Monday 11 February 2008

Disproportional representation

So the elections are over. Do you care? Did you even vote?

No. Of course you didn’t. I know this, because the voting figures comprised under 15% of the university’s student body. And that minuscule percentage will consist of the candidates, their pets, and that bloke they met at the pub. A few members of the media societies perhaps who have yet to drown in their own hypocrisy.


Voter apathy is a bad habit at so young an age. This being an exceptionally middle-class university, disdain at proletarian ignorance during the general elections usually results in ‘Well...it’s probably a good thing half the population don’t vote. They wouldn’t even know what they’re voting for.’ The SU aren’t quite as cack-handed as the Blair government, but it might be if you don’t tell it what to do. You’re not ‘the population’; you’re in the top 5% of intelligent people in this country. Unless you go to Score.


I covered the elections night on Saturday for RaW. People who asked me about it were generally impressed at the fact that the winning candidate (Stuart ‘Tommo’ Thomas) obtained almost double the votes than rival Peter Ptashko. I told them to fuck off. 1712 votes made Tommo’s victory. That's not an impressive feat. There are approximately 20,000 union members and about 12% of you voted. 1712 people do not represent the Warwick student body; therefore neither does Tommo. I’m not questioning the legitimacy of his win. He is indisputably the Union President, and if you don’t like it, then it’s your own fault. How can Stuart Thomas possibly claim to represent the student body when barely any of them bothered to check out and question his policies? What are his views on No Platform vs. free speech? What is he really going to do about the Union rebuild?


There were some interesting claims in the manifestos which needed serious grilling from the students to ascertain their veracity. How exactly did James Berragan intend to overrule the University and encourage such publications as the Sanctuary? How did Peter Ptashko finally pull off a lecture-free Freshers’ Week? Did Peter Thomas actually have any policies of his own or was he just a Tory Party bitch? Frankly I found all of the presidential candidates an unprepossessing bunch and voted for persistent underdog R.O.N. Although I voted for Woolley second, solely because it was nice to come across something resembling a sense of humour. ‘Nuts about Students’ didn’t quite cut it for me.


Elections intrigues are actually quite interesting, if you look into them. For example, a certain member of the democracy committee is allegedly under investigation for mouthing off about the rivals of a wannabe Sports Officer. Who is, incidentally, her boyfriend. Meanwhile, it’s likely that Tommo garnered a good proportion of his votes from Warwick Snow Society, of which he happens to be President. Warwick Snow isn’t the only society to attempt to monopolise the elections campaigns; there are also candidate clusters from RAG and of course the Tories. RAG, it appears, has won the day showing the Warwick students apparently prize altruism. Or they may just be familiar with new Societies Officer Lucy Reynolds as she chairs the RAG quiz every Sunday. Another wannabe Sports Officer claimed to have founded a club, but failed to mention that he was voted off the exec by his own team. And so on and so forth.


I have, at best, an ambiguous relationship with the SU. I don’t like how soft drinks cost as much as alcohol on a night out. I dislike its insistent monopolisation of student creativity (i.e. a vicious dislike of the Sanctuary). I think that flirt! was a really, REALLY bad idea. I don’t quite understand why it has a pro-life stance. But I do realise that anyone who dislikes any aspect of the SU should probably make things change by voting. This isn’t the general election, and actually, your vote does make a difference.
Get involved. Come on....propose a motion to get rid of Score at the next Union Council meeting. You know you want to. No? Bugger...

Sunday 3 February 2008

Political correctness

Driven to extremes by poverty last term, I risked the campus hairdressers. I was assigned a perfectly pleasant young man who lived in Kenilworth and thought Leamington made an exotic night out. I hate hairdresser/dentist/builder chit-chat but this one was new and as yet not worn down by the tedium of student attempts at small-talk.

As he was making me the new Tina Turner, he questioned my country of origin. Being a British subject, I replied I was English. This appeared to bemuse him and he said, ‘But…you are Indian originally aren’t you?’ I thought it would be unfair to pick out his vague use of ‘originally’ or indeed his assumption that I wasn’t perhaps Pakistani, Filipino, Iranian, Iraqi, Indonesian, Bangladeshi or North African. Strangely, I preferred his direct curiosity to the pained expressions of gap-year students who struggle to ask me the same basic question in politer terms. Ignorance is easier to deal with it when it’s obvious.

