Many years back, Gordon Smith was having a drink after work with Alex Ayuli in the Coach and Horses.
Gordon is my art director partner, Alex was a copywriter at JWT.
The Coach and Horses was JWT’s local.
A lovely old pub just off Berkeley Square and often full of tourists.
So it was a bit crowded.
Everyone was jostling each other for space.
Suddenly Gordon heard a southern USA drawl behind him.
“I didn’t know they let niggers drink in these pubs.”
Now as it happens, Alex is black.
But he’s from East London and Gordon is from South London.
Gordon didn’t take kindly to this.
For Gordon, the only thing worse than a foreigner insulting an Englishman is insulting a Londoner.
Gordon has red hair and a temper to match.
He turned round to see four large Americans in their late twenties, all from the deep south by the sound of it.
Gordon said loudly “Oi, you got a problem?”
The one who’d spoken said “No problem, why?”
Gordon said even louder “You called him a nigger.”
The pub went quiet.
Gordon said “You ain’t from this country are you? Well he is, so he’s got more right in this pub than you.”
Alex is a gentle guy, and by now he’s really embarrassed.
Alex said “No it’s all right Gord, leave it out.”
But now Gord’s in the mood.
He said really loudly “This is his country and his city. It ain’t your country or your city is it?”
The pub was silent.
Gord stuck his face right in the other guy’s “So he’s got more right in this pub than you, ain’t he?”
Alex now wishes the floor would open up and swallow him.
But Gordon won’t let it go.
“So I think you’d better apologise to him, hadn’t you?”
And the other guy apologised, bought Alex a pint, and left the pub.
Gordon calmed down.
Alex tried not to look embarrassed.
And everyone in the pub carried on drinking and chatting.
See, what those blokes had misinterpreted was the ripple theory of identity.
It’s like we are a stone dropped in a pond.
The ripples nearer the centre of the splash are the ones we identify most with.
As the ripples get further away, the levels of identification get weaker.
So for soldiers, for instance, they found the innermost ripple was their platoon. The men they went into combat with.
That was their fundamental identity.
Not country, or religion, or justice, or liberty, or a cause.
Those things were the outer rings.
The innermost ring was their mates.
When you communicate with anyone it’s important to know their identity.
What’s the innermost ring of their ripple effect?
Those southern Americans got it wrong because they assumed it was skin colour.
That was their identity, so they assumed it was that way for everyone.
Whatever nationality you were, if you were white you would identify yourself with them.
But it wasn’t that way for Gordon.
For Gordon it was London.
Gordon didn’t care if you were polka-dot, day-glo or striped like a zebra.
If you were a cockney you were like him.
That was his identity.
We can’t communicate with anyone unless we know who they think they are.
And it may not be who we think it is.
Great post, as always, Dave. My late wife was Kyrgyz, a tiny Central Asian country, next to the North-Western corner of China. People always assumed, because she was Asian, that she’d be a submissive, ‘Thai-bride’ type. Until they got on the wrong side of her tongue. Because Kygyzstan was part of the USSR until its breakup. So the official language was Russian. And as Kev will testify, Russian swearing (called ‘mat’) is the filthiest, most inventive cursing on the planet. It even used to be illegal to use it in public. So people who thought they were dealing with a submissive Asian discovered they were dealing with a tough Russian. It’s not about who you think people are, it’s about who they really are.
http://styled-comments.blogspot.ro/2013/06/364.html
Dave
This belongs on your other blog. It is not just suitable for work, it is essential for work. Anybody who puts “team player” on their cv (and, almost invariably, isn’t) needs to read this.
Thank you,
Jonathan.
I salute Gordon – one Brit against 4 Yanks. I think it’s great when a person’s fighting spirit goes beyond the agency to the real world.
Too often, in the name of being Political Correct, folks are afraid to stand up for what’s right. The logic being ‘2 wrongs don’t make a right’.
Robin,
I think the clever thing was that Gordon instinctively understood context.
It might start off as one bloke against four.
But what Gordon did by repeating the insult very loudly was quickly change the context.
Once everyone could hear it became four blokes against a pub full of people.
Very different scenario.
Dave, I am not from the South, but I live in the South, and it never ceases to amaze me how embarrassing some Southerners can and continue to be (although ignorance and racism are certainly not limited to the South). So on behalf of my more enlightened fellow Americans, allow me to apologize to everyone that was in that pub that day.
