Racism claim over use of Japanese three wise monkeys
Japan’s famous three wise monkeys (sanzaru) have become the subject of a racial discrimination accusation in Britain:
The row dates from an incident nearly two years ago, when supporters of the Socialist Party – a Marxist group well to the left of Labour – tried to get Unison’s annual conference to discuss proposals to cut links with the Labour Party, and reduce the pay of full-time union officials. Unison is one of the biggest donors to Labour, despite occasional friction.
The rebels were told by Unison’s standing orders committee, which determines what can be discussed at conference, that there were more important matters to be debated in the available time. Irritated by this, they distributed a hastily printed leaflet with a cartoon that compared the committee with the three wise monkeys.
The only member of the committee familiar to most Unison members is Clytus Williams, the chairman. He is a lay union activist and well liked by most delegates. He is also black. The idea the far left was trying to caricature him as a monkey infuriated delegates, many of whom are low-paid workers more familiar with bar room racism than Buddhist culture and proverbial monkeys.
Apparently the four people responsible for creating the leaflet have been barred from holding office in the union because they distributed “offensive” material.
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Hard to make a call without seeing the pamphlet.
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Follow the link in the story – you can see the pamphlet there. The monkeys in question are just pencil line drawings, not black caricatures. In fact, the “hear no evil” monkey looks to me like Tony Blair, while the “speak no evil” monkey bears a passing relationship to Dubya.
However, you lampoon a committee by comparing it to monkeys, and one guy on the committee happens to be black… well I guess it is clear and blatant racism then! Sheesh….
From the article: “delegates, many of whom are low-paid workers more familiar with bar room racism”
In other words, rednecks. Their last words will doubtless be “Oy, ‘old me pint an’ wotch this!”
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..and 4 more ex-leftists are born
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Actually my mother- who is the one who drew the picture, Suzanne Muna- is and always will be a leftist, as are the others.
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bar room racism. when we get drunk we’re so in-insensitive!
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In my opinion, people are way, WAY to sensitive to racism against black people, it gets to the point now, where people think you can’t actually be racist towards white people. It’s just stupid. People need to sit back and think sometimes, without yelling RACISM! at every little think they can.
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Winning quote from the article: Mr Thomas said: “I know Onay Kasab. To accuse him of being racist is utter stupidity and madness. Those who brought this charge need to take a lie down in a quiet room, possibly with whale music playing and get a rest.”
Not all Unison members are low paid bar dwellers. My collegue is a member of that union and he is nothing like that.
I didn’t know the 3 moneys were japanese… Interesting.
Meanwhile: “Oy! ‘old me pint ‘n’ wotch this”. What? Have you been thinking english people sound like that from watching american session actors trying to do accents? That’s like walking around with your eyes half-shut saying ‘velly velly solly’ over and over.
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“Have you been thinking english people sound like that from watching american session actors trying to do accents? ”
1. It is a parody of an American joke: “What are the most common last words of a redneck? ‘Hold my beer and watch this!’”
2. I think some English people talk like that from visiting England and hearing how some of them talk. Not all of them are pommey gits like yourself who apparently speak in r.p. all the time.
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はいはい、人種差別人種差別 ＼（￣ε￣）／
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Why racism ? Those monkeys in the pamphlet look cute. Unnecessary argument.
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There really needs to be more world cultural awareness taught in primary and secondary schools across the world, especially when it comes to Eastern culture and traditions. I learned a lot about Christianity and Western nations in school (in the US) but didn’t know much of jack (including not much Geography) about the Middle East, former Soviet block, or Asia (or much of South America even) until college or personal interest pushed me towards learning.
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No, not in primary school. The kids would be too young to understand it anyway and they have more important things to learn – reading, writing, math and basic science. Trying to teach abstract concepts like “cultural awareness” to primary school kids is pointless.