So I smiled back at him and replied that my parents were indeed Indian but had been in England for almost 30 years. Without any hesitation, he asked whether my upbringing had been strict. Again, I could have been pedantic about what strictness strictly means. Was he viewing strictness through eyes accustomed to media images of the hijab and honour killings? Because if that was the case, I clearly wouldn’t be sat in a hairdresser’s chair at Warwick uni. To be honest, I don’t think he thought the definition through that much. I looked at him quite carefully as I remarked that my parents were fairly Westernised.

I don’t remember what this man looked like, but I remember his exact tone as he grinned broadly and replied ‘Oh well, we like ‘em like that’.

I was unoffended. He was the man waving scissor blades in close proximity to my face, after all. But there was a genuine innocence in this whole dialogue where I almost felt it was a travesty to read too much into it. But I still don’t know whether I’m excusing ignorance for innocence. Is it right, is it hysterical to question what this man’s attitude would have been to the people who aren’t ‘like that’. And was it worrying that this man can only have been a year older than myself?

Strangely, it was a more subtle episode with a fellow student which troubled me more.

I rarely take offence to racial insults levelled at me, usually because they are in jest. It’s one very confusing symptom of a post-post-post modern culture of irony and self-effacement that allows one white man to call a coloured man ‘chocolate bear’ out of nothing but affection. Some months after my exchange with the hairdresser had taken place, I was assigned a presentation by a tutor. It involved meeting another student to discuss a novel set in Kerala, in South India. South India is as foreign a country to me as it is to most of the Caucasian population. Probably most gap year students know more about it than I do.

I barely knew this student except from a term of seminars together. Yet when it came to working together, he somehow felt it appropriate to comment a propos of nothing that my room decorations were my way of displaying my ethnicity. Everything in my room is from Paperchase, and not from cottage-industry workers as he seemed to presume. I was slightly non-plussed by his non-sequitur but put it down to social awkwardness. When it came to analysing the novel, he proved to be no better than my Kenilworth hairdresser, telling me that I might as well carry the seminar as I’d know more on the subject than anyone else. The beauty of these comments was that they were so indirect. I don’t know what it was about them which annoyed me – the fact that they weren’t funny, that they came from a stranger or whether I just felt they were offensive.

‘Political correctness gone haywire’ is a phrase I often seem to hear from the polite middle-class who constantly attempt to use ‘correct’ terms and phrases when referring to diverse cultures. But the effect of this correctness on the younger generation seems to have led to an almost ideological problem. How can I accuse anyone of prejudice when they make such veiled remarks? Would drawing attention to myself create some kind of negative boy-cried-wolf reputation for trouble? Racism, sexism and all the other isms aren’t as apparent as they were in the 1950’s. Scandals like football-pundit Ron Atkinson in 2004, or more recently Australian cricketer Andrew Symonds this year are actually quite rare in the media.

Middle-class racism is exceptionally difficult to perceive. Under a veil of politically correct language, it’s difficult to differentiate between personal opinion and prejudice. Take Ron Atkinson’s remark: ‘Chinese women are the unprettiest in the world’. Had Big Ron Manager chosen to, he could have quietly hidden the obvious idiocy in this remark behind a more careful phrase, like ‘I personally don’t find Chinese women attractive’. Simply by adding ‘personally’, the speaker implies that his view of Chinese women is not universal. This in itself is of course not racist – but can allow someone who is racist to mask prejudice or ignorance under this kind of veiled dialogue.

I return to the incident over my ethnic decorations and my apparently inherent knowledge of South India. Strip away the mask of vocabulary, and what this student implied was that there was a basic sameness about the myriad Indian cultures. He felt no need to ask my ethnic origin because he assumed a person who looked Indian must be Indian, despite my never making this apparent. He also assumed that however I decorated my room, it was consistently with this ethnicity in mind. But precisely because these two strange remarks were made in a casual, work-oriented context, I am still puzzling out my reactions. I haven’t ever even mentioned to this person that I was uncomfortable with his remarks.

Why should a generation used to that strange animal, ‘multiculturalism’ find it so difficult to communicate? Political correctness is only a virtue when it illumines rather than hides. To know that Kerala is very different from Bengal, to understand that the standards of beauty amongst the Chinese are no more nor less than amongst any other nation and the willingness to accept that Westernisation can be materially damaging – that is political correctness.