Racist remark about Sikh soldiers leads to apology from suddenly-famous English actor

I mean, how can you be British and not know about, uh, the British Empire?

4 Likes

The same way you can be American and not know about the American empire?

16 Likes

piss-poor phrasing by the source, judgment thoughtlessly passed along by me.

1 Like

Which he doesn’t “believe in.”

I wish willful stupidity of that magnitude was lethal to the person afflicted with it.

3 Likes

Yes, it was… I’m glad you are able to recognize that, as so many people would just double down on it… But we’ve all said things in insensitive ways, so no worries.

5 Likes

image

9 Likes

Sounds like part of a comedian’s sketch where he’s pissing on the British empire and in that context it probably doesn’t sound as demeaning towards the subjects. In a different context like this one? it could be taken offensively.

Not so much “passed a law”, as failed to pass a law stopping them: as British subjects (willingly or not), they had that right by default.

Then post-WW2, enough of them started availing themselves of that right that the British Government introduced a colour bar the concept of “patriality” to determine which British subjects were considered British enough to live in Britain.

Is this not passing a law?

Am I missing something? I’m not British, so…

it would have been post decolonization of Indian, but not other parts of the Empire (specifically in Africa). I’ve understood this as actively shifting the status of former subjects to citizens, with all the rights that entailed.

2 Likes

While, naturally, our gentleman completely ignores it in service of his aesthetic preferences; there is kind of a massive story of ‘shoehorning people of different ethnicities into dramas’.

Specifically, the massive use of troops and laborers from basically every corner of the empire and some non-belligerent nations that seemed handy. If anyone was doing some ‘shoehorning’ it was the ones who brought several million additional people into WWI from all over the place; not a filmmaker with the temerity to keep all of the exotics off camera…

5 Likes

Yes, but as I understand it, although it conferred a new status (CUKC), it didn’t confer a new right (ETA: at least, not a new right of entry or abode): before the dominions started granting their own national citizenships, the Empire had a single nationality, that of British subject, and in general British subjects could live and work anywhere in the Empire (though some dominions had control over immigration law: for example, in the 1920s, Canada started restricting which British subjects could freely enter Canada). The UK Government didn’t start imposing immigration controls on any British subjects / Commonwealth citizens, whether they had CUKC status or not, until 1962. [ETA2: and when they did, they jumped through all sorts of hoops to make sure that the controls mostly affected those countries with a non-white majority, while avoiding making them explicitly racial.]

4 Likes

Okay, makes sense.

Yet the “follow them home” characterization is still problematic, in that it was the British invading their countries in the first place. Subjectship was imposed on people, and then acted like it was a privilege (when in reality, it was always white subjects who had greater rights in reality, whatever the laws might have been).

4 Likes

Absolutely zero disagreement from me.

3 Likes

And @Spizella expressed that it was from the source, not them anyways, and that the source was poorly phrased…

I think it’s all good!

3 Likes

Yeah. People like to paint us as a bastion of progressiveness, but we crossed lines even the colonial mothership shied away from. Chinese Head Tax and Komagata Maru, anyone? And don’t get me started on the settlement of British Columbia.

5 Likes

Who, I wonder, is it racist toward, this whole “shoe-horning” of multiculturalism thing — especially when it actually turns out multiple cultures have lived (and fought) amongst one another for ages, technically forever?

Oh, wypipo you say?

So you’re just a racist yourself, Mr. Actor Fuckface. Got it!

Inaccurate. it would seem that the Kardashian family’s fame is a great deal more sudden than the Fox family.

This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.