Golly, Gee.
If there’s one thing that proves how racist British society is, it’s the desperate, panicked responses by old white people whenever you point out something racist. “I’m not racist!” they screech, usually followed by “you can’t say anything these days!” or “We used to call them that all the time!”
This is often said in the guilty tone of someone trying - and barely managing - to choke back a confession. They have the wild-eyed denial of someone who, in the middle of a conversation about fly fishing or stamp collecting, suddenly blurts that they never, even once, tried on their sister’s underwear when they were fourteen.
So it has been in recent weeks with another of the seemingly endless “debates” about the golliwog.
For those who are blissfully unaware, allow me to do what I always do and carve away another piece of your faith in humanity. Golliwogs are dolls that are designed to resemble caricatured black people, in the style of the old black and white minstrel shows. The original golliwog was a character for children’s books in the late 1800s and became a popular toy in years gone by. They were still used as an advertising mascot by a British marmalade company until, I assumed, the early 1990s.
I assumed the early ‘90s because I can still remember seeing golliwog badges as a child, when things were way more racist than anyone was willing to admit. (Cue screeching about how Britain isn’t racist and you can’t say anything these days, as above.)
Some of the insistence that the UK wasn’t racist in the 90s is down to Britain in the pre-internet era not fully grasping American racism. Whilst Minstrel shows had been popular in the UK as in America, certain American stereotypes of black people may not have been immediately recogniseable. Which still doesn’t excuse this ad for the soft drink Kia-Ora, which I can clearly remember seeing on TV as a kid.
In case you’re somewhere where racist ads shouldn’t be played (a location I’ll refer to as “basically anywhere”) that’s an ad in which a Tar Baby is drinking Kia-Ora (a drink named after a Maori greeting, meaning the company was also being a dick to the people of New Zealand in passing) and a series of black crows want to take it from him. The crows are variously portrayed as a basketball player, a mammy with a sack of laundry, and a jazz musician.
I can’t stress enough that this was just another run-of-the-mill ad on TV when I was young. Which might explain why golliwogs were still prevalent as a cute collectible at the time. And when I said earlier that I assumed the golliwogs were retired sometime in the 90s, I was wrong. They persisted until 2001. So British kids were still encouraged to collect racist caricatures of black people as toys until this century.
Which brings us back to the current news about golliwogs. There has been an outcry from tedious bigots on social media after a pub in Essex that had a display of the dolls was raided by police and the golliwogs confiscated for being racially offensive.
The usual arguments from the “I’m not a racist!” crowd have spewed forth. “I had golliwog dolls when I was a kid and I’m not racist!” is the most common point, along with “They’re just toys and there’s nothing offensive about them!”
Obviously, the golligwog is an extension of the racist tradition of the blackface minstrel, a character designed to mock black people, and this has been explained ad nauseum. But the people who want to defend ownership of golliwogs have essentially fallen back on their eternal argument: “I don’t see anything racist/sexist/homophobic about this and I’m refusing to listen to minorities/women/gay people when they explain why it is!”
Or, to paraphrase: “I’m not discriminating against these people whose opinions and feelings I purposefully ignore.”
To play Devil’s Advocate for a moment: When I saw the Kia-Ora ad as a child, or a golliwog badge, I didn’t think they were racist. But I certainly fucking do now, because I’ve listened to what black people have to say. If you’re reading this you’re already on the internet, and it’s a great way to hear other viewpoints and educate yourself on some stuff. There are books you can order and everything.
Not that anyone in the aforementioned Essex pub will be doing that. The arguments on social media about whether or not the dolls are offensive are ignoring a pretty major sticking point: The pub landlord was objectively racist and his Facebook profile (now deleted) showed him supporting a number of far right groups, as well as making references to lynchings next to images of the golliwog dolls hanging over the bar, just in case anyone was still trying to play the "ignorance" card.1
“We had lynchings when I was a kid and I’m not a racist!” is not an argument anyone is quite willing to put forward, but you can tell some people want to.
In the last week or so, the pub has been forced to close as breweries have severed all ties and refused to deal with them. A spokesperson for Heineken was quoted as saying:
"After being made aware of the abhorrent display feature in the White Hart Inn, we advised the pub owners that we want nothing more to do with them.
They go against everything we stand for.
We believe pubs should be places of inclusivity and respect for all people, regardless of their race, ethnicity, religion or gender."
CAMRA, the Campaign for Real Ale, have also removed the pub in question from their lists and revoked its previous “Pub of the Year” award. Supply company Innserve, meanwhile, is reportedly terminating its services to the pub, which included periodically cleaning their beer lines.
All of which seems pretty fair. Despite their protestations, the couple who run the pub are racist scumbags and got what they deserved.
Except…
I worked in pubs and bars for a dozen years. And there are a lot of things that don’t add up, here.
