The Racism Meme

                

                                     If only we could be as adult about racist jibes

Diminutive House of Commons Speaker John Bercow says that people should not be allowed to criticise somebody because of their lack of height and that mocking the same should be as unacceptable as disparaging someone’s race, disability or sexual orientation.

“Whereas nobody these days would regard it as acceptable to criticise someone on grounds of race or creed or disability or sexual orientation, somehow it seems to be acceptable to comment on someone’s height, or lack of it,” Mr Bercow asserted.

The Telegraph thought this an excellent subject for a humorous open thread discussion headed:

Is Mocking Short People As Bad As Racism?

The opinion of the Telegraph journo, Olivia Goldhill, who introduces the theme is obvious from her parting shot:

“But perhaps we need to learn to laugh at ourselves a little. After all, while it’s hardly respectable to insult someone for their looks or weight, should it really be taken as seriously as racism?”

The unstated answer to this is clearly, no. But Olivia and all the other legion journalists who made fun of Bercow’s comparison of sizeism to racism are wrong.

Sizeist language is just as bad as racist epithets.

                                                       

Or to put it the other way round, calling somebody a “stupid, black bastard” is no worse than calling them a “stupid, sanctimonious dwarf” as Simon Burns MP referred to Speaker John Bercow back in 2010.

Like race, being short is an involuntary condition. There is nothing a short person can do about their height.

And as for the history of slavery and empire which is supposed to make racist invective uniquely offensive, who’s to say? It’s entirely for the subject of abuse to decide how upset they get by an insult.

Then there are the more objective measures. We are daily told about the terrible toll that racism takes on the career prospects of black and brown people. But who tells us of the price that short people pay?

Everyone knows that the taller presidential candidate usually wins, but few realise that a short one never does. In the last hundred years not a single president has been under the average height for an American male.

                 

The presidency is emblematic of serious discrimination against short people that runs across the board. In the business world consider that though only 3.9 percent of American men are over 6ft 2in, about a third of Fortune 500 companies are headed by somebody over that height and hardly any by men under 5ft 6in. The only conceivable reason for this extraordinary underachievement is prejudice.

                

Indeed if you consider the success of Indians and Chinese against the abysmal prospects of short people, you could make a very strong case for sizeism being a far more serious prejudice than racism.

                      

But Olivia and every other journalist who derided Bercow’s comparison can’t see reality. In the real world people’s lives are blighted by a miriad prejudices of which judging people by their height, age, weight, religion, ugliness, and race are just the most common. This is because lefties have a serious mental affliction. Olivia and all other smug liberal journos are the victims of an insidious meme of their own creation.

That is the idea that for all sorts of psychological and historical reasons racial language and prejudice is uniquely evil whilst other prejudices which may be every bit as harmful to a person’s life prospects such as sizeism are seen as trivial or even funny.

And if the sentencing of our courts is any guide, judges consider racism to be of far greater importance than serious fraud and even assault. So that just last week one mother was spared jail for her part in the theft of £150,000 while another was sent down for 12 months for leaving a few bacon rashers in a mosque. So beyond redemption is a racist comment (or its first cousin the Islamophobic offence) that careers are ended and people are locked up simply for hurting another’s feelings.

                                 

It’s so out of proportion that it’s borderline insane. And yet at the same time this condition affects the vast majority of our liberal elite.

Yes, racist language is silly, ignorant and hurtful, but no more than any other insulting language.

Harking back to Olivia’s advice above, we need to laugh at ourselves a little and remember the old saying that:

Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me.

Fat chance. Not a reference to the more generously proportioned, I assure you.