I am not a racist.
When I say that there isn’t even an elided ‘but’ at the end, hopping about for a bit of attention. To be fair it might be more self aware to say that I wasn’t an intentional racist. My formative years were spent in the fifties. If you have ever seen documentaries set in the cotton towns of North West England, they were not shot in black and white as most people think. They were shot in colour. It was the 1950’s that were black and white. Monochrome was actually how it was in the drabbest decade of the twentieth century. In those days, before the Indians and Pakistanis turned up in large numbers to work the mills of Blackburn, we had to practice our racism largely unaided. We directed it, as children, at kids with glasses, overweight kids, ginger kids and anyone who dared to be slightly different. By the time the Asians arrived in any numbers we had amassed a fair amount of expertise in this area. After a couple of months in Blackburn they must have longed for the happy carefree days of violent subjugation by the British Raj.
A good part of my adult years have been spent opposing racism in all its forms. I was a teacher and then a head teacher. In East London in the seventies and eighties, equality education and moral development were really high on my personal agenda as an educator, and continued to be so during all my working life. Apparently, according to our current Education Secretary, the only point of education is to get a job. All those years and I hadn’t realised.
It is highly likely that given my age and my background, there may well be vestigial traces of racism and misogyny that lurk within me unrecognised. I can certainly be an intolerant git sometimes so it’s well within the bounds of possibility.
So, to the best of my knowledge I am not a racist and I can go further than that and honestly say that encountering it dismays me. I have to admit to being a little sheepish therefore, when I tell you that I am banned from playing in a certain club for, well, being a racist.
I can explain.
In the early nineties I was playing with an outfit called ‘The Diving Ducks’. The ‘Ducks’ were a decent blues band blessed with a rare jewel of a singer called Lindsey Smith. In London I would often go south of the river to the ‘Tunnel Club’ in Blackwall. The resident weekend band was the ‘Joanne Kelly Band’. At the time Joanne Kelly, sister of Dave Kelly and sadly no longer with us, was among the first rank of female blues singers. Not just in the UK, but in Europe. I saw people like Albert Lee pop down after a big gig, just for the pleasure of sitting in with her. I say without hesitation that Lindsey Smith was just as good. In fact she had a better range. I have only ever played with two musicians who could be fairly described in footballing terms as international class. One is a drummer who sits in with us from time to time, conceivably as a penance for something he did in early life that he can’t bring himself to mention, and the other is Lindsey Smith.
One Saturday we were playing a small pub somewhere in Burnley. We were sat round at the break when an old chap in a ludicrously stereotypical flat cap and overcoat came over to have a word. “I right enjoyed that”, he said genially, referring to the opening set. “More to come”, we said, “Stick around”. “Oh I will”, he said, “Are you going to do some more of that darkie music”.
We fell off our chairs laughing.
Now this needs a little exploring. In bald black and white it just seems like giggling at a racial slur which isn't particularly edifying. The truth is we found it hilarious.
Now, racism has an obvious material, economic and political impact on its victims. But to some extent this is a solvable problem, though to be fair we haven’t solved it awfully well so far. As a reasonable and liberal society we just have to shove it further up the agenda and construct laws and regulations to combat it and enforce them. Well, OK it's probably a bit more complicated than that.
But far more powerful, pernicious and pervasive is the racism of language. This seeps throughout society osmotically. It infuses our thinking. We are all part of it; our language is a joint enterprise. You and I are as much the authors of our language as the Regius Professor of Modern Etymology and Semantics at Oxford University. More so, in fact, as you and I are real and I just made him up.
So why fall about hysterically because of some old chap using the word ‘darkie’. I mean, it sounds like the behaviour of adolescents.
Well, first of all, it struck each one of us at the same moment that racism had been around so long that there was now probably such a thing as ‘vintage racism’, which is kind of funny in itself. What we had just heard was the Austin A40 of casual intolerance. A washing mangle of inequality. Until then, it had never occurred to me that racism could be retro, and bring with it flashbacks of ten shilling notes, crisps with blue twists of salt in them and semolina pudding. I was transported back to vivid memories of my youth, full of Andy Pandy, smogs and poliomyelitis.
The second thing that was going on was a classic case of the recurring humour in the tension between subculture and mainstream. You see this all the time, and it is invariably funny. This occurs when there is one group living blithely and innocently under its own esoteric arcane rules of engagement who rub up like a tectonic plate against the rational quotidian world that the rest of us live in. If you want a simple example, try ‘The Beverly Hillbillies’ and then think of how many comedy shows work exactly on this principle. You can’t not laugh at ’The Beverly Hillbillies’ by the way, it’s the law.
(In the late seventies I gave my flatmate in London, Phil Crossley, a lift back up north on Christmas Eve. I had an ancient and partly asthmatic Mazda with committment issues at the time, and it was going to be a long journey. As it was going to take forever, we had a little itinerary to reflect the Christmas season. “Guests mingle until M1”, it read, followed by “Drinks and canapés after Watford Gap”. Christmas carols were on the list. We had a stab at about six carols before realising we knew no more than half way through the first verse of any one of them. The only songs we could sing in their entirety were the theme from ‘The Beverly Hillbillies’ and Ken Dodd’s ‘Happiness’).
