How is this (non)rhyme racist? Sorry, I utterly failed to grasp the MSN report concerning Jeremy Clarkson’s mild brush with the racist paint brush. Copy-pasted here:
"Jeremy Clarkson, presenter of BBC motoring programme Top Gear, “begged forgiveness” for appearing to use a racist insult in a non-aired clip recorded for the globally successful show. Clarkson, no stranger to controversy, explained that he had recited an old nursery rhyme that includes a racist term, but tried to mumble out the offending word. Having seen the recordings, the presenter said he had asked for another take to be used, replacing the word entirely, as there was some ambiguity in the original. Responding on Twitter to the Daily Mirror report, Clarkson said: "Ordinarily I don’t respond to newspaper allegations, but on this occasion I feel I must make an exception. "A couple of years ago I recorded an item for Top Gear, in which I quoted the rhyme Eeny, Meeny, Miny Moe. "Now, of course, I was well aware that in the best known version of this rhyme, there is a racist expression that I was extremely keen to avoid.
"The full rushes show that I did three takes. In two I mumbled where the offensive word would normally occur and in the third, I replaced it all together with the word ‘teacher’. "When I viewed this footage, several weeks later, I realised that in one of the mumbled versions, if you listen very carefully with the sound turned right up, it did appear that I’d actually used the word I was trying to obscure. “I was mortified by this, horrified, it is a word I loath,” he added. “And as I’m sitting here begging your forgiveness for that fact that obviously my efforts weren’t quite good enough.”
I learned it first with the N-word, when I was very little (in the '50’s) and I was not at all aware of the impact of the word. Later I heard it with “tiger”, although I think it makes nonsense of the next line (“If he hollers let him go”).
I think I heard mostly the “tiger” version as a kid, since the society I grew up in (Canada) was moderately polite about these things. But I did hear the alternate version from time to time - usually in an attempt to be shocking or funny - so I was not unaware of it.
Of course, I also remember golliwogs and the illustrated “Little Black Sambo”.
Nitpick: that version existed, but it’s not the original. This counting rhyme has a long and ultimately obscure origin. the version containing the N word appeared somewhere in the middle of its history.
In Canada in the early 1960’s, especially outside of the biggest cities and with a few exceptions, black people were a rarity. (A friend of mine remembers going through the Eaton’s department store in Hamilton when he was about 4 or 5 and seeing a very dark person and exclaiming so everyone could hear “Mommy! That man’s BLACK!” His mother was appropriately embarrassed.) As a result words did not carry the same baggage as in the USA until the US race riots and civil rights marches made the news - and television brought the issues into everyone’s living room, in their face.
So things like little black Sambo or cartoons of blacks with exaggerated lips were no less or more intended to be putdowns, just offensive caricatures like showing Chinese with coolie hats or East Indians as snake charmers in just a loincloth. In the more Anglocentric times, “black” as often as not referenced inhabitants of African or Caribbean colonies of the British empire rather than southern USA. (with all the offensive stereotypes applicable to those areas of the world).
So until the time of Martin Luther King, it seemed to me the alternate rhyme version was crude and rude, but nowhere near as offensive as it appears today.
“The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.” -L.P. Hartley
I disagree with Clarkson on a lot of things, and of course it would have been unacceptable to broadcast this (which didn’t happen anyway), but it seems to me this was an unfortunate slip of the tongue that he immediately corrected and has apologised for.
When I was at school, the N-word version of the rhyme was still commonplace. I can’t will myself to forget it - it’s stuck in my memory.
Clarkson is 7 years older than me, so it’s even more likely the thing is imprinted in his memory. That doesn’t make it acceptable in any way, but it’s understandable how it could slip out, even without any malicious intent.
I would totally buy that if it had been something like “Catch a nig….[pause]…oh bugger, don’t show that for God’s sake!”
But the whole idea of “deliberately mumbling it” … why on earth do that if you didn’t know at the time that the word you’re mumbling is going to offend people? Clearly if he was doing that at all, he had some degree of insight. It’s mumbling as a form of hiding that I think is stupid - it’s the exact opposite of something slipping out accidentally. Just change the damn thing and be done with it!
Except that he didn’t retain it - he did a couple of rehearsals where he didn’t want to use it, realised it wasn’t working then replaced it altogether.
Of course he knew the traditional(to him) form of the rhyme includes the N word. It’s very likely the only version of the rhyme that he would ever have recited (back in his schooldays).
Yes, it was probably poor judgment to replace the word with a mumble, or indeed, to use that particular rhyme at all. I don’t doubt that Clarkson is more prone to such errors of judgement than the average man - he (or at least, his on-screen persona) is a brash idiot at times, and well known for blurting out controversial or provocative opinions (not commonly on the subject of race, to my knowledge, however - his usual targets of choice are environmentalists and vegetarians).
But:
He claims he never even used the word (it just sounded like he did). I don’t know whether to believe that or not.
He already decided it wasn’t appropriate.
It didn’t go to air. It was discarded.
He has apologised sincerely (I have seen his insincere apologies in the past and they are not subtle)
What’s left to do? Sack him because of something that, essentially, never happened?
Probably got this a bit wrong, but there was a Barney Miller episode where they needed to decide who would go on a call. Barney says “We can just do eenie meenie minie mo” and Harris (the only black detective) says something like “I’ll get my hat.”
A jocular use of a form of the rhyme by a Southwest Airlines flight attendant, encouraging passengers to sit down so the plane could take off, led to a 2003 lawsuit charging the airline with intentional infliction of emotional distress and negligent infliction of emotional distress. Two versions of the rhyme were attested in court; both “Eeny meeny miny mo, Please sit down it’s time to go” and “Pick a seat, it’s time to go”. The passengers in question were African American and stated that they were humiliated due to what they called the “racist history” of the rhyme. A jury returned a verdict in favor of Southwest and the plaintiffs’ appeal was denied.
What an incredibly frivolous lawsuit. The plaintiffs should have been made to pay all court costs and lawyer fees.
