Carol Thatcher was sacked from the BBC for refering to a tennis player as looking like a golliwog.

My opinion.

Firstly i dont condone racism in any form so please dont call me one, it'll jus wind me up and thats not what this post is for. any racist comments made by anyone will result in action.

Right for those who dont know a golliwog is a childs toy. It is a cotton toy of a black man in a red suit jacket and blue trousers. my brother had one when he was a child and it was one of his faves.

anyway, if i commented that arnold schwarznegger looks like an action man, would i be a racist because both he and the toy are white?
if i referred to kelly rowland as looking like a bratz doll would i be racist because she and the toy are black?

my answer is no to both, and i dont believe that a golliwog is a racist toy.

i myself have been told that i resemled a buzz lightyear toy and never once did i feel that i had been racially abused.

maybe its high time that people realised that racism is now a minority issue in the modern world and this stupid PC culture that holds people back and costs them they're reputation for innocuos comments should be fogotten all about and people get on with things that really matter, such as the millions of people dieing all around the world due to poverty and war.

get a grip bbc. and the rest of the modern world for that matter.

I personally think Golliwogs have run their course, there's no real place for them now in a society that should be more multicultural and tolerant, or we face the possibility of civil war!

The word Golliwog has been used to put black people down for years, even back when the Black and White Minstrel show was going, blacked-up men playing stereotypical black people, the word was used in an offensive manner.

I do however Carol Thatcher used the word in an offensive manner, what was the need for her to describe anyone as a "Golliwog",............ did she think that we wouldn't know the tennis player was black?

Your analogy about comparing people to childrens toys is not neccessarily a good one though Mighty, she didn't describe the person as a fit looking black doll, she described them as a Golliwog, she also said that she was "joking" when she said it, ie poking fun at, ie she wasn't being complementary. She was putting the person down.

As for the "there's wars going on",........ its people with these views, eg that calling someone a Golliwog is ok, that has led to the intolerance and distrust that has led to the wars in the first place.

On another note, if she had just said "Wog" a shortened version of "Golliwog", would that still have been ok?

Gonna have to agree to disagree on this one!
Dont like the Golliwog toys, never have.

Excerpt from link below:


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golliwogg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_ ... strel_Show
http://www.ferris.edu/jimcrow/golliwog/

fair comment dude, glad someone disagreed because it allows for enlightenment. i didnt know about those enid blighten books, and wow was that racist.

anyhow, that aside, the said tennis player does actually resemble a golliwog doll (remember i am not trying to be racist). that is argument i was making. i dont believe she was calling him a golliwog but merely stating that he looks like one. now as for wether it was appropriate i dont know, i dont know because i dont know the context of the conversation.

so to summarise, just saying that someone looks like someone or something is not racist (depending on context of course). if the player himself takes offence to the comment then fair enough, but for a community as a whole to take offence to a comment made of an indivdual is overkill.

To be honest, I agree with SK on this one. In my upbringing golliwog was something I wasn't allowed to say, no matter how funny the actual word in it self sounds. I live by the rule not to discriminate.

Now the issue here, like I understood it anyway, is that she was sacked because she said thought a black man looked like a golliwog.
Is it appropriate to demean an athlete, saying that he looks like a childs toy? Fine, I guess not. But the implications the golliwog dolls have in modern society.. there is no chance she could hav bypassed them. The comment is clearly inappropriate and racist.


The points you (Mighty, sorry ) make is that if she had said something else about a white man, would it be racist aswell? Well she didn't, she called a black man a golliwog, judge her by what she, as a professional, says, not by what she didn't say.