Last year Trevor Phillips, chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, angered many equality campaigners by declaring that the label "institutional racism" was "no longer a useful term" . Phillips calculated that if he was able to park the definition – and in so doing remove the common emotive response, "you're just playing the race card", or "we're not racist" – one could have a meaningful conversation about how to make progress. The danger of this trajectory, of course, is that without clear terminology the issue you seek to address can be sidelined. Whichever way we look at it, it's complicated.
Carol Thatcher [the daughter of former prime minister Margareth Thatcher (my note)] was also described as racist for her "golliwog" comment about a black tennis player [French tennis player Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, during the Australian Open, in January 2009, in which Tsonga lost to Spaniard Fernando Verdasco in the quarter-finals (my note)], and [Carol Thatcher] refused to acknowledge she had caused offence. In both these cases we neither had the ability to separate the individual from the comment, nor the linguistic dexterity to effectively describe what had occurred.
(My note) The "golliwog" was a black character in children's books in the late 19th century usually depicted as a type of rag doll. It was reproduced, both by commercial and hobby toy-makers as a children's toy called the "golliwog", and had great popularity in Europe and Australia into the 1970s. The doll is characterised by black skin, eyes rimmed in white, clown lips and frizzy hair.
The image of the doll has become the subject of heated debate. While some see the golliwog as a cherished cultural artifact and childhood tradition, others argue that the golliwog is a destructive instance of racism against people of African descent, along with pickaninnies, minstrels, mammy figures, and other caricatures, and it has been described as "the least known of the major anti-Black caricatures in the United States". In recent years, changing political attitudes with regard to race have reduced the popularity and sales of golliwogs as toys. Manufacturers who have used golliwogs as a motif have either withdrawn them as an icon, or changed the name. In particular, the association of the golliwog with the pejorative term "wog" has resulted in use of alternative names such as "golly" and "golly doll" (Pilgrim, David, 2010).
The image of the doll has become the subject of heated debate. While some see the golliwog as a cherished cultural artifact and childhood tradition, others argue that the golliwog is a destructive instance of racism against people of African descent, along with pickaninnies, minstrels, mammy figures, and other caricatures, and it has been described as "the least known of the major anti-Black caricatures in the United States". In recent years, changing political attitudes with regard to race have reduced the popularity and sales of golliwogs as toys. Manufacturers who have used golliwogs as a motif have either withdrawn them as an icon, or changed the name. In particular, the association of the golliwog with the pejorative term "wog" has resulted in use of alternative names such as "golly" and "golly doll" (Pilgrim, David, 2010).
In between there are different degrees of racial insults: "N—r" and "Paki", for example, are much more demeaning than "those foreigners" or "darkies"; the writer Taki Theodoracopoulos asserts that Caribbean people "multiplied like flies" ['West Indians were allowed to immigrate after the war, multiply like flies and then the great state apparatus took over the care of their multiplications’ (my note)]; Boris Johnson makes patronising and derogatory comments about Africans' "watermelon smiles".
And when the EHRC reported the discrepancies in police stop-and-search rates by ethnicity, it stopped short of calling the force racist because it feared the use of certain language would have immediately closed down the much-needed debate.
With drastic spending cuts looming in areas such as housing, policing and the voluntary sector, minority communities could be disproportionately affected. In this environment, now more than ever we need a better understanding of the multifaceted nature of racism, and a language to help us avoid the polarised positions that have dogged the debate so far.

• [1] Atkinson, Ron, 2004. "fucking lazy thick nigger". The Guardian. Retrieved on Feb., 2015 from newsvote.bbc.co.uk
• [2] Golliwogs, 2003. The doll Golliwog, heated debate. Damali Ayo. Retrieved on Feb., 2015 from www.damaliayo.com
• [3] Griffin, Nick, 2009. "The EU should sink boats carrying illegal immigrants to prevent them entering Europe". BBC News. Retrieved on Feb., 2015 from newsvote.bbc.co.uk
• [4] Mohanty, Kunal, 2009. "Glasgow seaman attacked because of his skin colour". BBC News. Retrieved on Feb., 2015 from newsvote.bbc.co.uk
• [5] Phillips, Trevor, 2009. 'The label "institutional racism", "no longer a useful term" '. BBC News. Retrieved on Feb., 2015 from newsvote.bbc.co.uk
• [6] Pilgrim, David, 2000. ""The Golliwog Caricature"", Ferris State University. Retrieved on Feb., 2015 from http://www.ferris.edu
• [7] Racist Golliwogs, 2009. The "golliwog", a black character. Time. Retrieved on Feb., 2015 from time.com
• [8] Thatcher, Carol, 2009. "Racist remark about tennis player Jo-Wilfried Tsonga". The Guardian. Retrieved on Feb., 2015 from www.theguardian.com
• [9] Theodoracopoulos, Taki, 2009. "Black thugs, sons of black thugs and grandsons of black thugs". BBC News. Retrieved on Feb., 2015 from newsvote.bbc.co.uk
• [10] Woolley, Simon, 2010. "Racism has shades of grey". The Guardian. Retrieved on Feb., 2015 from www.theguardian.com
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