BBC1’s Silent Witness has become embroiled in a ‘one-way racism’ row after a recent episode featured a not-very-inclusive epithet employed by a visibly non-white character against a white one.
This is the crime drama series which focuses on solving murders with the help of the ‘silent witness’ – the victim.
New arrival Roy Lock, who is black, inquires about Kevin, a white man trying to play basketball with local black characters. Roy asks Leo, a black teenager, ‘Who’s whitey?’ When Leo replies: ‘He’s my aunt’s friend. He likes to think he’s looking after me’, Roy mocks: ‘White saviour?’ Leo, chuckling, responds: ‘Yeah, whatever.’
A BBC spokesman maintained: ‘Silent Witness is an established fictional drama series set in the modern world. The dialogue used was in keeping with this character who is not depicted in a sympathetic light.’ The show’s synopsis describes Roy Lock as ‘an antagonist who uses threats and intimidation’.
Clearly Roy, a convicted drug dealer, is not a positive role model for anyone, black or white; but equally clearly a similar linguistic latitude would not be allowed to unsympathetic white characters, and Roy seems strangely well versed in wokespeak.
Woke warriors (aka the BBC) see racism everywhere apart from that aimed at white characters. Various vintage comedies, such as Till Death Us Do Part and It Ain’t Half Hot Mum which mercilessly mocked prejudice are now banned or prefaced with warnings about outdated language and attitudes. Sadly, being funny will not save them: woke humour is a contradiction in terms.
Racism, a real evil, involves judging people not by their actions but by selected inherited characteristics, illogically judging whole races based on their skin colour and/or ethnic origins.
Silent Witness fails to understand this, nor that ‘racism’ is not as widespread as alleged. Indeed, in the absence of real racism, the 2016 Brexit vote served as ‘evidence’ for the ‘anti-racist’ brigade, as now does support for a ‘populist’ party. The opinion-forming classes simply assume that everyone (else) is racist, hence the endless woke lectures on racism conveyed via TV dramas and commercials.
This Silent Witness episode ticked all the woke boxes, including disability: Roy is killed (accidentally and for a good reason of course) by Kevin, who is mentally challenged.
In woke drama, any non-white character who commits a crime is ‘driven to it’ by white characters or by circumstances, i.e. forced into it by society’s inbuilt prejudice.
We have gone from knowing in advance that ‘the butler did it’ to knowing that the minority character will be innocent.
Another BBC drama staple, Spooks, might illustrate the danger of being spooked by a white face. As G K Chesterton observed, if we ever saw a real white man, we would run down the road screaming in terror. In real life, people are neither black and white, and racism is not a black and white issue.
It is rather an issue which has been weaponised and reversed – by left-liberal progressives to virtue-signal and by cultural Marxists to create division – regardless of the distress caused in racially diverse families and the risk of harm to minorities who may bear the brunt of any resentment stirred by the woke tokenism of their self-appointed defenders, and regardless of the cruel demonisation of working-class white males.
Yet diversity campaigners in institutions and corporations everywhere, especially in the ‘entertainment’ industry who shoehorn ‘minority’ issues, characters and storylines into practically every TV programme, never ask whether the minorities they champion would rather not be continually pointed out as different. Or whether they themselves are not guilty of reverse prejudice and discrimination.
Rather they preen themselves on their alertness to attacks on minorities, needless to say only to those of whose ‘plight’ they approve. This never includes the disabled threatened by the inexorable move to assisted dying, the Nigerian Christians massacred in their thousands, or the disproportionate slaughter of non-white babies before birth – black lives which appear not to matter much.
My worry is that for all the public furore over Silent Witness it is likely only to further the cultural Marxist campaign, which thrives on dividing communities by promoting mutual suspicion and, yes, prejudice.
