Smile When You Call Me That
Hey I feel marginalized and neglected and I yearn – I yearn, I tell you, I yearn and burn and pine – to be understood as a community. Won’t someone please understand me as a community? It would make me so happy. Just once in awhile? On weekends maybe? Or during the World Cup?
Hindus…feel neglected and marginalised and yearn to be understood as a community…[They] do not want to be described as “Asian”, according to a big study of the community…The report, Connecting British Hindus, to be published in the Commons today, was funded by the Government and carried out by the Runnymede Trust and the Hindu Forum.
Connecting British Hindus. Connecting them to the community. The Hindu community – not the Asian community – no no – Asian community right out, not to be connected to. The community in ‘the community’ is the Hindu community and not some other kind, else there will be yearning and feelings of neglect. See – if it were called the Asian community, then no one would call it The Community in that thrilling way, whereas if it’s called The Hindu Community, people will. See?
Note the funding by the Hindu Forum. That’s those nice people who got the Husain exhibition closed down. Another reactionary religious ‘forum’ claiming to speak for the whole ‘community’ and being taken at face value by a major newspaper.
Sunny at Pickled Politics notes some bad methodology in that ‘study’:
The survey was carried out through people in focus groups that the Hindu Forum personally invited and an online survey only promoted through their website. The report does not acknowledge there might be a bias towards more religious Hindus than simply cultural Hindus because of this. Not only that, the survey doesn’t actually ask if respondents prefer a Hindu identity over an Asian identity. It asks vaguely interconnected questions and does not pose the question – Do you prefer being described as Hindu or Asian? The Hindu Forum has an obvious interest in promoting this viewpoint because, like the MCB and other religious organisations, they want people to be identified by religion rather than race. That would mean more government/media attention (and money) would go to faith than race groups. Of course, being ‘Asian’ is a very, very vague label that totally ignores the diversity of Asians. But that is a good thing in my opinion because it means less people can speak on our behalf. In fact why not just refer to us as Britons and do away with “community leaders”?
Gosh, there’s a radical idea!
At sp!ked Neil Davenport repeats the now standard but necessary points, and adds this example on the way that multiculturalism focuses all discontent on to narrow questions of ethnic identity:
“…what official multiculturalism seeks to engineer is ‘recognition’ of suffering rather than any meaningful cultural engagement. It is fundamentally about recognition that someone’s ethnic genealogy has suffered persecution in the past or been excluded from centres of power, or both….
“Interestingly, but not surprisingly, it becomes a rather different matter when ethnic minorities assert economic rather than cultural demands. By the phoney remit of multiculturalism, last year’s strike involving Gate Gourmet workers at Heathrow airport should have been seen as a model of diversity and inclusion. After all, the strikers involved were predominately from Sikh and Hindu backgrounds, and there were many women on the picket lines, too. Yet there were no congratulations from New Labour ministers, no leader articles in the press marvelling at multicultural trade unionism. In fact they were mostly discussed in the same terms as other striking workers – as an irritation.”
http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/1020/
Ah yes – Gate Gourmet. This is what I’ve been saying. Classic example of why poor people are so desirable and useful – as long as they don’t strike. The point about people from Sikh and Hindu backgrounds is that they are part of a pool of cheap labour, and the drooling about diversity is an afterthought. Sort of like rich white people thinking they’re multiculturalists because they have a Hispanic gardener. And don’t you think there are no rich white people like that, because there are.
P.S. Thanks for the link.