An interesting point of view

Why wasn’t Pete Burns the subject of ‘national fury’?, asks Brendan O’Neill On last year’s Celebrity Big Brother, a white housemate slated a black housemate for the way she looks and talks - yet it didn’t even hit the front pages, much less cause an international storm. Pete Burns, the botoxed and lip-inflated transvestite who was a pop star in the 1980s, laid into Traci Bingham, the black American actress most famous for her slo-mo appearances in Baywatch. He was far more cruel than Jade Goody was to Shilpa Shetty. ‘You’ve got a short shelf-life. I know black don’t crack, but ultimately you get dusty hair’, Burns told Bingham, referring to black people’s skin texture and afro hair. ‘I can’t believe the absolute diarrhoea that’s dripping from your mouth’, he continued. ‘Your whole culture, everything you come from, everything you aspire to be is repugnant to me.’ He told Bingham she was ‘insincere to the point of nausea’ and ‘just fundamentally a fucking LA whore’. He called her a bitch, and when she protested he said: ‘I know the meaning of bitch, it was just black terminology, it’s fundamentally your language.’ He left the room and boasted to the other housemates, ‘I just attacked Traci for the hell of it’, while Bingham wiped away the tears. It makes Jade Goody’s use of the word ‘Poppadom’ look...well, like the idiotic outburst it was. Why didn’t Burns v Bingham cause a storm? Maybe because it didn’t fit today’s chav-bashing script. Burns is the tongue-in-cheek pop star whose ‘acidic wit’ went down well in certain liberal circles, while Bingham is a black American known for posing in a swimsuit - and who could feel sorry for a person like that? Jade, on the other hand, is coarse ‘white trash’ and Shilpa Shetty is respectable and refined, ‘just like us’. So Burns gets away with his spiteful rant while Jade is buried alive by politicians and the media for hers. It seems it’s not what she said that really matters, but where she comes from and what she represents
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