THE TROUBLE WITH HARRY

I didn’t get steamed up yesterday on my first day back for 2009 about the racist video comments from Prince Harry. It just seemed like yet another gauche moment in the life of the Royal wastrel. After all, this is the Queen’s grandson who saw nothing wrong with wearing a Nazi uniform to a fancy dress party. And then there’s the argument that political correctness has gone so far that nobody can take a joke any more.

But it is the reaction from newspaper readers’ letters to the Editor that have made me realise that people are missing the point.

They say that if Paki –short for Pakistani – is an offensive racist term then so is Aussie, short for an Australian. And what about Yanks, and Polacks, and Krauts and Kiwis and Poms and Ruskies.

Well, it may surprise you that in Chicago Polish-Americans find the word ‘Polack’ very offensive. And presidential candidate Ed Muskie had his campaign undermined when he was wrongly accused of calling Canadians ‘Canucks’.

But it is more than that. In Britain ‘Paki’ is a derogatory and demeaning term for anybody from Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka or Bangladesh. And Paki-bashing has been a brutal racist sport for some English thugs resenting migrants from the sub-continent.

The same way that the word ‘poofter’ became so offensive here because of gangs of louts who would go out ‘poofter bashing’. Their victims’ so-called crime was that they appeared to be homosexual. Tragically, here in Melbourne, a man of Indian appearance was bashed to death and one of his killers admitted they had gone out to ‘do a bit of curry-bashing’.

Nick Giannopoulos and his team turned a slur into entertainment with Wogs Out of Work and Acropolis Now but when Greek and Italian migrants came here in the Fifties and Sixties they were cruelly put down –and often beaten up. The dirty little Wogs.

When I lived in Montreal I couldn’t understand why French-Canadians were called ‘Pepsis’ and didn’t know  why the term was so offensive. But it was.

And here. Bert Newton made his notorious blooper at the Logies when he stood next to Muhammad Ali and said ‘I like the boy’. No offence there – unless you are descended from a slave and when even grown men were called ‘boy’ by their owner.

One other thing to come out of all this is possible proof that Harry is a Windsor not a Hewitt after all. His string of insensitive, racist comments could have come straight from the mouth of his grandfather, the Duke of Edinburgh.

Tuesday, January 13, 2009

© Copyright Derryn Hinch 2008