Another excellent piece from Shazia Hobbs the author of the novel ‘The Goris Daughter’. This piece was originally published on the ‘Sedaa – Our Voices’ website

Shazia Hobbs said:

“Political correctness is a weapon used to silence people who tell the truth” — Ayaan Hirsi Ali

I remember being told that it was no longer politically correct to sing the nursery rhyme ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’ to my son, who is now almost 24 years old.  I remember being told that it was offensive to black people.  The fact that I was singing about sheep and not black people was neither here nor there.  Black people and black sheep were one and the same to the lefties and political correctness pioneers of the late 80s and early 90s. I carried on singing ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’ to my son and ignored those who discouraged it.

Next it was the black board that was an object of offense and you could not say ‘black board’ any more.  If I were a black person I would have been offended that I was being compared to sheep and a board.  The saddest thing about these two changes and no doubt numerous others like it, is that black people were not even offended.

In January 2000, a nursery school in Birmingham tried to stop Baa Baa Black sheep being taught, as it was considered ‘racially offensive’. Black parents told them this was ‘ridiculous’ and the children continued to sing Baa Baa Black Sheep.

Next they went after the golliwog on the Robertson jam jars. I personally loved the gollywog, as I am sure many black people did too. In 1983 Greater London Council stopped buying the firm’s jams and marmalades because the golliwog was deemed racist.  In 1984 councillors in Islington banned a road safety poster for being offensive because it featured the golliwog.  The golliwog was axed from TV adverts in 1988 and then disappeared from labels in 2002.

The golliwog was not on the jar to cause offense but political correctness removed him from the jar and the golliwog was forever deemed as ‘racist and offensive.’

I remember my cousins visiting when I was a child, cousins on my mother’s side of the family, my white cousins.  I remember we dressed my girl cousin up in one our shalwar kameezes, Asian clothes, gave her bangles to wear and braided her hair.  She was delighted by her transformation into a little Pakistani girl and the fact that she had blonde hair and blue eyes didn’t matter to any of us.  Then we didn’t know about cultural appropriation and how we should have been offended that my cousin wanted to dress like us.

Today cultural appropriation gets everyone offended.  A white girl with dreadlocks, wearing bindis, saris, anything that is not part of her culture is usually slated the most.  Yet a black girl can straighten her Afro and dye it blonde and wear blue contact lenses and no one shouts cultural appropriation.  As with most things it works only one way, white people are accused of stealing everyone’s culture.

Today everything is offensive and everyone is racist.  Racist no longer has the same meaning it did when I was a child and experienced real racism:  racism, where white people would spit at my mum for wearing Asian clothes and having little mixed race children, spit at her and call her a ‘Paki lover’;  racism, where the windows of my childhood home were smashed on a regular basis because some people in the predominantly white area where we had moved to were not happy with the new brown faces on their streets — a real fear of being hated because you looked different and only because you looked different to those doing the hating.

Today you are a racist if you disagree with mass immigration; that you may be an immigrant yourself makes no difference, you will still be called a racist and failing that a bigot, an Uncle Tom or deluded.

Political correctness has come so far that we now can be racist towards an idea, not people.  If you criticise or mock Islam you will be labelled a racist.  How did we get here? Simple. Back in the late 80s Salman Rushdie wrote ‘The Satanic Verses’, a book which Muslims around the world burned and a fatwa was issued to kill Rushdie for insulting Islam in this book.  The majority of Muslims rioting and burning his book had not even read it.  Blindly, they followed the orders of their mullahs and sheikhs.  Rushdie had to go into hiding for many years for his own safety.

Here in the UK, they rioted on the streets of Bradford and burned an effigy of Rushdie and copies of his book.  Books they would have had to purchase to burn.  They burned the books outside magistrates’ courts, town halls and the police station.  The police, whose job it is to protect the public, stood by and watched and allowed the angry Muslims to carry on.  Since then they have been allowing ‘angry Muslims’ to carry on with a number of things that would see non-Muslims jailed.

Read the rest of this truly excellent piece by clicking on the link below:

http://www.sedaa.org/2017/04/political-correctness-has-gone-mad/?platform=hootsuite