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Golliwog

Why is it that the main effect of political correctness (pc) is to inconvenience the masses. I fully support the idea of showing sensitivity towards other people's feelings, however I don't feel that banning the odd word or phrase from general use is helping anybody. It simply makes life more difficult for normal reasonable people who are faced with the growing burden of trying to remember what they can and can't say. If you call an ambulance for someone because they are writhing violently on the floor and devouring their own tongue, is it ok to say they are having a fit, or are you being politically incorrect? Apparently you must now use the word seizure, however when focusing on the bigger picture i.e. the gesture of helping someone in need, surely it doesn't matter what you say.

I am convinced that everyone has failed to observe pc at some point. A person could quite innocently be using a term and not know for months/years that they are using unacceptable language, as many pc decisions go virtually unannounced. This is particularly common in older generations who have used certain words and phrases all their lives without any malice or discriminatory intent. On occasion the powers that be will make a public declaration against something they see as discriminatory, and as a result it will be banished forever from our culture. This is what happened to the Golliwog, a popular icon in children's fiction that was laid to rest in 1999 when Robertson's (the jam manufacturer) dropped the caricature from their packaging labels.

I have been giving much thought to Golliwogs recently, and in many ways this article is my belated tribute to a pleasant childhood memory and innocent victim of political correctness. As a child I never made any connection between a Golliwog and an ethnic minority, in fact I thought of them as mythical creatures, a bit like the goblins and gnomes which populated children's fiction of the same era.

The Oxford Dictionary describes a Golliwog as a soft doll with a black face and fuzzy hair, and the word originates from the name of a doll character in books by the 19th century American writer Bertha Upton. The Golliwog came to the UK in the early 1900s when Robertson's began using them as its trademark. According to the company's promotional literature, it was in the USA , just before World War I, that John Robertson first encountered the Golly doll. He saw children playing with little black rag dolls with white eyes. The children's mothers made the dolls from discarded black skirts and blouses. He also claimed that the children called the dolls "Golly" as a mispronunciation of "Dolly".

The reason that the Golliwog is considered politically incorrect is because the term wog was used as a racial slur during the mid twentieth century; in particular during the 1960's, as a way of describing Arabs and other coloured people. In spite of this, research indicates that the majority of coloured people do not find the character offensive, and that when school-children are presented with the image of a Golliwog, they don't associate it with an ethnic minority.

My research indicates that the Golliwog is rarely portrayed in a negative way in children's books, and certainly no more so than any other character. The Golliwog was a key figure in the Noddy series by Enid Blyton, yet is only portrayed as a villain in one story. At this stage I would hastily add that I looked that up, and haven't in fact being catching up on the adventures of the vertically-challenged male and his portly chum. A cursory glance through the Enid Blyton back catalogue suggests she was no racist, and in fact wrote popular adventure stories which are enjoyed by children from all cultures across the world. Perhaps if she had written such books as Five Go Mental in Brixton, where the Famous Five attempt to start a race riot in South-West London, there would at least be some weight to the argument against her work.

Much of the political correctness movement over the last 20 years has been led by people with, dare I say it, nothing better to do with their time than make weak associations between everyday language and varying forms of discrimination. One of the most absurd examples I've heard was on a TV chat show some years ago, where a guest declared that Black Monday was a racist term, suggesting that the stock market crash of 1987 was actually being used to perpetuate racist ideologies. If we are to accept that the Golliwog is a negative stereotype, then do we ban Goofy and Bugs Bunny on the basis that they ridicule children with protruding teeth, or indeed Barbie, who mocks the footballer's wife with her lavish lifestyle? In fairness the average footballer's wife thinks Bang and Olufsen is a stereotype, so I guess we can keep Barbie, but it's about time the pc movement started to tackle the root cause of issues such as racism, rather than pretending to deal with them by banning children's toys.

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