid being obvious and unpopular, and so their language is perhaps mutating at an accelerated pace. You’ll notice this if you watch the chilling video The Guardian just put up of an undercover journey into some meetings of the English Defence League (EDL), an anti-Muslim hate group. They use the word “paki” a lot, but it seems to mean any Muslim, not just Pakistani. Similarly “Asian” seems to mean, to them, Muslim, and is similarly considered an insult.

Another thing you’ll notice is a new use of the verb “sort,” as in, “we’ll get them sorted.” This has been a common idiom in Britain for many years, and its meaning is flexible but generally friendly: “Sorted?” means “Did you get what you needed?” or simply “Are you okay?” It obviously derives from “sorted out.” But it also has an association with drugs: If you’re on your way to a dance club, and you say you’re sorted, it means you have connected with a dealer and you are in possession of some pills or herbs. “Did he sort you?” is the British equivalent of the American expression “Did he hook you up?” By extension, “I’m sorted” has come to mean I’m high on drugs, particularly ecstasy. And, by general extension for all of that, sorted can be used to mean generally good or cool or sexy, as in, “That bird’s sorted, she is.”

But when the skinheads of the EDL promise to “sort” the inhabitants of a council estate in Bradford, they do not intend anything so pleasurable. They are talking about giving out beatings. The Guardian video includes a recording of hysterical telephone threats made against an anti-racist activist that promise, “You come to Birmingham, mate, you are going to get sorted.”

It seems strange at first that the verb has gone through such a 180-degree rotation in meaning, from helping to assaulting, but it can be explained by the fact that the thugs think that they are, by administering violence, setting things right – sorting – in some way.

There’s a bright side, an optimist might say, to changes in distasteful language: Sometimes it shifts the other way, from hateful to silly. As the neutral word Asian has come to take on, in fascist parlance, a negative connotation, so inversely do some hateful racist terms become diluted.

The most recent example of this came from last year’s best actress, YouTube one-hit wonder Clare Werbeloff, also known as Clare the King’s Cross Bogan. In case you missed this troubling piece of improvisation on Australian TV news (and subsequently all over the Web), this 19-year-old model/actress was interviewed by a TV crew moments after a shooting in the red-light district of Sydney. She claimed to have seen it all happen, and famously described the altercation as being between “a fat wog and a skinny wog.” She then went on to imitate the accents of the quarrelers as she recounted their exchange: “Oi bru, you slept with my cousin, eh? And the other one goes, ‘No man I didn’t for shit eh?’ The other one goes, ‘I will call on my fully sick boys!’ And then they pulled out a gun, and just went chk-chk, boom!”

She became famous largely because her story was entirely made up, and because her impersonations were so colourful, but also because her use of a notorious racist term shocked the rest of the world. Australian commentators had to explain – and argue and argue about – what she meant by “wog.” It turns out that in Australia the word doesn’t mean dark-skinned person, but a person of Eastern or Southern European descent – it means Romanians, Balkans, Turks, Greeks and Middle-Easterners. And it is commonly used there, even in TV comedy, and even by self-parodying European immigrants themselves (google Australian videos with the word in it and you’ll see what I mean). Werbeloff herself insisted there was nothing racist about it.

That doesn’t make the word any less offensive here, of course, or even in Australia, where many people were still disgusted by it, but the general public seemed to shruggingly accept that, offensive as it may be, it’s less offensive when used toward white people, and at any rate it has entered everyday vocabulary and probably cannot be eliminated at this point.

Paradoxically, Werbeloff’s most furious detractors made a point of calling her a bogan – Australian slang for brash working-class person, similar to the British chav. This is a classist term, which is undoubtedly hurtful too. And, predictably, anonymous YouTube scribes triumphantly point out that her name is Jewish, too, proving that the miasma of racist name-calling is a deep, dark, confusing and inescapable one, a sort of shifting fog that we all hope to avoid falling into.

The Globe and Mail

Thanks to NewsHound for the heads-up

Phil Wilson MP - I’m working-class, white and proud of my roots

Phil Wilson MP tells why he is speaking about the mining heritage of County Durham at a Hope Not Hate rally in his Sedgefield constituency today

There are still rows of colliery terraces in the former mining villages around Sedgefield. Where housing is not terraced, there are estates of council-built homes. I grew up on one of those estates in Trimdon. I remember that, back in the Sixties, my dad and almost every other man of working age along our street worked down the local colliery.

