Guardian Unlimited | Germaine Greer | Thousands have complained about the racist bullying of Shilpa Shetty on Big Brother. But we should not be surprised - it simply reflects the widespread bigotry of British society
There are no good reasons for watching Celebrity Big Brother and very good reasons for not. Not watching will spare you the nerve-fraying annoyingness that is Shilpa Shetty. Everything about her is infuriating....What no one seems to have quite understood is that Shilpa is a very good actress. Everyone hates her because she wants them to. She also knows that if she infuriates people enough, their innate racism will spew forth.
As a Tamil, Shetty has certainly had to deal with discrimination at home in suburban Mumbai. Her only motive for parading in front of the other women in the house with whitener on her face was to show what utter hicks they are, how little they understand of her complex reality or of a billion people in the subcontinent who all want to have wheat-coloured skin. I bet thousands of brown-skinned girls in Southall fell off the sofa laughing when she did that.
I can switch Shilpa off. The people in the house with her haven't got that option. The problem is that most of the housemates are too dim to convey what a pain in the ass Shilpa is without appearing to persecute her. So Danielle, beside herself with rage because Shilpa cooks with onions, calls her a dog. Jack Tweed calls her a cunt. The word was bleeped out, leading many viewers to speculate that she had been racially abused. That is not surprising. This is a racist country; to the vast majority of couch potatoes out there, Shilpa is a "Paki bird"....
Every time someone sends in a complaint to Ofcom about racism in the Big Brother house, the profile of the show is raised and Shilpa earns a bit more of her huge fee. But it's a funny old world, to be sure. You can call her a "dog". Sexism is fine. What you mustn't do is call her a "Paki". As if to be Pakistani was to be worse than being a dog. Our very tenderness on this issue is the flip side of racism, and still part of the same coin. If you call me an Aussie you don't insult me because Aussieness is OK. Pakiness is evidently not OK.