Posts Tagged ‘racism’

The Athletics Union (AU) of the London School of Economics (LSE) has condemned an incident in which some members of the society dressed up as Guantanamo Bay inmates and drunkenly yelled ‘Oh Allah’ outside the college bar.

At least a dozen students attending the December 4^th ‘Carol’, the annual fancy-dress Christmas party for all sports teams, chose to wear costumes deemed “racist, religiously insensitive and demeaning”.  These included students who painted their faces brown and wore orange jump suits in imitation of Guantanamo Bay inmates, and others who claimed to be dressed as ‘Somalian pirates’.

After complaints from students, the AU President Charlie Glyn wrote a joint statement with Student Union General Secretary Aled Dilwyn Fisher in The Beaver, LSE’s student newspaper, which condemned the actions “of a minority of students” as “racist, religiously insensitive and demeaning”.

They wrote: “This behaviour is completely at odds with the anti-racist principles of the Students’ Union and the internationalist, diverse and tolerant majority of the student body”.

They went on to state that the AU and Students’ Union (SU) were “working together to put in strict regulations and that any club or society that chooses to contravene these will be held accountable”.

London Student understands that the AU has a long history of causing controversy at its social events, and this year’s ‘Carol’ is thought to be the first time in several year’s they have been allowed to drink on LSE’s campus. Students paid £10 for a ticket and many started drinking at 11am.

LSE SU Treasurer George Wetz said that the society’s budget had not been docked, but it has been given a warning. He added that in future “All costumes will have to be checked and approved beforehand which is just a lot more trouble for everyone”.

The letter also said that the AU Executive Committee “sent a clear message to all Club Captains before the event that costumes worn must fit within the Student Unions’ Equal Opportunities policy.” But London Student was told by one LSE student that an email had been sent around at least one team stating that “it is our duty to offend”.

LSE student Samer Araabi, in a comment piece in The Beaver, called what he had seen “unquestionably one of the most insulting, offensive, and downright frightening acts of racism I have ever witnessed”. He further stated that such actions meant he did not “feel safe on my own campus”, as an Arab Muslim student.

According to Glyn and Fisher’s letter, the sports teams in question had “no malicious or racist intent” but had acted in an “ill thought out and immature” way.

Emma Kelly, a 1^st year International History student, commented: “In terms of punishment I think they got away lightly. Personally I think they should have their budgets cut, they get a lot of money each year (especially when compared to societies like the LGBT who get very little in comparison).

“If my understanding of the budget is correct the AU get about £70,000, which is about £22 per member whereas the LGBT society get around £500, which is about £4 a member. I think that this is the only way to make them actually pay attention and stop such activities. LSE is one of the most international and diverse universities in the country and its really shocking that people think that such behaviour is acceptable. Frankly, it makes me feel embarrassed and offended.”

Glyn also publicly apologised on behalf of the AU in front of students at yesterday’s Union General Meeting.

Four students were stabbed and others injured after being attacked by a group of up to 30 people armed with bricks and metal poles, on Thursday November 5^th, in what has been described as the “culmination” of a “series of attacks” that week.

The students appear to have been targeted because of their religion, as the attackers are said to have shouted “terrorist” and “get the Muslims” as well as racist abuse such as “Paki”.

Three of those stabbed were prominent members of the Islamic Society and were leaving the prayer room in City University’s Gloucester Building in Islington, North London when they were apparently ambushed. Witnesses said two others were badly beaten in St John Street near the university.

The Federation of Student Islamic Societies (FOSIS) said that several similar incidents had taken place prior to Thursday, including an attack the Monday when bricks were thrown and one Muslim student reportedly suffered a fractured skull.

A FOSIS statement said: “The attacks have come amidst calls for the University to increase security and ensure student welfare on campus.  The Student Union’s response to the attacks has been both swift and fully supportive of both the Islamic Society and Muslim students. Interim security measures have been introduced by the University and the Metropolitan police who have understood the serious nature of these attacks.”

Qasim Rafiq of FOSIS said: “We believe these attacks involved the same group but there have been sporadic attacks at other universities over the last year. We are in consultation with the police and university authorities and want reassurance that the measures they are putting in place to protect students are permanent, not just temporary.”

City University Islamic Society posted statement on its website saying urged all students to take extra care, and for Muslim students especially to “be cautious and go home early and in groups; never split or head off on your own”.

Another message said the students who had been hurt were “recovering”.

Witnesses said white and black youths among the group of attackers. Following the incident, police have arrested three teenagers aged between 17 and 19, and are thought to be investigating links to the attacks on previous days.

