Oxford’s UNWomen society gave its name a new meaning by no-platforming Amber Rudd last Thursday. Student Nadia Awad
“highlighted Ms Rudd’s reference to Labour’s Diane Abbott as a “coloured” woman during a radio interview”
in her explanation of why the remoaner-sympathising ex-Home Secretary had to be silenced.
Inspector: “Would Mr Kodogo by any chance be a coloured gentleman?”
Police Constable Savage: “WelI, I can’t say as I’ve ever noticed, sir.”
All those times I watched the Not-the-Nine-O’clock News sketch yet failed to realise that PC (in both senses) Savage was merely shocked at his superior’s using such a term.
I knew that the terminology merry-go-round is a major PC concern, but I had not realised that the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People had advanced so far as to make part of its own name unsayable – at least by those who who wished to be allowed to say anything else afterwards.
(What with her being set up by her civil servants over the Windrush scandal and now this, I may yet feel compelled to a slight sneaking sympathy for Amber – which, as demonstrations of how political correctness distorts reality go, really takes the cake! 🙂 )
I can remember when ‘coloured’ was an approved term. Now person ‘of colour’ is the only acceptable phrasing.
In my time ‘black’ has been both approved and condemned. ‘Black lives matter’, but I’m sure if I referred to Diane Abbott as black there would be people quick to denounce me.
This is all bollocks. Phrases are changed by the woke as one of their weapons against the rest of us,those of us who don’t keep up with the latest linguistic fashions.
There is nothing offensive about referring to someone as coloured.
If it keeps changing, they can keep taking offence, same old tactic is renewed to infinity.
This insanity can’t continue. The fantastic Mr Fox managed to say out loud on the BBC that racism accusations were now boring. We have to be over peak hate hoax by now…..
Could I maybe take offence – loudly outraged and highly vocal offence – at anyone who would describe me as ‘white’ instead of ‘person of pallor’ or ‘melanin-deprived individual’?
Is ‘white’ not a colour?
🙂
This stems from a misunderstanding of the rule. It’s not the phrase used to describe the color of a person, but rather the color of the person speaking the phrase that determines its acceptability.
It is hard to keep up. 🙂
I post about Amber yesterday and today the story is that Trevor Phillips has been suspended by the Labour party for islamophobia. That would be the same Trevor Phillips who, when chairman of the Equality Commission under Tony Blair, invented the word ‘islamophobia’, and under whose auspices that Labour government introduced the crime of hate speech in late 2001, with the need to combat post-9/11 islamophobia being the number one justification for it.
Whereas Amber Rudd has never given a sign of repenting even slightly her bubble bigotries, Trevor has shown some regret for stealing my free speech rights, to the point of making a documentary suggesting it wasn’t such a good idea. He has important things yet to learn, but for some time has been moving noticeably outside Labour’s comfort zone – today’s news is not the surprise it would once have been. Let me therefore, in a spirit of fairness, note that, when I say he invented the word ‘islamophobia’, he himself is keen these days to point out that, to be precise, he chaired a committee that invented the word ‘islamophobia’ and provided the reports and arguments with which the hate speech law was introduced. I know no reason to doubt that this is the pedantically correct way to put it.
It is a lot easier to forgive someone like Trevor, who has expressed some real regret over some part of what he did in a public way intended to have political effect, than someone like Amber, who AFAIK has yet to drop a hint that she’s felt any unselfish regrets. I desire no worse punishment of Trevor than that he see the funny side of the situation he is now in. 🙂
I think that PC Savage may have been ahead of his time with one of his arrests:
“Coughing without due care and attention”
That’ll soon get you locked up in isolation.
Possession of an offensive wife however is long off the criminal statutes….
I can think of few greater recommendations of character at the moment than a life time ban from Labour party membership.
Hopefully Mr Philips’ repentance will continue, publicly and effectively.
Black is an absence of light, therefore no colour. It is darkness, void, which is why the universe has Black Holes not Holes of Colour nor Coloured Holes.
We are well into the Age of Absurdity in which its rulers live without mirrors.
“What with her being set up by her civil servants over the Windrush scandal and now this, I may yet feel compelled to a slight sneaking sympathy for Amber”
I don’t. Rudd is one of these daft One Nation Conservatives who deep down has a pro-government philosophy, that a larger, more bloated, interfering state is a good thing, and the only difference between them and Labour is that they balance the books. They can’t stand everyone to the right of them and constantly suck up to the left. And this is what you get as a result. Because they might like you better than Thatcher, but they like Labour even more. So, you’re still the Baby Eating Conservatives.
I mean, can you imagine Thatcher or Normo Tebbs doing a meeting with the NUS?
We’re not disagreeing, Bloke on M4 (March 10, 2020 at 1:43 am). The point of my OP exit joke is: how mad has political correctness become when Amber Rudd is made the victim?
(and then the Trevor Phillips thing comes along and my joke is well-eclipsed!)
🙂
It must be exhausting to give a damn about what the SJWs do and do not permit one to say. “People of color” is fine, I guess, but “colored people” is apparently extremely offensive and deserving of draconian punishment. Of course, you could try to get by without taking any notice of race, but that won’t really work either, since if you are white you have to acknowledge your position of relative privilege. Oddly enough, your privilege is what puts you at a social disadvantage with respect to a person of color, and you cannot have a conversation without showing proper deference to pigmentation. SJWs have adopted the KKK code of conduct, simply changing the relative positions of skin color in the hierarchy.
Rudd’s error was grammatical, if she’d said “woman of colour” then it would have been fine.
So, ‘coloured’ (or Colored) is bad, but is colourful still good? (Colorful?)
So now, according to the Oxford Marxists, one has to say “person of colour” rather than “coloured person”.
Amber Rudd, like so many Conservative Party people, has very much tried to get along with the “Progressive” – but the effort does not achieve anything, as “Woke” doctrine is just the Frankfurt School of Marxism by another name, the “Critical Theory” types do not want to live with Conservatives (of any sort) they want to utterly destroy all Conservatives – no matter how “Progressive” those Conservatives try to be.
Sadly I do not believe the lesson will be learned – on the contrary, the effort to appease the Marxists (or the followers of “Post Modernism” which is officially non Marxist – but shares the same “exploitation” and “oppression” doctrine, and the same desire for Collectivist tyranny) will continue.
People such as myself will continue to be “thrown under the bus” – but it will not save other Conservatives, on the contrary the blood-in-the-water (this show of weakness in the face of the “Progressives”) will just embolden the left.
And YES Amber Rudd (a “Remainer” and every inch the sort of Conservative who tries to work with the “Progressives”) was indeed set up by the Civil Service over the Windrush stuff – this will, sadly, not lead to any reconsideration of the idea of Sir Charles Trevelyan (the founder of the modern Civil Service) that there should be a permanent bureaucracy – immune to General Elections.
By the way, as I make no apology for repeating yet again, anyone who thinks that the crushing Poor Law taxation that Sir Charles Trevelyan imposed on Ireland in the late 1840s (under the slogan “Irish Property most pay for Irish Poverty”), taxation which crushed the Irish economy, was “laissez faire” is deeply mistaken.