Entertainment was also a shared experience. The working men’s club, now the Labour Club, was the social hub of the village. The club hosted the leek show; the pigeon lads met there and still do. One day every summer, the club organised a family day out. Twenty buses would drive in convoy the 20 miles to Redcar beach. Community spirit was strong.

Still is. During the coal mining era community was a necessity because for many people self-help wasn’t enough. For example, at least 1,560 men and boys lost their lives down the many collieries in Sedgefield. The community had to rally round to help those families pull through. The shared lives of those generations led to shared values.

Compassion and solidarity can be traced through the genetic code of the local people. The union lodges, one for each colliery, were the basic building blocks of the code. They were the centres where compassion ensured that the sick and aged were provided for, where solidarity meant defending the many. Co-operation was the watchword.

Each lodge had its own identity expressed through the famous banners carried through the streets of Durham City on Big Meeting day. Each banner was an expression of the miners’ hopes and values. They contained emblems portraying scenes from the colliery, portraits of political leaders and religious symbolism. Each had a motto. For example, Deaf Hill’s expressed its faith in the parable of the Good Samaritan, “Go thou and do likewise”; Trimdon Grange’s was “Unity is Strength”. One of my favourites is from my father’s colliery of Fishburn: “The cause of labour is the hope of the world”.

The banner became as important to the miners as a flag to a regiment. Years after the collieries closed, the banners still hang on the walls of local community centres. They are still taken down on special occasions, such as the Big Meeting, to be paraded once again as a symbol of local values. Mottos sewn into the fabric of the banners need to be articulated in a different way for a new generation which remembers little of those times. There must be no appeal to nostalgia, yet the language of new Labour needs to be given an accent understood by those who feel left behind as well as by those who have moved on.

It is 16 years since the last colliery in the Durham coalfield closed. Communities are not broken. People are relatively better off and their needs are changing. Club life is not as vibrant and there is no longer the communal trip to the seaside. Instead, today, the equivalent to my dad’s record player, which could stack six LPs, is an iPod. To hold a conversation is to text. But even as times change, some things stay the same. Nothing could be more profoundly true than the values proclaimed on those banners.

Compassion and solidarity are still needed because self-help is still not enough. As Labour learns to articulate for a new generation, some in communities where the mining values gained foundation look for another set of standards where compassion is made callous and discord replaces solidarity.

CHANGE has breathed life into the far right, especially in those communities where industrial change has been the most dramatic. But for all the extremists proclaim that they are the saviours of the white working class, they are the complete opposite to every sentiment on every lodge banner carried through the street of Durham on every Big Meeting day from the 19th Century to the 21st.

The far right and the British National Party are a canker on the soul of the white working class. I know they will not succeed because at every Big Meeting there is a banner present from the Dean and Chapter lodge in Ferryhill. The banner’s emblem is a portrait of three men meeting in friendship. One is white, one is black and another is Asian. The motto beneath reads: “Fellowship is life. Fellowship for all”.

The banner, words, portrait and sentiment are of the white working class. I am proud to be of the white working class too, and I honour the heritage that they created because fellowship is life and fellowship is for all.

Northern Echo

The BNP’s very own anti-White racism

This article was submitted by one of our readers, Hexapla. We welcome any contributions from our supporters (as long as those contributions conform to the law and are in reasonably good taste). Please send your articles to us via email.

Like a cross between a broken record and a rabid dog, the BNP and its automated army of online posters attack, hound and denounce their critics as ‘anti-White racists’. But, being thoroughly inconsistent and quite careless with the key ingredient that makes the perfect racist dish, a generous dash of hypocrisy, the BNP likes to, every so often, dip its athlete’s foot into its very own algae-covered piranha-filled pond of anti-White racism.

BNP on the British White Working Class

"White working class scum will be swept away by a future BNP government"

"I'm no apologist for white working class scum"

- BNP councillor Simon Smith, Sandwell

BNP on British White Catholics

“I would include them [Catholics] in the 'foreign white' category, which you seem to have overlooked in my earlier posts - they certainly could not be described as ‘white Britons’”

- Alan O’Reilly: BNP speaker, activist and operator of Cleveland BNP blog

BNP on White Eastern Europeans

“They may be White, my comrades, but they have a completely different culture. And the hardships they faced in their own countries make them opportunists in ours.”