Secondary school maybe, but where are you going to find the time? US schools have something like 160-170 school days a year, 6 hours of class time a day, but in my experience you can cut that to 5 per day because of study hall. Within that limited time, while competing with math, science, English, PE, health class and mandatory foreign language classes, social studies teachers tried to teach us US and European history as those were the most relevant to our lives. Asian history is fascinating, but it is also pretty much completely irrelevant to understanding American society, and getting kids to understand their own society is what jr. high and high school social studies classes are all about. I mean, as a test question “Explain the importance of the Magna Carta to modern US democracy” makes sense. “Explain the importance of Shotoku Taishi’s Seventeen Article Constitution” – it would make no sense to teach that even at the high school level, where the goal is to get the students basically aware of what is going on around them and give them a basic, rounded education so they can function as adults and don’t fall flat on their faces after graduation.
University level, yes, as university education is supposed to provide specific skill sets to enable adults to succeed in a given area of expertise. There is a whole different set of goals at work.
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I don’t agree there. In social studies at my primary school we looked at a series of different countries, including the US, and even places as obscure as Nepal. As a result, from learning some of the basics of Nepal at an early age, it seems less exotic and alien than it otherwise might. You don’t need to teach anything abstract like cultural awareness – it comes with the territory. Nor do I agree that high school is about learning about the society you live in – mine certainly was not. Nothing about politics or local government or how to invest money or driving lessons or anything that would help us function in society. Instead we learned concepts of knowledge, which were illustrated by examples drawn from all over the world if need be. School is the time to expose the kids to as wide a world as possible, as university narrows it down, and the more you advance in university the narrower it gets, and you know more and more about less and less until you know everything about nothing.
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“Nothing about politics or local government or how to invest money or driving lessons or anything that would help us function in society.”
Interesting, because all of those are pretty much exactly the things that were taught in my high school. OK, “how to invest money” was the vocational accounting course, which was more focused on how to run a business/file taxes/balance books, things like that, but it was there for the learning.
Modern European History was a one-year course, three hours a week, and “modern” pretty much meant “we’ll gloss over the Greeks and pick up with Julius Caesar, and everything that has happened in Europe since then.”
Europe in a year. Needless to say it was a course covering a bunch of touchstones with little depth up until, oh, about the 18th Century. Which made perfect sense really as we weren’t Europeans (well, most of us weren’t), we were Americans who were descended from Europeans and were trying to tie all this up to learn where America came from and how we, and by extension Western Europe, got to where we were in the 1980s. Asia would have been a distraction from that goal, as Asia’s influence on America was, at least at that point in time, pretty much limited to the Chinamen who built the railroads, World War II and Toyota cars.
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Interesting. I know very little about American high schools, though I have heard some give driving lessons, which from my perspective is exceedingly weird. What did my school teach? Well, the first year we had Latin (and French) as compulsory subjects. English and mathematics – the Three Rs in general – were given priority, then languages and geography/history for the humanities, with both geo and hist being about almost random areas – the Amazon rain forest or Henrican Catholicism, or the New Deal (bearing in mind this was NOT the US) or how beaches are formed: all very academic and abstruse. Plus the sciences of course. There were some technical classes, but they were aimed squarely at the lower academic levels, those who were not expected to go onto university. There was accounting, but it was not vocational but prep for those that wished to be accountants. That’s the closest I can think of to a vocational course or one that actually was relevant to the outside world. There wasn’t anything about “where we were and how we got there” in terms of recent (past couple of centuries) history. Interesting, the history courses were not overviews at all (at least the ones I took), but, as I have indicated, focused on very particular areas. So Asia did in fact feature, as did other random areas, and I feel that was a good approach in directing our gaze outwards. I cannot recall any subject that had a focus on my own country at all. It was a grammar school, which may account for the style of education, since grammar schools traditionally had a very academic focus.
Incidentally,
http://ejje.weblio.jp/content/grammar+school
informs me that the US uses the term “grammar school” to refer to primary education.
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Idiots devaluing racism.
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i don’t get it,
i am black also
but then again this is happened in Europe
where political correctness is the rage now
i remember they were talking about removing words like “black sheep” from the dictionary(it was on the news one day) and i’m like wtf? that’s dumb
i am black and i don’t find it offensive. i call myself the black sheep of my family.
but whatever
this is stupid
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