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It's fairly apparent to me (dunno about the rest of you) that while Jade may have been the bullying ringleader, she was probably the 'least bad' of all three of the witches when it came to the racism. Danielle had the traditional English racist's horrifying comments down, Jo was snide and crypto-racist in the way that around 40% of the people in my department at work have down pat, and Jade was the loud brassy one who couldn't keep her opinions or her mouth to herself. That Jade's being demonised so much is a little worrying... like someone said upthread, it's like we can point at her and say "look, 82% of the country voted her out, we must be doing ok as a nation! And she's a horrible pig-faced bully! We're not!"
For me, endemic casual bullying has always been part of the English national character. We're not a pleasant race, as a rule. We like slagging things off, dragging things down, deciding who is in need of a kicking and why, and rationalising whatever we do by virtue of the old stand-by, "they was asking for it." This person is smug or arrogant, that person is patronising or 'has a punchable face' (a lovely phrase used fairly often on this message board, actually meaning "I want to punch that person's face because I don't like it" but that transfers the blame for this to the face itself), etc. We like bitching about things, usually only when it's safe to do so (ie on the internet or behind someone's back, or when it's funny so that we can pretend that someone would laugh with us if they could hear what we were saying). Incidentally, I'm not using the first person plural to avoid sounding sanctimonious, I'm using it because I recognise that to a certain extent, sometimes quite a large extent, I myself do it too.
Anyway, looks like Jade's 'asking for it' now.
Realistically what makes sense here is that there are appropriate and proportionate consequences, an equal and opposite reaction that goes as far as is practical towards balancing the scales. So the woman is likely to have lost a large proportion of the career that she's spent five years building up, and has very little in the way of fall back options. She's not profited out of the show (her CBB fee and the fee charged for the News Of The World interview have been donated to charity), and she's going to be working on damage limitation and re-evaluating if/how she's going to make a living now for a while to come. Considering what she's actually said and done while in the house, this seems sufficient. Effectively, she's had the self-employed celebrity-for-the-sake-of-it equivalent of losing her job over this, and potentially the career in which she worked. There's also bound to be a degree of fallout with the whole 'walking down the street getting abused' thing, (although I hear Tesco's online ordering service is pretty damn on the money these days). Shall we say she's had enough and move on?
I know people in my team at work who voted to evict Shilpa last Friday, by the way, and a lot more who didn't vote, despite the fact that they would ordinarily. They're convinced Jade wasn't being racist herself. They've made similar comments before themselves, and didn't mean it. There is a sense I'm getting today that a lot of people here didn't vote to evict Jade because to do so would be a little too much like voting to evict themselves... not sure what to make of that. |
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