- Donna Hancock (BNP Worcestershire Organiser) and Lee Hancock (BNP candidate) writing on BNP blog, worcestershirenationalist

BNP on so-called 'White Trash'

“The BNP believes in voluntary repatriation. Indeed - there are many people like Bhaskar [an Asian Muslim] whom I'd prefer to remain in Britain than white trash like Cliare or that other reptile that used to disgrace this forum - a certain David Webb if I remember correctly”

- Francis Andrew, BNP activist

THREE FACTS

Fact 1: If you are White and working-class, the BNP despise you

Fact 2: If you are White and Catholic, the BNP despise you

Fact 3: If you are White and of east European origin, the BNP despise you

They just piss on the working-class: the BNP's ambiguous relationship with class

This article was submitted by one of our readers, Hexapla. We welcome any contributions from our supporters (as long as those contributions conform to the law and are in reasonably good taste). Please send your articles to us via email.

The BNP is increasingly trying to orient itself as the sole representative of the white working-class. Whether or not it succeeds in doing this is another thing. But, deep down the BNP is riddled with anti-working class sentiment.

Like many racist/fascist parties, the BNP ideologically makes a connection between class and 'race': that that the white race is not just threatened externally by Jews, non-whites, and whites who marry non-whites but, that it is internally threatened by whites who 'genetically' don't make the grade. In other words, the white working-class due to their genetic inferiority (the reason why they cannot progress economically and culturally) threaten to bring the white race down from inside.

I was prompted to write this piece after I was incensed by a recent comment made by the Lee Barnes, the self-appointed 'Director' of the BNP's legal department, about how he sees the trials and tribulations of modern working class life in Britain as a source of amusement and personal entertainment. This is what Lee Barnes wrote:

"The other night when I was laying in bed all I heard at first was the screams from my neighbours having another drunken fight, then the sounds of a baseball bat smashing car windows in the car park. This happens most friday and saturday nights. To be honest its more entertaining than the TV, so I just lay back and listen to the chaos of modern working class lives"

'The Song of the Star Lark'

This sideswipe at the working-class is a recurring theme in BNP utterances. Thus, we read BNP councillor Simon Smith saying:

"White working class scum will be swept away by a future BNP government."

"I'm no apologist for white working class scum"

Also, we shouldn't forget BNP leader Nick Griffin's argument that people who live on housing estates are "scum". So, according to Nick Griffin working-class people are scum. Unfortunately, unlike Nick Griffin, we can't all be born with a silver-spoon in our mouths, raised on Suffolk farms, with a six-figure inheritance from granddaddy and a private-school education rounded off with a third-class degree from Cambridge.

Nick Griffin's former mentor, John Tyndall, the founder of the BNP, went further, stating that inherited wealth "increases the probability that assets come into the hands of those best fitted to use them by virtue of genetic advantage". John Tyndall, like Nick Griffin, also had the benefit of a six-figure inheritance. From John Tyndall's perspective the working-class are both undeserving of financial inheritance and incapable of leaving an inheritance. Tony Lecomber, then a senior BNP officer, articulated this reasoning when he said: "The rich are genetically superior to the poor" i.e. the upper classes are genetically superior to the working classes.

One is then not surprised to learn that BNP members posted on the website of the youth wing of the BNP jokes making fun of working-class people or 'chavs' as they call them. Similarly, I recently came across the Bebo profile of a BNP member/supporter called John Smith (his nickname is the enamouring 'The Michelin Man') who states under the section 'Pure Hatred for':

"I cannot stand chavs or gypsies or sluts and hoes as they fuck me off big time acting like hot shit"

Source

The BNP hierarchy have even deployed the sub-text of class to dismiss any internal dissent. Currently, we are seeing BNP councillor Colin Auty from Kirklees attempt to challenge Nick Griffin for the leadership of the BNP. Some BNP members on the neo-nazi chat forum Stormfront dismiss Colin Auty's leadership challenge by contrasting Nick Griffin's 'education' against Colin Auty's lack of an 'education'. Therefore, we see the juxtaposition between "university-educated Nick Griffin" and "painter and decorator Colin Auty"; and, "capable and competent Nick Griffin" and "not so capable and perhaps incompetent Colin Auty". The sub-textual reading is obvious: how dare a working-class person, stupid and uneducated, challenge an 'educated' man.

The BNP's conception of the 'nation' is both oppositional and hierarchical. Oppositional because externally the BNP defines Britain in opposition to non-Whites and Jews i.e. its vision of Britain is exclusionary. Hierarchical because internally the BNP defines Britain in terms of a hierarchy of class with the white working-class at the bottom as an internal threat who can diminish the purity and strength of the white race from within i.e. its vision of Britain is again exclusionary because it comes from an upper/middle-class vision of Britain which is out of touch with and hostile to working-class life and culture.