In the long and illustrious history of race chancing, there must have been many more egregious examples than that of Noel Deans’s recourse to court because a colleague ‘fist-bumped’ him rather than shaking his hand, but I can’t think of any right now. Certainly not over here in the UK, where we still lag a little behind the inventiveness of the top American chancers.
It is quite possible that, through the best of intentions, I will appear before a tribunal one of these days
The case brought by Mr Deans against RBG Holdings was one of racial discrimination. He alleged that on one occasion the firm’s senior partner, Ian Rosenblatt, greeted him with a fist-bump, which is apparently a common form of greeting among the African-Caribbean community from which Mr Deans hails. He told the tribunal: ‘In a professional environment I have never seen someone fist-bump a white new junior. It is customary to shake hands.’
For his part, Mr Rosenblatt said that he fist-bumped Mr Deans because he was elated at having him on his team – a heady delight which I think we can assume dimmed a little during the course of Mr Deans’s tenure. Tribunals can be guilty of astonishing gullibility, of course, but this was too much even for them. Considering Mr Rosenblatt’s greeting of Mr Deans with a fist-bump, the judgment said that the gesture was a ‘misjudgment’ and ‘insensitive’ but did not find the conduct met the threshold for constituting unlawful race-related harassment. The firm was cleared on all charges.
It is an excruciatingly tricky business, isn’t it? How should one greet people from a different background? My own recourse is, I admit, flawed, but at least demonstrates a sensitivity to racial difference. When I am introduced to a person of colour I always shout ‘Kasserian Ingera!’ and then perform a short but evocative dance, in the hope that the person I am greeting hails from the Masai warrior people, for whom this is a traditional salutation. The problem here is that not every person of colour hails from the Masai warrior people: I know that, I am not an idiot. But my thinking is that wherever they have their own origins – be it a savannah wilderness in Kenya or, say, the barren mountains of the Hindu Kush – they will at least appreciate that I have made an effort to accommodate their culture.
Much like Mr Rosenblatt, I would be reluctant to shake hands because it would be an immediate signifier of an oppressive white power structure, quite alien and indeed repugnant to all people of colour, of course. So it is quite possible that, through the best of intentions, I will appear before a tribunal one of these days. I do wonder if Mr Rosenblatt also uttered the words ‘Wah gwaan?’ when he performed his fist-bumping. As Mr Rosen-blatt is a prominent donor to the Labour party, I would guess the answer is ‘yes’, but I cannot be sure.
I wondered a little how the chief executive officer of BBC News, Deborah Turness, greets people of colour – whether she, too, shouts ‘Kasserian Ingera!’ and does a dance. Probably wise not to speculate, as she might put the BBC’s brilliant Verify team on my case, the very quintessence of fact-based, empirical, unpartisan journalism. Ms Turness and the rest of them over there at New Broadcasting House think they’ve all been doing a sterling job recently and that their coverage of the war between Israel and Gaza has been impeccably balanced: that is one of the benefits of living inside a bubble, I suppose – you are always right, whatever the story.
A while ago I wrote about the BBC’s coverage, suggesting that it was indeed biased and that a substantial reason for that was the presence of loads of journos from the corporation’s Arabic service being used as independent and non-partisan observers. As I pointed out, the BBC used quite a few journalists who are Palestinian nationals and who seemed, through their reports, to have… y’know… a certain viewpoint regarding Israel – and yet had no Israeli nationals reporting the war, so far as I could tell. That, plus the perverse and counter-rational decision (presumably by Ms Turness) to eschew calling Hamas terrorists, claiming the corporation never uses the word (when it does, pretty much every week), seemed to me to somewhat colour the BBC’s coverage.
Perhaps you disagree – Turness certainly did. Luckily, we now have an independent report from lawyer Trevor Asserson and a team of data scientists which suggests that in my original article I gravely understated the case. Asserson concluded that the BBC ‘displayed a deeply worrying pattern of bias’ against Israel. Asserson stated in the introduction to his report that the BBC had not met its legal obligations in covering the war, namely: 1. To report accurately; 2. To report with due impartiality; and 3. To avoid the expression of personal views by BBC journalists. Asserson added: ‘The report finds that there have been material breaches by the BBC of a number of its legal obligations.’
The weird decision not to describe Hamas as terrorists was dealt with, along with the BBC’s grandstanding about how they never use the word. But most importantly, perhaps, was the recognition that the BBC used correspondents and contributors from an Arab background who described the grotesque events of 7 October last year as a ‘morning of hope’, and another who defended a Lebanese journalist who said, ‘Sir Hitler, rise, there are a few people that need to be burned’, which seems to me a tad on the anti-Semitic side. In fact the BBC itself furloughed a bunch of these Jew-hating maniacs a couple of months into the war, although whether or not it has since re-employed them, I have no idea. Perhaps Debs can tell us.
It may come as a surprise to you to learn that the Asserson Report has not dominated the BBC’s news bulletins. And then again, perhaps it might not surprise you that much. Or maybe BBC Verify have assured Debs it wasn’t worth bothering with.
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