Racism on Celebrity Big Brother.

last updated 8 January 2015

United Kingdom

Bollywood beauty Shilpa Shetty had no idea what she was getting into, said Jenny McCartney in the London Sunday Telegraph. The Indian actress figured that the British reality show Celebrity Big Brother would place her on camera in a house with other movie stars. Instead, the so-called celebrities included a beauty contestant, a failed pop singer, and one Jade Goody, a working-class girl famous only “for her fearless displays of ignorance in a past series of Big Brother.” Goody is celebrated for being the woman who thought Portugal was in Spain and for complaining that she was being made “an escape goat.” Shetty—rich and gorgeous, multilingual and articulate, smart and poised—is everything Goody is not. Shetty does not drink or discuss her sex life; Goody is a foulmouthed “ladette.” Predictably, Goody made it her mission to humiliate Shetty, calling her various types of Indian food and screaming that she was a fake who should get a taste of life in an Indian slum. And that was the nicer stuff.

Such a creature does not merit a “diplomatic incident,” said India’s The Hindu in an editorial. Yet our newspapers covered the flap as if it were a war, inflaming public opinion with incorrect accounts, including that Shetty was called a “Paki” (she was not). The Indian government fell overitself to demonstrate umbrage. Minister after minister warned Britons that Indians would “not tolerate” disrespect for a beloved Bollywood icon. Poor Gordon Brown, Britain’s chancellor of the exchequer and de facto prime-minister-in-waiting, was forced to spend the entirety of a three-day trip to India denouncing his vulgar countrywoman and assuring Indians of his opposition to racism. “Surely this is too much fuss over tawdry, tabloid television.”

Yet the public outcry in Britain has been heartening, said Anushka Asthana in the London Observer. As a British Asian woman, I too was appalled at Goody’s behavior, and I was glad to see that thousands of white Brits called Channel Four to protest racism on the program. Still, the callers may have overreacted. Goody and her cohorts were mostly expressing class rage. They were certainly “guilty of bullying and bitching, of cultural misunderstanding and ignorance,” but only “a small part of that was unacceptable racist comments.”