Race is the New Sex

Recent controversies over whether the Indian actress, Shilpa Shetty, was bullied by the other British contestants due to racism on have sparked a new hype for the Celebrity Big Brother reality show. This incident has rasied even international attention as well as the £3 million withdrawal of commercial sponsorship of Channel 4. As the pretty, upper-class, Indian star gets bullied and boycotted by the three British girls, there are also talks in the US that the government (well, Bush to be exact) is planning to deploy more troop in Iraq… what gets more attention here? Times put it right on,

It says a lot about Britain today that a violent, non-fatal racist attack would generate only a few paragraphs of news coverage. But an on-screen, non-violent row, in which race is a dimension, gets the whole nation talking, and the media and some politicans into a frenzy.

That, though, is the curious power of Big Brother — a format that means little or nothing to the over-40s, but in the post-modern, war-is-only-on-the-news era, it is able to animate millions. Amid all the talk of the death of broadcast television, and the shift to advertising online, there is no clearer reminder of the incredible power of the small screen.

I would recommend for those who have not seen the clips, please see it yourself to feel the ‘power’ of Celebrity Big Brother, if not mass popular culture: Clip (1), (2)

One exerpt of Jade, the main girl who had made touchy remarks directed toward Shilpa, may gave a full-fledge flavor on what this is about,

You need a real life in your life. That is what you need because you’re so stuck up in your ass you cannot think of anything except your own ass. You’re so stuck up in your own ass you can smell your own shit.

In an interview, John McCririck’s, the previous participant of this show sums it up,

‘Institution racism inside her and unconscious of it.. what people in this country who do come from another countries have to endure is the subtle nasty horrible continuous undercurrent of ill-feeling that Daniella is giving her […] Racism is so strong in the country that we ourselves do not understand it.’

You may not agree with what he says, and I have not stayed in this country long enough to make a fair judgement. But living outside my hometown for the real first time, I become much more aware of the attention simly because I am not ‘Western’. One main row in the Big Brother that made me empathize is on food. Shetty got teased at because she put onion in her curry, and that reminded me how some non-Asian folks I met looked at my food and actually said ‘yuck’ or ‘oh that doesn’t look too inviting’ _while I was digging in_. To me, I know that they are kind people, but it diffuses a hinted, subtle kind of ‘outgroupness’ that got to my nerve. But you also ask yourself if this is cultural misunderstanding, or they just do not know that saying things about other food, especially when others are still eating, is considered very ill-mannered in Chinese culture. Also could it be sheer curiosity, and are these legitimate justifications as well?

Finally – I think what the local press have not raised yet is the classism exposed in this incident. The register UK, depicts Jade, the supposedly bully of Shilpa as follow,

Specifically, “Jade Goody, Danielle Lloyd and Jo O’Meara have ganged up on Shetty in the past few days”, while Goody’s mother Jackiey couldn’t pronounce the star’s name and referred to her simply as “the Indian”.

The way this article describes the mother of Jade hinted ignorance of Jade mothers, whether that stemmed from her indifference or class status, we don’t know.
At the end, I just feel severely disturbed by the classism hidden where people were not talking about. As much as Jade has been mean to the other girls, and as much as the other girls ganged up against her, I feel that it is the TV company that capitalize on the constrasting scene between the high-class Indian and ill-manner (which could mean lower-class as well) contestants who happened to be Brits. What do you think of this use of insecurity? On our own class? Gender? Appearance? Or even race?
London is going to get colder soon.

Notes: The title of this blog, ‘race is the new sex’, is a direct quote from the essay Prof. Richard Howells wrote on Borat, which is a fun read as well if you’re interested in this topic.

“Is it Because I is Black?’ Race, Humour and the Polysemiology of Ali G” in the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television Volume 26, Number 2, June 2006, pp. 155- 177. ISSN 0143-9685.