Joan Rivers "is not a racist"

[cosmocat]

Rowe's point of view...from www.guardian.co.uk
My part in the battle of Midweek

[FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]Darcus Howe
Friday October 21, 2005
The Guardian

[/FONT]
[FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]It was a crisp autumn morning. Mrs Howe and I shuffled around each other in the kitchen of our new home as she itemised my chores for the day. By 7.30am I was off to Broadcasting House by taxi provided by the BBC to get to the Midweek radio show presented by Libby Purves to discuss my film Son of Mine.
The producer had briefed me some time before on my fellow guests: Jackie Collins, the author; Andrea, a plant photographer; and Joan Rivers, a comedian. Only Andrea was a mystery to me, and so is plant photography.


Although I've never read a Collins novel I knew her through her comments from time to time in the British press. I sat through a Rivers set quite recently on the Jack Dee show. She appeared to me crass and much too coarse, but that is an old genre in American comedy.
The guests and the presenter were seated as I entered the studio. Purves was amiably polite as she turned to Collins. The tone was as I had expected - a civilised discourse à la Radio 4.
It was Collins who introduced race into the discussion as she explained that she uses people she meets to inform the characters in her novels. And one of them was a mixed-race girl whose mother always insisted to her that she was black. I concurred, saying quite simply that both the mother of my two girls and I did the same. Inoffensive, it seemed to me at the time.
Rivers, sitting next to me, shifted her tiny frame around the chair. And then Purves and I sparred a bit; she was warm and engaging as she drew references to moments in the film. In one of those, she pointed out that I got rather angry with my ex-wife, upbraiding her about her colonial baggage.
I replied that those moments of intensity were pretty common during our relationship. I admitted telling her one time, "If you think that go and join the bloody BNP."
Rivers kicked off. She was bored with race; she's interested only in people. Why don't we just love each other, inter marry, just be friends? I found this rather odd from a white American who had lived through civil rights, black power and, latterly, New Orleans.
I was taken aback by her fury; it seemed to fall out from a distant sky. It was clear to me that race had returned to American society with an urgency that disturbed white Americans of Rivers' ilk. Jesse Jackson likened New Orleans in the wake of hurricane Katrina to the conditions of slave ships four centuries ago. Kanye West, the celebrated rapper, blasted Bush's America for its racism and this bores Rivers; it does not bore me particularly. At the end of her rant Rivers transformed herself immediately into a calm and quiet great-grandmother. As I said my goodbyes she sidled up to me and whispered, "Darcus my dear, don't worry about anything. This will be great publicity for your film." I muttered to myself, "And for your tour".[/FONT]

 

[FrockRadar8]

wow...interesting to hear his side.

 

[roppal222]

I agree with you completely, but I think from reading the article Joan meant it as saying "I wish it weren't an issue...like why can't we all get along?" That's pretty damn idealistic...but I don't think she deserved to be called a racist.

Absolutely.

What Darcus should've said 'was well ok Joan, for you as a white woman, it's easy to dismiss racism and say it bores you, because it doesn't affect you to the extent it does with black people....' Her comment was definetly idealistic. But Darcus really handled it wrong....and came back at her in such a way it made him look stupid and uneducated.

I usually can't stand Joan Rivers, but she handled the situation well.

 

[roppal222]

Thanks for that article Cosmocat, it contextualises Darcus' thoughts and I can really see his point, and actually concur with him on his views,

but he was still wrong for saying 'black offends Joan' because that wasn't what she meant.

 

[Hipkitten]

I'm afraid I'm missing his "point." I think he's forgetting that she's a)Jewish and b) She succeeded in the male dominated world of stand-up comedy. So don't tell me that Joan hasn't had to overcome serious obstacles/prejudice in her life.

 

[SiennaInLondon]

I agree Roppal and Hipkitten. I think it was frankly rude of him to say "black offends Joan". If he is so into race relations, he should know full well what kind of allegation he is making particularly in light of American culture and recently the events in New Orleans. I hate chip/shoulder people because they along with the racists hinder race relations. I was impressed with the way Joan handled it.

There was a show on TV the other day charting the 20 greatest supermodels of all time or something. There was this awful woman on it piping up every time there was a black model on. She was really agressive about it. Ok so you are black, I am brown, my friend is yellow... what's your point woman?

 

[roppal222]

I'm afraid I'm missing his "point." I think he's forgetting that she's a)Jewish and b) She succeeded in the male dominated world of stand-up comedy. So don't tell me that Joan hasn't had to overcome serious obstacles/prejudice in her life.

Bering a Jewish white woman in a white male dominated world has its difficulties I'm sure....but I'm betting being a black man in a white man's world ain't a picnic.