Firstly, the couple running the place are crooked. I don’t know what they’re into, but it’s something illegal and something big. The husband is reportedly out of the country at the time of writing, at the couple’s other property in Turkey.
Show me a bar manager with property - not just property in another country, I mean show me a bar manager who owns their own house - and I’ll show you someone who didn’t make that money running a pub. Landlords with “second house in Turkey” money, especially if they’re from Essex, are almost certainly involved in some shady stuff.
This, then, explains the police raid. Because although the bar sounds like a racist, Brexiteer dive, it’s still somewhat heavy-handed to have police raid the premises for the sake of some dolls. Having racist imagery in your shitty pub really feels more like a “send a cease and decist letter” situation. My guess is that the raid was a shot across the bow from the local constabulary under the pretext of enforcing discrimination laws.
What’s also telling is that Innserve have stopped cleaning their beer lines.
If you’re one of the many obliviously lucky people who have never run a pub, you have no reason to know this, but beer lines have to be cleaned regularly. I’m talking once a week. You have to disconnect the kegs, pour out all the beer that’s still in the pipes, definitely not spend the rest of the after hours period drinking it2, then run a sterilising solution through the tubes to kill off any yeast that the beer has deposited and that would otherwise begin to grow there. Then you flush it all out with water and reconnect the kegs.
It’s a pain, but crucially, it’s not difficult. It’s just slightly time consuming. And yet the proprietors of the pub in question were having an outside company come in to do it for them, which means they didn’t know how to do it themselves. Anyone who runs a pub should know how to clean their lines, so we’re back to my theory that they’re not real publicans and are actually making their money in some other way.
This doesn’t, however, let Innserve off the hook as neatly as their decision to sever ties might cause them to hope. Because if someone is coming in to clean the beer lines once a week (and they should have been) then there’s no way in hell they didn’t notice a collection of racist dolls. It’s not entirely clear whether the Golliwog dolls were permanently strung up over the bar or if that was just for the one Facebook “joke” and the dolls were merely lying around as decoration the rest of the time, but it doesn’t matter. Whoever cleaned the lines knew full well they were there. Innserve didn’t give a shit until the story went viral, and then they had to leap forward as moral champions.
Ditto Heineken. If you are buying beer (or anything else) from a company like Heineken, it’s not an anonymous process. They will send out a company representative semi-regularly to check up on you and see how things are going, what products you might need, what is or isn’t selling, what deals might be appealing in terms of stock, etc etc. Every pub manager in Britain is on first-name terms with reps from multiple breweries and drinks companies. Now Heineken is shocked - shocked! - to learn that there was any hint of racial insensitivity at a pub where black minstrel caricatures were proudly displayed.
CAMRA might be worse yet. To say that they have taken back their “pub of the year” award and removed the business from their lists is a clinical and detatched statement that ignores the fact that someone from CAMRA - probably multiple someones - had to go to the pub in order to review it in the first place. Whoever it was clearly didn’t have a problem with anything there, and in fact the pub hadn’t just won CAMRA’s “Pub of the Year.” It had won it on eight separate occasions, the most recent being 2020.
That Facebook post making mention of how “they used to hang them in Mississippi” next to an image of the lynched dolls was from 2016. CAMRA still saw fit to bestow honours in 2017 and 2019. Whoever was doling out these awards was absolutely fine with the golliwogs, as noted in the (also now deleted) CAMRA guide entry which mentioned “an extensive collection of old fashioned soft toys.”
I might be a straight white man in my thirties and therefore immune to discrimination, but even I caught that one. You can hear it, can’t you? The smirking description by some loathesome old Farage-ist as he winks at the Landlord of his favourite pub. “They have old fashioned soft toys here, if you know what we mean. Proper toys. From when things were like they used to be. From when it was okay to make fun of Them.”
So, CAMRA and Heineken and Innserve and Carlsberg can shout all they want about how they’re not racist. And maybe they’re not - they’re not really anything, as they’re companies and organisations and therefore don’t have thoughts or feelings. But maybe the people at the top of those companies aren’t racist. They do, however, employ people who are demonstrably okay with racism.
The UK isn’t racist, either. We hear that all the time from the sort of people who collect golliwogs.
“The UK isn’t racist, and we don’t need to apologise for anything, and the only people telling us we’re racist need to be quiet and know their place, because I’m not racist and neither is my golliwog collection!”
Some of which is true. The UK can’t be racist because it’s a landmass, and the dolls themselves aren’t racist because they don’t have thoughts. But there sure seem to be a lot of people in the UK who are okay with racism, and who defend racists, and racist practices.
If only we had a word for people like that.
Right wing news outlet GB News covered the story without mentioning any of that information, for some mysterious reason…
Wink.