Rob,
Every country has people like that and the UK has more than its fair share.
I often get embarrassed by the way some of my countrymen (and women) behave abroad.
Intelligent people everywhere, hopefully, know better than to judge anyone by anything but their own individual behaviour.
Otherwise we’d be as bigoted as the people we despise.
Growing up all of my English pop-culture references were white people. When I spent time in England as a student, the first time I met a black person my brain temporarily short circuited because what I saw and what I heard didn’t match my environment at home. Once my brain caught up after a few seconds I thought to myself, “What exactly were you expecting? He’s from England, why would he sound otherwise?” Lesson learned.
The best part was one of my fellow American students was black and he was just as surprised by the accent as I was, in fact even more so. It really knocked him for a loop. We then got into a discussion about how there can be a divide in the States between how white people and black people speak. That may or may not exist in England, but to our untrained ears (I’ve gotten better about assigning regions to language) it all sounded like an “English” accent. It wasn’t “he sounds white” or “He sounds black”, it was more, “He sounds like he’s from Manchester” or “I think he said Sussex, but I couldn’t understand a bloody word he was saying.”
Very funny, the part about accents Mark.
I felt the same the first time I went to America, but about old people.
Everyone I’d heard speaking American was hip and young: James Dean, Marlon Brando, Bob Dylan, Elvis Presley.
Then I heard an old person with an American accent and it just sounded wrong.
Old people were supposed to speak with English accents not American.
I couldn’t make out why that old person was trying to sound like a teenager.
Great post Dave. It’s the second time I’ve been motivated to comment on your blog because it really hit a nerve. I’ve encountered racism myself and very recently at work (I work in advertising and I’m mixed race.) On this occasion I chose to ignore it. Not out of any sense of fear that it wouldn’t be dealt with but because I’ve learnt when and how to deal best with such situations.
Anyway to my point. Why have you put it on this blog? This needs to go on your other one.
Jonathan and Lee,
It’s a good point that you think it belongs on the other blog.
I just thought the word ‘nigger’ is very offensive to some people, understandably so.
So rather than risk upsetting anyone at the office, or our clients, I put it here.
But I do take your point.
Dave your use of it isn’t offensive. It’s used in context to illustrate a point. A very important one. Still better it appears here than not at all.
That’s gingers for you.
I understand your concern over the “n” word. I suppose you could do the tabloid thing and put n*gger but that seems to me to trivialise the offence that people rightly take. Whilst I agree with Lee that context is all, on reflection I think that some people might take an absolutist stance and simply find the word unacceptable under any circumstances. In this case, with all the history and baggage hanging on it, it must be right to respect that point of view.
In Hitch-22, Christopher Hitchens wrote movingly of a black New York cab driver who had been posted to England in the war and, for the first time, had been treated as an equal by his fellow man. Maybe we are too isolated from the pain behind that word in England.
“We can’t communicate with anyone unless we know who they think they are.”
Excellent, Dave. Great point. It’s not about communicating with a demographic but a psychographic. I need to speak to who you THINK you are. Because who you think you are, is what sums you up fully.
Great insight. Thanks.
Joanathan, when Miles Davis first came over to Europe, he couldn’t believe that he wasn’t treated like a second-class citizen; rather, that Europeans, particularly the French, admired him and other black jazz musicians as artists. Indeed, quite a few of them decided to stay in Europe, away from NYC’s 52nd St, the home of bebop, simply because of the way they were treated back home.
Tom & Jonathan,
The issue of race v identity is interesting.
We have a friend whose parents came here from Jamaica.
She was born in London and grew up feeling that her identity was black first.
On her first trip abroad she was quite shocked.
She suddenly found that she felt English first and black a long way second.
I think it’s the same with Miles Davis, Chuck Berry, Tina Turner, Jay Z.
To us they are American first and black second.
In his autobiography, Miles talks about sitting on the garden wall outside his house, an amazing converted Russian Orthodox 3-storey church on the Upper West Side, worth millions. A white guy came to deliver something, and assumed that Miles was the janitor. Because he was American second, and a long way second, after being black.
At the end of his album, Jack Johnson, about the world’s first black heavyweight champion, a voice says ‘I’m black. They won’t ever let me forget it. I’m black all right, I won’t ever let them forget it.’
(And as a fellow-ginger, I’m glad Gordon stood up and had a pop!)
I notice you put this on the other blog Dave. Good for you (and all your other readers!).