WATCH YOUR LANGUAGE
Ray Honeyford discovers
hidden subtleties in schoolboys' racial vocabulary
NOT long ago I was on yard duty. Sudden- ly I heard a little brown boy call a black boy 'Chocolate'. I was concerned. This, remember, was Bradford, the city in the vanguard of the anti-racist movement. As a head teacher I had been ordered to attend racism awareness courses where my con- sciousness was to be raised by a group of officers known by the Orwellian title, 'the Race Trainers'. But whatever I thought about the council's lapse into what some- one has called `the totalitarian temptation', I didn't intend to have children being called nasty names based on skin colour in my school. And 'Chocolate' sounded nasty.
I ushered the little brown boy into my study. A quiet word might just be sufficient to convince him of the error of his ways. `Why,' I asked 'did you call Jonathan "Chocolate"?' He looked surprised, as if I'd asked him a daft question. 'Because he's my friend, sir.' Your friend?' I said. `Yes sir, him and Tony [white] and me are all best friends.' I see,' I said, my anti- racist antenna quivering nervously. 'And what,' I inquired, 'do they call you?'
Without a flicker, without a wink, nudge or snigger this little brown boy, whose father had come from Jamaica and mother from Cleckheaton, looked me straight in the eye, and said, `Cocoa.' Cocoa,' I repeated, puzzled. 'But aren't you upset about that?' No sir, of course not.' I collapsed into a nod and 'I see'. 'And what about Tony [the white one]?"0h, we call him,' a grin spreading across his face, 'we call him "Snowdrop".' I, too, grinned. And then I dismissed him.
What was Ito make of this? How could I connect this with the council's voluminous memoranda ordering me to adopt a bureaucratic attitude to nasty name-calling in the playground? (Reports in triplicate, lectures in assembly, parents in school, staff meetings convened for the purpose.) And with the stuff I got through the post from an outfit calling itself the National Association of Multi-Racial Education? (I think they now call themselves the Anti- racist something.) They enjoined me and the staff to listen for racist talk in the staff room. The idea was that the most recent crop of taboo words emitted by teachers could be described at their next meeting. They also circulated schools with this information, presumably to illustrate their basic belief that all (white) teachers are racists at heart. Eavesdropping — with notes — was justified on the grounds that the ends justified the means. How could I connect that with the attitude of the little brown boy?
The problem, perhaps, was one of con- text. The little boy was functioning in the hurly-burly culture of the playground — a place where language operated in ironic, even contradictory ways. Perhaps these subtleties could not be encapsulated in the discreet formulations invented by grown- ups. What I had perceived as an insult was nothing of the kind. I had been misled by appearances. I was reacting to the surface of the utterance. But it was the sub-text which gave the real clue to meaning. There was a code operating to which the boy had access — and to which I, in my earnest, flat-footed way, had no entry.
Because I had assumed meaning from appearances — and perhaps because I existed in a professional environment in which the tendentious discourse invented by the 'anti-racist' lobby predominated — I had responded wrongly to this playground rhetoric. I had forgotten that form and meaning can bifurcate if the rules gov- erning their relationship are overlooked. What I had interpreted as hostility was, in reality, a sign of friendship. The three boys were so secure in their relationship that what, in other contexts, might well offend, was here signalling solidarity and warmth. This complex, human understanding of language — which children grasp from a surprisingly early age — is totally missing from the mentality which has produced the anti-racist movement. Whereas a proper grasp of the significance of words often involves imagination, empathy and lateral thinking, the logic of this lobby's approach to words is rigid and linear. Humour, metaphor, irony — all those things which characterise discourse at a human level are missing from the vocabulary of the anti-racist. How else can one account for the emphasis on proscription, for instance? How can anyone with a developed under- standing of how language actually works believe that race relations are improved by seeking to impose an ever-growing list of banned words on the public?
Black looks, black eyes, black moods, blackmail, black marks, black coffee and, presumably brown studies are now pro- scribed. They might, it is said, give offence to the ethnic minorities. (Apart from the absurdity of assuming you can make peo- ple in a free society desist from certain usages, this particular ploy is based on ignorance. The force of 'black' in these locations derives not from skin colour, but the association, expressed in ancient myths, between black and white and night and day. The same principle operates in many languages, including Hausa and Swa- hili, as Tom Hastie has pointed out.) Oral interdicts extend to literature. Take Huckleberry Finn, for instance. The critic Martin Seymour-Smith describes this as `one of the world's greatest books', the first truly American novel. And Lionel Trilling has said of it, 'There are few other books which we can know so young and love so long.' It has given pleasure and sustenance to generations of children and adults on both sides of the Atlantic. It is essentially liberal in its values, and many readers perceive the friendship between the book's eponymous hero and the black boy, Jim, as an attack on slavery. But the cultural revisionists of the anti-racist lobby will have none of it. Since the book contains the taboo word 'nigger', that is enough to ban it or to justify an expurgation. Such an attitude, again, displays the inflexibility of the mind which runs on tram-lines.
The book's theme is not enough to save it, nor its eminence as literature. Nor can it be rescued by the intervention of a sensi- tive teacher who might, with profit to his pupils, explain how language changes over time and how intention can so transform appearances. Mark Twain himself made perhaps the best comment. On learning that some libraries would not stock the book because it was 'coarse', he said, 'The truth is that when a library expels a book of mine and leaves an unexpurgated Bible around where uprotected youth . . . can get hold of it, the deep unconscious irony of it delights me.' I wonder what the great writer would have made of the anti-racist puritans.
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