 

[PrinceOfCats]

Essential reading (who would have thought that the Independent could actually write an interesting article?...


As a row, it was more heat than light. People who searched the internet for the confrontation between the US comedienne Joan Rivers and the black activist, Darcus Howe, on Radio 4's Midweek slot this week would have been more entertained than enlightened if they focused in only on the shouting bit. If they tuned in from the start of the programme, they might more easily have understood what it was all about.
It was clear enough where the Jewish comic was coming from. Hers was a pure American "melting pot" psychology. Let's all forget about labels, treat each other as people and have a nice life, she said. But with Darcus Howe, you needed to know about years of calcified bitterness and resentment.
The clues were there when Howe talked about Son of Mine, the film he was there to plug - about his relationship with his son who recently narrowly escaped a prison sentence. Young black boys, he said, were neither "good nor bad".
"They're just what they are historically. They have emerged into the world of globalisation with a certain attitude. They spend a lot of time in prison which reflects our society's serious intolerance of their behaviour, however mild."
There was Darcus Howe's life's work on a neat little plate: a doughty portion of advocacy, with a dollop of Marxist historical inevitability, a cupful of excuses, a liberal sprinkling of rights with a deliberate under-seasoning of responsibilities, and all stirred together in a recipe unchanged since his heyday in the Sixties.
"You've got such a chip on your shoulder," barked Ms Rivers. Chip is not the word. For Darcus Howe, Britain's leading professional black man, it's not even a plank or a tree. It's an entire tropical forest.
To be fair to Mr Howe, it's not hard to see why. He grew up in 1950s Trinidad in a school with an Anglican church in the grounds. His father was both the headmaster and the church deacon. "Sometimes, the services were High, sometimes Low," he has recalled. "But the vicar was always English." At school, the extravagantly over-named Queen's Royal College, he learned cricket and Latin. "Tantum hostem quiescentum," as one of his schoolboy contemporaries put it. "So great an enemy lying in wait".
When he left home in 1960, to study law at Middle Temple, Trinidad was still a colony. He sailed for the imperial homeland. But when he arrived, he found the English sense of fair play he had been taught did not apply to blacks.
He moved into Notting Hill in its pre-Hugh Grant era. In those days, he found, "you didn't want to be seen alone walking down a street if four white men were coming the other way". He was married, still a teenager, in a shotgun wedding into a white middle-class family where the in-laws were not best pleased. It was the era of Africans campaigning against Portuguese colonialism and independence for Rhodesia and for an end to apartheid. Radical politics seemed inevitable.
He abandoned the law for activism and joined the Black Panthers, a movement inspired by the American group of the same name. But where the US separatists carried guns, their British counterparts just talked big. Being a British Black Panther, one wag later said, was about as hard as being a Welsh Sandinista.
Even so, in 1971 Howe was charged with riot, conspiracy and affray after an anti-police demonstration. He and the other "Mangrove Nine" were all cleared after a huge media hoo-ha involving Vanessa Redgrave and Black Power demonstrators outside the Old Bailey. But in 1977, he spent six weeks in jail. "I got three months for beating the sh*t out of [a policeman]," Howe told his son recently.
But he was a romantic rather than a rationalist. In 1981, he was elected editor of a magazine called Race Today in a workers' coup. It saw the unemployed not as workshy but as the vanguard of social change. He printed a short story by the IRA hunger-striker Bobby Sands (which he later said had little literary merit) as an act of revolutionary consciousness.
Around the same time, he organised a 20,000-strong Black People's March in protest against the lack of progress in a police investigation of a fire at New Cross in which 14 black teenagers died; the police said it was an accident; the protesters felt it was a neo-Nazi attack against a black celebration. Howe has always leant towards a conspiracy view of the world. When the Government weapons inspector Dr David Kelly died, Howe's New Statesman column was the first publicly to suggest that it was not suicide, but a CIA/MI5 plot.
Somewhere along the way, Darcus Howe got stuck in a timewarp. He chaired the Notting Hill Carnival in the 1980s, but then in 1998 declared it to be "crap". He celebrates West Indian cricket, but looks back on the Seventies and Eighties as a golden era in which "we" - Howe fails the Norman Tebbit cricket test - "conquered all that stood in our way", through a combination of black consciousness and the discipline inculcated by the colonial education system. He lauds black music, but stops at Otis Redding, Aretha Franklin and Bob Marley, condemning hip-hop singers for lacking "artistic intensity" and having voices that lack range and phrasing and are weak.

