I caught the tail end of an article on the BBC news where in an article, newspaper columnist, Kelvin MacKenzie had likened Ross Barkley (who is white) to gorilla, and as it turned out later, Barkley’s father was Nigerian. Apparently MacKenzie wasn’t aware of this at the time – however for me that’s not the issue, neither are the other crass and insensitive comments MacKenzie made in the article, not only about Barkley, but sweeping generalisations about people from Liverpool.
My issue, is why in 2017, the media deems it to be valid to reflect a link between a man, beyond the notion of his physique, but focused on his ancestry, with a gorilla?
We fear gorillas not only because of their domineering physical presence, but because they are animals and we can’t communicate or reason with them. Are we in 2017 still… still wanting to portray this attitude toward people of African descent?
There may have been an unwitting comment by MacKenzie, but what worries me more is the media machine, indeed reflective of common modes of thought in society, that falls back on thinking that must be at least 500 years old, when by now today, we should really know better.
I’m sure if a tribe of people lived with gorillas for hundreds of years and shared a common language, both the gorillas and the tribe would know by that time the true characteristics of each other. It is strange that some white people, as exemplified by the media fuss around this story, have not realised the true characteristics of black people – even today with all the different modes of communication and translation we have.
There is something else at play here, which shows a contempt for our common history, the benefit of hindsight, and this reflects the kind of sometimes ignorant, but always blind prejudice that exists in the fabric of society, and forms part of that amorphous, metaphysical and cultural construct that manacles the black mind and sets the white mind on an undeserved pedestal.