Danny Baker should be sacked immediately

Baggs, the banana thing is not a trope. I have zero interest in football but somehow it appears to have registered with me.

We are not discussing primates and David Attenborough as you very well know.

breeze ?????????????????

The point is, did he use a picture of a well dressed couple, holding the hands of a well dressed monkey, to make a point about privileged royals or was it intended as a dig about a mixed race baby?

Breeze He captioned it "Royal baby leaves hospital" !!!

^
When I tuned in late to this post last night my hair stood on end at the 'Witchfinder General and the lynch mob with pitchforks' nastiness I read. Maybe reading it all at once gave me a better perspective.

Crikey, Breeze, that's inflammatory language over a debate on here. Don't catastrophise for goodness sake.

lily, yes I know you were not discussing primates. I was though and not in any racist way. I was trying to understand the situation, not assuming guilt before I was convinced by the evidence and fair stuff like that.

And I'm allowed not to know that football hooligans throw/threw bananas at footballers, especially as I don't have a TV, never listen to radio, and turn over quickly from nasty news. So, as I said, I knew there had been some football related racism recently and that is all.

There is a lot of assumption of guilt on this thread.

Sparklefizz Der. Exactly! Royal Baby Leaves Hospital. Therefore, well dressed and ready for a privileged life.

maryeliza stop sending me ducks. You are ridiculous.

sparklefizz I explained earlier that I completely agreed with Mycatisahacker (wish she had a shorter name) that the nastiness was uncalled for. Mycat said that you are in danger of becoming as vile as the tweet.

And if you don't recognise that calling someone a 'shit' is not a healthy debate then it's not only DB that has a problem.

Ahhh - but Danny Baker does know that bananas and monkeys are used in that way.

With all due respect, what you Baggs know is irrelevant.

Der. Exactly! Royal Baby Leaves Hospital. Therefore, well dressed and ready for a privileged life

You mixed out the bit Royal Baby whose mother is black is caricatured as a chimpanzee

How dare you Breeze! I have never called anybody a shit either on here or off.

And how dare you say that I am in danger of becoming as vile as the tweet.

How insulting.

Oh, and realising that I probably need a 'note of absence' I have to leave to cook a meal.

So why has what I know been questioned/doubted in such phrases as "Where have you been all your life that you s
didn't know...?" SirC?

I came back to say that the never in relation to radio is wrong. The car radio came on the other day (Husb usually has it on when he's driving alone) and I listened to a very interesting programme about what dinosaurs might have sounded like.

Read the post Sparklefizz you really should. I explained (sigh) and I'll explain one last time that Mycatisahacker posted that calling DB things like a shit (read the opening of this thread) sigh. Is not conducive to a healthy discussion.

And it was Mycat who said that people on GN are in danger of becoming as vile as the tweet.

Sorry you're insulted but you will be if you can't grasp the right end of the stick.

Now that I am being personally insulted for challenging racism, I think it's time for me to leave Gransnet. It's upsetting and unpleasant.

I'm explaining to you that DB does know - and now, as a result of this thread, you do too

That was to Baggs

I don't actually know if he is racist or not. I'm not a huge fan of MM, but I think it pretty cruel to post something like that about a new baby.

I agree with Nonnie. I think that at the very least he made a stupid mistake in putting up that picture. He must have known it had racist connotations, given his background. Perhaps he was drunk and not thinking properly (to give him the benefit).

But afterwards, he didn't offer a genuine apology initially, it was quite sarcastic. If he'd been totally unaware, surely he would have been horrified to realise what he'd done.

He has lost his job deservedly in my opinion. If I had done something at work like that, I'm pretty sure it would be grounds for instant dismissal.

I understand his old mate Chris Evans has already bailed him out several times over the years. Perhaps he'll move to Virgin.

Baker has posted what looks to me like a real apology in a series of tweets.

SirC, OK, thanks.

I guess the crux of the matter is this. We (thankfully) can't see inside DB's mind so we have no idea for certain if any racist intention was there BUT if we were to ask any average reasonable person with a properly developed sense of right and wrong if they would consider his post offensive and racist, then surely the answer would be yes.

I know very little about this man (again thankfully) but from what I have heard he has been in journalism for years, so the idea that he had no idea Meghan Markle is of mixed race doesn't stack up at all.

I find it hard to understand how anyone can defend DB. His tweet was racist. It’s impossible to believe he was unaware MM has African American heritage, or that he didn’t know the baby was born etc. I heard three of the interviews he gave after he was criticised, in all he was furious, self serving and accused the BBC of throwing him under a bus. The written apology he gave this morning bore no resemblance to what he’d said earlier. It was clearly written by his PR people. A ‘real apology’ ? Contrived more like

Iam64 I'd be very surprised f DB has any PR people I think they would have given up on him a long time ago.
I suspect the rant was more to do wih his relationship with the BBC.

Sparklefizz Isn't it racist to think that the RF should be different to yours and indeed that the event is at all important?
It's possibly racist because thinking that someone who is black or of different ethnicity to yourself can't or wouldn't be accepted into the RF indicates that you think that the RF is superior to them and that they are therefore inferior. In order to abolish racism completely people of different races need to be accepted into any roles without it being any sort of an issue, and not even news worthy.

When one cannot imagine how someone could think x or y, one doesn't understand their viewpoint yet. I think it was someone like John Stuart Mill who said that, though more lucidly.

If media had not told us at the time of her and Harry's engagement I would not have known MM was mixed race until I saw pictures of her parents. So I can imagine and understand someone not knowing it.

And when I did realise I thought "So what?" Having read this thread I now realise that the what of the matter is that there exist racists who will use any chance to hurl abuse at other people (I think DB was not doing that). I can't help thinking that perhaps we shouldn't focus on a person's race. Instead of ramping up the intersectionality, why not ramp it down? That's what Martin Luther King and others like him wanted. We seem to have gone the opposite way.