Was Jade Goody a victim of class prejudice? Hasan Suroor RACE OR class? Take your pick whether it was one or the other — or both — that sparked the Jade Goody-Shilpa Shetty rumpus on the
Celebrity Big Brother show, but make no mistake that the explosion of moral outrage over Ms. Goody's behaviour was driven largely by class prejudice. In fact, the real story is not so much about what happened to Ms. Shetty as what happened — and is happening — to Ms. Goody, and why. Over the past week, Ms. Goody has been subjected to a level of personal vilification that is unprecedented and the line of attack has invariably shifted to her working class origins — to the argument that despite her recent makeover and a 8 million portfolio she is not "one of us." To anyone who has followed the "debate" closely, it is obvious that she is seen as an embarrassment by her more cultivated compatriots, especially the Oxbridge set in the media and at Westminster. We are told that the reason why Ms. Goody picked on Ms. Shetty had nothing to do with race ("poor thing doesn't even know what race is") but with her own sense of social and cultural inadequacy vis--vis the "posh" film actor from Bollywood. She may have seemed like behaving in a racist fashion, but — the argument goes — it was actually a class thing and her seeming racism was borne out of class-induced ignorance. It was not racism in the "normal" sense of the word. It was the racist rant of a woman from the "lower depths" of British society who simply could not stand the "dignified," "graceful," and "soft-spoken" (all signs of her high class background) Ms. Shetty. And Ms. Shetty, of course, fuelled her tormentor's inferiority complex by constantly harping on her own culturally superior upbringing. "Class Vs Trash" ran the headline in one British newspaper and
The Sun, which may be wrong in many respects but certainly knows what Middle England wants to hear, branded her as a "vile, ignorant, racist bully." Time and again in the past week, we have been reminded about Ms. Goody's "lowly" class — or what some have called "underclass"— origins: her (Jamaican) father, who died of drug overdose in 2005, was in and out of jail and abandoned the family when Jade was just two. She was brought up by her mother who herself "used to be hooked on pot" as newspapers gleefully recalled last week with details of her various relationships and "wild" lifestyle. Jade was thrown out of school after her mother apparently hit a teacher, and she grew up amid juvenile delinquents, pimps, and drug addicts in a latter-day version of Dickensian London. "With a background like this, how else do you expect her to behave?" asked one commentator. There have been jokes about her fragile grasp of anything remotely approaching literacy (on one occasion she could not even spell her own name); her pathetic general knowledge (how she thought Cambridge was in London, East Anglia was "abroad," and Saddam Hussein was a boxer); her "vile" tongue; and "disgusting" manners. She has been called vulgar, foul-mouthed, mocked for the way she speaks (Ms. Shetty haughtily suggested that she needed elocution lessons); and accused of bringing Britain's image into disrepute. It became a "Jade Vs the Rest" issue with Chancellor Gordon Brown, who was on a visit to India, issuing a public appeal to his countrymen and women to kick her out of the CBB house to show their anti-racist credentials. The picture we have been presented is that of a woman who is an aberration in a multicultural and otherwise racially tolerant Britain where everyone supposedly respects everyone else's sensitivities. In other words: remove Ms. Goody from the scene and Britain would be a model of racial harmony. Her eviction from the show last week was hailed as multi-racial Britain's victory over prejudice and bigotry with 55 per cent of Britons saying, in a poll, that Ms. Goody's behaviour did not represent "modern Britain." Again, the subtext was: don't mistake modern Britain for Ms. Goody. But the truth is that modern Britain is teeming with future Ms. Goodys — growing up on the same sort of inner-city sink estates that produced Jade Goody. In East London alone, as
The Independent columnist Johann Hari pointed out, there are "children — white, black and brown — who don't have a bedroom but instead sleep on the kitchen floor... [and] families of six crammed into damp two-bedroom flats, with mildew climbing the walls." Should we be surprised if they grow up to be like Ms. Goody: ignorant, foul-mouthed, blighted by prejudice and, when the occasion arises, ready to pounce on someone "posh" like Ms. Shetty?
The point is not whether Ms. Goody should have been condoned for her behaviour which, no doubt, was covertly racist but the manner in which she was targeted and subjected to personal attacks with constant references to her class. Would we have witnessed the same sort of moral hysteria if the person who persecuted Ms. Shetty was someone "like us"? And those who argue that it was only someone like Ms. Goody who could have behaved the way she did is to confirm our class prejudices.
https://www.hindu.com/2007/01/25/stories/2007012503441100.htm
Coming back to my views on this topic.
I still feel this issue of shilpa Shetty is not an issue at all.Big brother or Big Sister or Big Daddy shows are just junk shows.Those shows are a good platforms for not so big junk actors.These shows don't really depict their personality!!
What is this format !!! Putting all people men and women in One house and leaving them like that.BTW they are not there for Prayers of Some Satsang to do Bhajans to speak only respectable words.So these type os issues like "using bad language" is a part of the show.The contestants also shed gallons of tears😡!!!
This is all what happens when set of brainless fools are left in an isolated place.But much much more 🤢dirty thing is audience reacting to that junk issues.Audience should not react they should just watch it for fun.
People are also very mean,they don't react to Killings of Noida immediately but they really cry ,break their heads for Sourav Ganguly or ASH-ABHI!!!
Vinash Kale Viprit Bhuddhi!
Cheers,
Mythili
PS:For these type of views expressed already I got Several rewards in another post !!! Sareg Bhayya rescued me
Edited by mythili_Kiran - 19 years ago
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