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The Comfort of Segregation

Ten-thirty AM. The morning cuppa. Fingers fumbling for Five Live on the kitchen transistor. A minute or two of idle phone-in while the kettle boils. This morning they were debating racial abuse. Whether it was good or bad to use the word ‘nigger’. D’oh. The usual mixture of over-earnest zealots advocating positive discrimination and rabid idiots whining that it’s OK to call the Irish paddies. Etc.

Let’s not get into all that. The one that interested me was the caller who couldn’t understand why the music industry insists on staging an annual Music of Black Origin (MOBO) awards as well as the more mainstream BRIT awards. Or why the Afro-Caribbean community insists on the music industry staging the MOBO awards. The gist of his argument was that if we tried to stage a Music of White Origin awards we’d all be accused of racism. And he was probably right.

Shaky, shaky, shaky ground. Leaving aside the obvious question about whether either of these self-congratulatory shindigs has any value (they don’t), I have to admit to being troubled every time I see the MOBO awards advertised on TV. Not that I don’t like the music, or that I want to see a matching MOWO awards. And certainly not out of any fear or disgust or hatred of black culture. It’s just that there’s something a little… desperate about the whole concept.

Let’s get one thing straight. The BRIT awards show does not exist to celebrate white culture – or any other kind of culture come to that. It’s a beancounters backscratch, originally set up by the Britannia Music Mail Order record club, and totally devoted to the acts that shift the most units in any given year. Creativity doesn’t come into it, unless you still labour under the delusion that marketing is somehow ‘creative’ because it includes nice typography and pictures.

The reason the BRITs appear to reward more white artists than black is because white artists sell more records. And the reason they do that, here in the good ‘ole UK, is that there are more white people out there buying records. We’re one of the most culturally mixed and vibrant countries in the world but the fact remains that there are numerically more people of Caucasian origin living in these islands than there are African, Caribbean, and Asian. That’s not a matter of prejudice – it’s history.

So why not the MOBO Awards? Why not allow our cultural minorities their moment in the limelight? Why not practice a little positive discrimination, if it helps raise the overall profile of Afro-Caribbean music?

I’m aware of the sensitivities here, believe me. But I think my unease stems from that one word ‘minority’. Creating an exclusive awards ceremony for black music wins it the oxygen of publicity (and makes stars of its most compliant artists) but it also segregates it. And that, it seems to me, is the inevitable outcome of any kind of discrimination, negative or positive.

Purely by coincidence, I watched Roman Polanski’s fine film ‘The Pianist’ last night. And I was struck once again (just as I am every time I touch on the literature of the Holocaust) by the great mystery of those times: why did the Jews appear so compliant? Surely, we think, if it had happened here, to the plucky inhabitants of Middle England, we would have fought back? Surely we would never have agreed to go blindly and fearfully into the ghettos? To be discriminated against, separated, segregated?

One of the most common explanations for this apparently inexplicable phenomenon is that, at least in part, European Jewry actually welcomed the segregation. There had been pogroms before, and there had been ghettos before. In some sense it felt safer and easier and more familiar to go behind the walls. And wait.

I don’t know about this. How could anyone know, unless they were there? And I apologise now for trivialising humanity’s darkest moment by drawing tenuous parallels to the truly trivial. But I do think this is what disturbs me about the idea of the MOBO awards (and possibly many other forms of positive discrimination as well). It’s one thing to take pride in the gradual blending of many different cultures – quite another to create your own little cultural ghetto, just so you can play at pop stars like all the white accountants do.