Third, but not least, is what might be described as subject inversion. I know one cracking racist joke. It is genuinely funny and witty. I’m not going to repeat it here because without context, I don’t get subject inversion. You need a lot of scaffolding in place for this to work. I told this joke in a corner of ‘The Park’ pub in Accrington to three friends I have known for over a quarter of a century. All three are by their very nature anti-racists. They fell about. When you tell a racist joke under these circumstances the humour is swivelled 180 degrees upon itself. Whereas the joke's recipient would normally be the source of the laugh, now it is the perpetrator who becomes the butt of the humour, the perpetrator because of his ignorance and preposterous attitudes. Had I gone to the bar and some complete stranger told me this joke, some stranger whose cultural and social references I had no knowledge of, I would have been offended. It is distinctly odd how this works.
‘The Ducks’ I had known for a couple of years. Long enough to know they were a tolerant, liberal minded bunch, perfectly consonant with my own particular world view. Even Chris, the ex-army bass player, a right winger of some conviction never stooped to racist tropes. Therefore we laughed. Not at a racist slur, but at the archaic casual racism of an old chap who used such a term without regard to possible effect and as a reminder of forgotten bits of growing up. Peter Kay can do two solid hours on that stuff and make a fortune.
Our drummer, another Peter, less famous, obviously, came up with a new strap line for the band. “The Diving Ducks, bringing you some more of that darkie music’. Now that’s really funny as a humorous conceit kept amongst the band with all the linguistic and attitudinal scaffolding in place. What you absolutely, definitely and without question most certainly don’t do with a tag line like that is actually put it on a poster and send it off before our forthcoming gig to Hebden Bridge Trades club.
Peter sent it to Hebden Bridge Trades club.
Hebden Bridge is a small town in West Yorkshire but suspects it ought to be in Surrey. It has a trades club, although the trades practiced by its members nowadays are more likely to be Reiki healers, life coaches, telephone sanitiser engineers and dream catcher designers. People in Hebden Bridge would move to St.Ives in Cornwall like a shot if it wasn’t for the lack of parking and ruinous house prices.
When I was a young teenager in those barren wasted years before you could sneak into some of the more financially challenged pubs who would turn a blind eye to the fact you were obviously 15 at most, and that you squeaked a bit when ordering half a mild, we used to hang out in coffee bars. There were a couple of more upmarket ones in my home town. You knew they were upmarket because they called themselves butteries, (as opposed to the more working class ‘El Greco’ down the road). They had paintings on the wall by a local artist called Nick Tomlinson. Even at 14 with no discernable critical abilities or gift for drawing, I was a better artist than Nick Tomlinson. I think he got his five year old daughter to paint in the two swooshes that were his trademark seagulls. Even his mill paintings had seagulls. If he'd had a go at representing Dante's Inferno there would have been seagulls. All his houses were straight out of Playschool, but marginally less convincing. His pictures were painted to suit the dimensions of the wall they were to go on. I’m sure one of his pastoral scenes was L-shaped to fit round the coat stand in the doorway. When the Butteries closed down, having proved too bohemian for Blackburn, a friend bought me a Nick Tomlinson for a pound, as a joke. It is in the loft as we speak I think, and would struggle to make its purchase price at auction even 40 years on.
I was in Hebden Bridge one afternoon and strayed into a vintage art gallery, probably for no better reason than it was raining, and there, for £120 was a Nick Tomlinson. I looked round to see if I was in the ‘ironic’ section but as far as I could tell they were serious. It kind of summed Hebden Bridge up for me.
Hebden Bridge is very leftie. I’m a leftie too but I am aware one of the left’s more awkward failings, apart from being suicidally determined never to be in power at any cost, is that it does rather lack a sense of humour. A lot of lefties are, well, earnest.
Now, I get it. I understand that it was an error of judgement and might be seen as a little crass. And I am aware that I may, this blog, in literary terms, have bored the tits off you. I know that although I didn’t send the poster myself, I am just as responsible. I’m further uneasily conscious of the fact that a person of colour reading this might have an entirely different take on this and say I’m being glib and solipsistic. If I am, I apologise here and now.
I still think they could have rung us up and said, “Look lads, we’ve had a right laugh here in the office, but we can’t really put your poster up, can you send us another?” But no, we got a letter or an email from the acting chairman, (crossed out, chairperson) of the equal opportunities subcommittee telling us in no uncertain terms we were a bunch of fascists and we’d never work in Hebden Bridge again and they would be taking the matter up with PRS and the Musicians union.
And I understand. The rational, anti racist core of me feels abashed by this and definitely at least slightly embarrassed.
There is a tiny corner of me though, if I am to be entirely honest, that still thinks, nearly thirty years on, that they’re a bunch of humourless po-faced twats.