I raised a weary eyebrow the other day when Philip Davies, the Tory MP for Shipley, berated various BBC bigwigs, including DG Tony Hall, in a Commons select committee hearing for the Corporation's "racist approach" to diversity.
Hall has apparently planned a boost to black, Asian and ethnic minority representation in the Corporation's output, and Davies' objection is that this is itself racist because it ignores the white working class.
Whilst Davies is clearly wrong - if it's class discrimination it can't have anything to do with race - his argument is slightly more nuanced and interesting than it first appears. "I think the true racist sees everything in terms of race or colour", he said. "Surely what we should be aiming to be is colour blind".
I thought something along these lines a couple of years ago when the Spanish golfer Sergio Garcia said that he intended to cook fried chicken for Tiger Woods. The brilliant American tweeted his displeasure about this apparent piece of racial stereotyping, and Garcia, jumped on by the media, apologised for his remarks. Then the head of the European Golf Tour George O'Grady tried - ineptly - to stand up for Garcia, saying he had "most of his friends are coloured American athletes".
Only someone well out of the metropolitan loop could have made such a schoolboy error. O'Grady soon found himself up to the nostrils in the media thick and sloppy.
The word "coloured" is now well out of order. As far as I can remember it was replaced by "black" at least twenty years ago, although now, at least in the US, the favoured expression seems to be "people of colour". I have no idea what the correct parlance is and personally use the "black", because that was the inoffensive term amongst "black" people when I was growing up.
We have become such a rainbow nation however that "black" no longer fits the bill accurately, not when latte is a more common colour on Britain's streets. I can't bring myself to use "people of colour" (it is ploddingly over-elaborate). "African-American" and "Afro-Caribbean" are cumbersome, and "coloured" reminds me rather too much of Apartheid South Africa. "Black" people have the right to call themselves whatever they choose, but it is of course patronising in itself to imagine that "black" people are a single homogenous group; the reality is that individuals will have different ideas about how they'd like to be addressed. It can be bafflingly difficult for the average white person to avoid giving offence. Sergio Garcia may be a prick, but he probably isn't a racist prick, and as for Mr O'Grady the words "well-intentioned" and "hapless" spring to mind.
All of which brings us back to Philip Davies MP. And yes, "what we should be aiming to be is colour blind". Absolutely. Britain is not a colour blind country, but it has made such massive strides in that direction that I sometimes wonder whether hyper-sensitivity about race is counter-productive. If we're trying to get to a situation where race doesn't matter, why do people so often make such a fuss about it on such modest pretexts? Of course there are various withering put-downs possible to that question, but are we not at least approaching the point where saying "Oh well, never mind" every now and again might at least be an option worth considering?
If Tiger Woods had simply shrugged and said, "Sergio can cook me fried chicken whenever he likes", he would have emerged from the furore with his reputation (and by association that of his fellow - cringe - people of colour) very much enhanced.
