Having launched a blog to show that the goings on in my village are too bizarre for the Archers, I had better post an example.
Racism doesn’t raise its ugly head in Ambridge (“Quite right too,” I hear you cry and I cry along with you.) unless you count Roy’s run in with the Young Fascists. However, it was made plain in the Archers that it was really the outsiders who were bad and that Roy was easily led and that he’s over it now and all is sweetness and light. In the overwhelmingly mono-cultural village of Not Ambridge where a foreigner is someone from Wales, this laissez faire attitude does not exist everywhere. And it is never far from the surface. Usha Gupta would not pass uncommented on here.
We have two Asian women in our village. One from Malaysia and one from Thailand (I think). They have families and take their children to the local school where they and their children are well accepted. This is a good thing.
However, in the village shop, J (as we shall call her) was heard to comment, “…. And we don’t want any more slanty eyes in the village.” To her everlasting shame, D, the shopkeeper, agreed with her.
But why pick on Asian women as a minority ? Why not pick on short, fat, ugly, bigots with poison dripping from their mouths ? It would have been a good point; pithy and well made. The impact of the words would have stopped J and D in their tracks and made them review their entire world view. In a blog or in a script, you always know what to say, because there is time to review it and rewrite it. Standing flabbergasted in the shop doesn’t present the same relaxed and unpressured circumstances and the situation went unremarked.
To my everlasting shame.
Perhaps it’s a good thing that plotlines from here don’t end up there.