City’s Acting Vice-Chancellor, Julius Weinberg, emailed all students and staff to say that university security would be increasing its presence.

A spokesperson from City University said: “We’re shocked and saddened that some of our students have been the victims of an attack near the University. 

The University is taking this matter very seriously; the safety of students and staff is very important. University security has increased its presence at prayer meetings and has also increased the volume of its campus wide patrols. We are of course working very closely with the local Police on this matter and as it is a criminal matter, we continue to take their guidance.”

1967 is often considered something of a watershed for cinema, the year in which the counter-cultural sensibilities of the sixties began to seep through into the mainstream and presage of the so-called ‘New Hollywood’, with the commercial and critical success of The Graduate and Bonnie and Clyde paving the way. It was also a busy year for Sidney Poitier, the top box office star of that year and the first black male to win the Academy Award in 1963, who starred in three pictures that purported to deal with serious social and racial fissures of the time, to varying degrees of success. In addition to school-set melodrama To Sir, with Love, Poitier took centre stage in two other self-consciously culturally significant efforts that yearned for Oscar attention.

The first was In the Heat of the Night, a sweaty, raw but ultimately pat police procedural that the actor still cites as his favourite work, its most famous line (“They call me MISTER Tibbs!”) remaining well-known and much-parodied to this day. The second was Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, a toothless Stanley Kramer prestige picture, which boasted the final pairing of Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy and little else. Both were touted at the time as laudable films that wouldn’t shy away from the issue of race, thrusting Sidney Poitier as they did into overwhelmingly ‘white’ environments – a prison cell in a small Southern town, the dinner table of an upper-class liberal family – and having him triumph over backwardness and bigotry. The films were feted with awards (In the Heat of the Night winning for Best Picture), and praised for their forthrightness. But Poitier’s career was never to scale such heights again.

Viewing these films retrospectively in this allegedly ‘post-racial’ clime, it’s tempting to see the outwardly progressive agendas of both In the Heat of the Night and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner as bald and condescending; thinly-veiled attempts to cash in on liberal guilt and play it as straight entertainment. Granted, we have to watch these films in the context of the era they were made. But even then, they were both, to some extent, preaching to the converted: by the end of each film, a stubbornly antagonistic white male (Rod Steiger in Heat, Spencer Tracy in Dinner) has become reconciled to Poitier’s character’s inherent worth and value, this staggering feat apparently only possible by solving a local murder or enduring several hours’ worth of embarrassment in front of your girlfriend’s parents. By the same token Poitier is idealised to a ridiculous degree. He’s the street-smart homicide detective amongst a gaggle of idiot racists in In the Heat of the Night, and in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner his character is deified to such laughable heights (an internationally-respected doctor who lectures in Hawaii and Switzerland) it derails the film almost entirely.

Both films never transcend the narrow trappings of their ‘social issues’ agenda. Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, however, is ultimately the weaker effort. Like Kramer’s The Defiant Ones before it, Poitier is taken to be emblematic of all African-Americans firstly, and a character in his own right secondly, only existing as a social phenomena that must be ‘solved’ by the film’s self-righteous protagonists. At least In the Heat of the Night, which was to spawn two sequels featuring Poitier’s Virgil Tibbs, makes attempts at raw exuberance and grim violence, even if its strident rhetoric would’ve merely reaffirmed its largely liberal audience’s pre-existing beliefs. Considering blaxploitation would erupt as a sub-genre just four years later with the release of the incendiary Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song and Shaft, Poitier’s 1967 pair come off as overly mannered and woefully naive. Both should take comfort, though, in the fact that neither are as austere and mincing as Paul Haggis’ insipid race-relations drama and Worst Best Picture Oscar winner ever, 2004’s Crash, which propounds the notion that having Sandra Bullock fall down the stairs will cure her, and by extension the whole of Los Angeles, of their intractable racial prejudices.

Race continues to be a divisive and trenchant issue in contemporary American society, as the wrongful arrest of Henry Gates, Glenn Beck’s continued lunacy at Fox News and ex-President Carter’s recent claims of racism against Barack Obama will testify. Invariably these issues will always reach our cinema screens. Few attempt something genuinely radical; the ones that do flare heated, but often productive debate, by conceptualising people of different races with appropriate individuality and dignity. Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing is the obvious example here. Perhaps it would be better if we didn’t shower the rest of the more ham-fisted attempts with Oscars. But 1967 was a watershed for cinema, in that it opened the channels of racial discourse. And however cloying some of the end results seem today, it would be a grave mistake to consign these issues to a past conceived as either ‘dead’ or ‘irrelevant’.