Others moved on. Farrukh Dhondy, another Black Panther, recently repudiated their old idea that school was a machine to grade the labour force, and set low expectations for immigrants so they would do the most menial jobs. It took no account of the importance of self-discipline which the new generation of young blacks now lack, he said, and induced a "something for nothing" mentality. "The endemic paradox of revolutionary philosophies," he said, "is that they are based on demands for rights, with no acknowledgement of duties."
Or as Dr Raj Chandran, of the Commission for Racial Equality, put it: "We shall not bring black, Asian and white youths to respect and live with one another if people like Darcus Howe continue with their attitude that the white man owes them a living."
But Howe has continued to make one TV series after another locked into his anachronistic world view. The most recent - Who You Callin' a ******? - looked at tensions between different ethnic minority communities in Britain. The new violence is between black and Asian youths in the inner cities. What happened to the spirit of anti-racist solidarity that bound them together in the struggles of the Sixties and Seventies, Howe wondered? But somehow, he wanted simultaneously to hold that "since 9/11, Muslims have become the most hated group in Britain" and also to maintain that his black community are still the real victims.
His broadcasting style, as Joan Rivers discovered, is confrontational and bullying. His Devil's Advocate series on Channel 4 puts him in the role of hectoring prosecutor, judge and jury. Jonathan Dimbleby has branded him as Any Questions' most difficult panellist ever: "He didn't seem to be aware that some listeners might like to hear the views of the other panellists as well." In one TV series, he reduced a 38-year-old woman he met through a dating agency to tears; the poor woman sobbed for the cameras to be turned off.
The personal is political with him. He has had seven children by four different women and opines: "Divorce is to be celebrated. Anybody who challenges that is an enemy of freedom."
In Son of Mine, when his first wife points out that he was an absentee father, he goes ballistic and starts shouting at her about colonialism. The idea that his kid went off the rails because he wasn't there clearly is nothing set against the enormity of hundreds of years of racist oppression.
But although he rails against other people's stereotypes - "you can't simply say black people can run faster and white people can swim better" - he's quite happy to employ his own. Geordies only seem interested in beer and football, he said on TV once, in an off-hand way which would outrage him if someone said the same thing about blacks and drugs and promiscuous sex. "I am a West Indian. That means I make children all the time," he has said. "West Indian men are historically violent," he adds, by way of excuse. "We tend to fly off the handle quite quickly."
When he was mugged by a Somali recently, he tracked the youth down and, with some friends, kicked in his door and seized the money back. But what would he have said if it had been white vigilantes and a black mugger? He would doubtless have said quite a lot, and loudly. Shouting being a substitute for thinking in his self- regarding polemics.
But then the world keeps giving him reasons which legitimate his tribal outrage. His wife was recently told at a white hairdresser's in Brixton: "We don't do your sort of hair here."
His son was not long ago stopped and searched by police who threatened to charge the youth with "intent to do criminal damage" because he was carrying a crayon. No wonder Darcus Howe is still an angry old man, even if his oft-billed "radical" ire increasingly seems to take on a reactionary tinge. The only shame is that he is unable to realise that his self-righteous and slightly pompous indignation has a diminishing return.
A Life in Brief
BORN 1944, in Trinidad, which he left, aged 16, for England.
FAMILY Father a headmaster and Anglican deacon. Mother a teacher.
Married, he has had seven children by four women.
EDUCATION Queen's Royal College in Trinidad. Studied law at Middle Temple in London.
CAREER As a Black Panther activist, he was charged with riot and affray in 1971, and acquitted. Sentenced in 1977 to three months for assaulting a police officer. From 1981, editor of 'Race Today'. Chairman of Notting Hill Carnival in the early 1980s. Since 1990s, has presented 'The Devil's Advocate' series, Channel 4. TV series: 'White Tribe', 2000; 'Slave Nation', 2001; 'Who You Callin' a ******?', 2004.
HE SAYS 'I am always to be found running up freedom street.'
'If Amiri [Howe's son] ends up in prison, it will be a defeat of everything I've dedicated my life to.'
THEY SAY 'A loopy libertarian' - Charlotte Raven.
'A man of vast charm and even vaster ego'. Jane Shilling

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[cosmocat]

^That was interesting, thanks for posting.

 

[Hipkitten]

Bering a Jewish white woman in a white male dominated world has its difficulties I'm sure....but I'm betting being a black man in a white man's world ain't a picnic.

I think you missed my point - I wasn't discounting or trivializing the struggle facing black men (or any other minority group/individual). I was simply pointing out that Joan herself is a member of the minority and certainly knows a thing or two about facing prejudice.

 

[MizBlue]

Why did she say "Don't forget you're black," though?

Good piont