Thanks, nellie. I had no idea about the historical significance of the term BongoBongoLand.
I tried to write post earlier about what I think is our over-sensitivity to harmless stereotypes but deleted it as I couldn't express it well. I still can't but here is some of it in any case. You need to remember what I said above about not having come across the BBland term before.
There is nothing actually wrong with wearing a grass skirt and having a bone through your nose. People of all skin colours (there is only one human 'race') wear things far crazier than grass skirts, and wear face and other body furniture that is, in effect, the equivalent of a bone through one's nose. So it must be the historical perspective that nellie highlights that makes the BBland reference a problem. Plus the fact that it was a Ukip member who used it.
I just read this which I feel is telling about modern attitudes. A son is reprimanding his dad for what he sees as racist remarks even though he knows his dad is not racist:
"It was what you said, not just what you felt, E tried to explain. Maybe it was a generational thing, but he had always thought it should be monitored, addressed, fixed.
'It's strange that none of my mates have ever corrected me', Dermot once said in a rare moment of frustration. 'And they come from Trinidad and Jamaica and Pakistan and Bangladesh. You're always telling me what I should call them, but I never see you with a friend that isn't white.'
And E had tried to brush that away, insisting it was an exaggeration and moreover an irrelevance. But it lingered between them, an inconvenient truth."
It is from Mr Lynch's Holiday by Catherine O'Flynn.
