Noun: A custom, principle, or belief distinguishing a class or group of people. A manner of speaking that is distinctive of a particular group of people
I'll keep this brief and roll in pictures.
Here's everybody's favourite Camford Mafioso, Don Starkey on Newsnight talking about how "whites have become blacks"...
You have to admit this is TV gold. It's got it all - including a crusty old upper class guy reading out rap lyrics (close enough anyway) in a crisp Cream Cracker College accent. Ok, admittedly not as funny as it might have been in, say, 1992 and a little unoriginal comedically speaking, but when he whips out that piece of paper I knew exactly what was coming next. You've got to respect the classics.
But it's a sad day when it takes a patronising old cliché like Starkey to say what everyone's thinking. I remember when that particular social honour belonged to the comedian, instead of their modern substitution - braving the side splitting humorists' no man's land of "making a wine choice for your table-guests" or the the outrageous irreverence of "observations on decorating one's three-bedroom semi".
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| "You're a wanker like me! Hilarious!!!" |
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| Put on your blackface |
Some kids, though not all by any means, just the ones who are wilfully ignorant or (more likely) uneducated, cannot speak. Forget about learning to read and write - they were never taught to speak. Oh, they can make utterances and perhaps, to their friends at least, make themselves understood to some degree. Something meaningful will come out of their mouth: communication is happening. But if you spend any time analysing it, trying to imagine having a conversation with them in the same dialect, you'll resign yourself that it is mostly garbage. It has some kind of idiosyncratic structure and syntax, and certainly a colourful diction, but it's an evolutionary step backwards linguistically as it is, so far as I've observed, totally un-nuanced. By that I mean some kids (not all) lack even the language to have an ethical conversation, let alone perform the necessary ethical back-flips in a job interview. It's not even the old middle class joke of the common folk dropping their 'H's and transmuting a 'th' into an 'f' sound. Now we're talking about vowels which have become contorted, distended, tortured into some kind of labial, bass-register hooting - like you'd imagine of some sub-human ape man.
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| Kanzi the ape: "This...is...demeaning. Release...me...human. Die...purple...woman...die." I'd wager there was no symbol for rebellion. |
How serious/facetious am I being here? It's a sliding scale with me. I'm not sure where I sit on it just about now. But I do believe I'm speaking the truth on one important point - many of these kids lack even the language of ordinary morality.
So why's that? I'd hazard it's because it's not a language which was ever important to them. It didn't feature in their lives. I'd put it to you that when these kids were growing up and did something wrong, even if their parents wanted to chastise them and reason out the error of their ways, they never really had that conversation. I mean they were rendered mute, neglected parent and offspring alike, by a vacuum of language.
Why is this so? Well to over-simplify it (trying to keep this as short as poss) I'd blame generational failures in the education system: and a society which dispensed with the moral crutch of religion only to replace it with...nothing. Patronising though this sounds - remember by and large I think people need to stand on their own two feet and dispense with government intervention - but the system really has failed these people. I believe in the welfare state - don't dare mistake me for some kind of right wing free-marketarian - but if you abandon people and leave them uneducated, economically surplus to requirements, whilst at the same time feeding, clothing and keeping a roof over their heads you're asking for trouble. Not immediate trouble, as I said this is a generational thing, but down the line they're going to want to rejoin mainstream society one way or another. They're not hungry or homeless, neither are they yearning to be free from bondage - I told you they lack the language to manifest these thoughts, should they even have them - but as a group they may well be inarticulate but they can still be indignant about one thing: no human being would like being kept as a pet.
Let me stop riffing and breathe a while. This needs to come back on topic.
Starkey's worried about some Jamaican, faux American gangland rap culture taking over. He has a point, but if rap music is popular it's popular for a reason. Lets imagine I'm one of these mumbling young oafs. If I don't know what 'society' means and yet I still want power, consumer goods and sex then it's logical for me to want to kill steal and rape: that's just me fantasizing about winning these things I want. Music, like any art form, can be nothing more than wish fulfilment. Incidentally I don't necessarily want my art form of choice to agonise about the morality of this fantasy, especially if that queer dialogue is overdubbed in a language I don't understand. Come to think of it surely a narrative without any antagonism or angst to speak of is a pretty good definition of pornography? So lets proceed on the basis that these young guys, of indeterminate race, are enamoured with the pornography of violence, AKA rap music and associated 'gangsta' culture. Let me imagine that for a second and see what I feel about that.
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| "My neck hurts all the time, homes." |
I don't care. There's no point trying to prohibit, or indeed condemn these vices into oblivion. It will never, ever work because you are fighting against human nature. And you're a hypocrite to boot. If you're the kind of person who's guilty (or perhaps not guilty) pleasure is sitting down to "Grand Designs", "A Place in the Country" or "Location, Location, Location" then you're a fine one to talk. One assumes that as a wannabe upper-middle class tosser you have a pretty adequate Daily Mail-esq grasp of morality - yet you feel ok to masturbate over a £450'000 house in Surrey while you know in all conscience there are some parts of the UK which are virtually unlivable. Places you wouldn't dream of sending little Jacob and Georgina to the local comprehensive. Places where you know full well they wouldn't have the opportunities in life you've had. When was the last time you broke out that glossary of moral indignation over "A Place in the Country"? You never did, and I'll tell you why: because this is your pornography. It's lifestyle pornography. Your wish fulfilment.
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| "Just a 180 minute commute each way? To central London? £580,000 baby!" |
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| "I even want to punch myself." "And I have a yeast infection!" |
So what solution is there? Education, buddy, education! It's late in the day to talk about what I think education is for, but suffice to say that it shouldn't be about trying to make moral judgements on behalf of young people. Don't take away the power or the right of deliberation. It should be about giving them the language to make these judgements for themselves. Any child who grows up and can't express his/herself - be it emotionally, economically, politically or morally - is a tragedy. Language is thought, and thought it language, so if you want your children to make the right choices then make sure they command the language to describe that choice. Language for simple choices and complex ones. Force them to learn that language if it's necessary; but I don't think that will be necessary, because I think most people yearn to make that choice, and are empowered by the choosing.
That was very inspirational wasn't it? But the cynic in me doubts it'll take root in my lifetime.
The cynic in me thinks the political classes can't contemplate that. A curriculum which has at its centre this kind of individual, thought-provoking empowerment won't be on their agenda. They aren't aiming for the 'underclass' to have the same deliberative linguistic powers as their privately educated little darlings. If the great unwashed were taught to speak like a man, to walk upright, then what would be left to distinguish good people from bad? Little Jacob and Georgina might start to sound a little lacklustre in the job market, mightn't they? No - better to seek opportunities for the poor elsewhere. You see I've slowly started to understand how these people think. Even clothed in their most polished, parliamentary language it's plain they want our disadvantaged youth to aspire to be naught but shiny little cogs in a grand economic machine; albeit a machine they can never fully understand. You see it's the shibboleth which is most precious to them. It maintains the status quo, quite aptly sorting the social ears of wheat from the economic chaff, and it will always be there helping us to distinguish, morally and ethically, black from white.
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