RACIST LANGUAGE AND IMAGES
An Essex landlady is defiant over the removal of golliwog dolls by the Police. Benice Ryley is planning to create another display using dolls that have been donated. She denies being racist, but not convincingly.
The Golliwog doll display has been present in the pub in Grays since 2016, and there have been several complaints over that time.
Benice and her landlord husband Chris have attempted to portray that the display has always been an innocent historical doll collection with no racist element. She is on record denying that the word ‘wog’ is racist. ‘wog’ is racist. “I won’t use that word because I’ve been told not to. But I don’t find that offensive”.
She continued to deny that her and her husband were racist in reference to a photo of Chris Ryley that emerged with him in a T-shirt from the far-right group Britain First. She said: “I don’t think Chris is a supporter of Britain First, he was just wearing that shirt because it was convenient at the time.”. Presumably he bought it for it to be available to wear.
Further evidence of their racist activity and awareness has come from a Facebook post Chris made in 2016 where he posted a picture of the dolls next to a comment saying “they used to hang them in Mississippi years ago”.
There has been no recent comment from the Police, but they are waiting to interview Chris Ryley when he returns to the UK from Turkiye.
What are golliwogs?
As the pictures illustrate, these are dolls with black faces, large lips and curly hair. They originated as a doll-like character, created by cartoonist and author Florence Kate Upton, which appeared in children’s books in the late 19th century.
The golliwog dolls were very popular in the Southern United States, the UK and Australia into the 1970s.As cultural awareness developed the golliwog became highly controversial. It is now considered to be a racist caricature of black Africans, The Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia described the golliwog as “the least known of the major anti-black caricatures in the United States ‘.
…and the ‘wog’ word?
Anyone who thinks that word is not racist lives in an alternative reality. It is a British/Australian racial slur typically aimed at people of Indian-Pakistan-South East Asia. There have been backcronyms claiming the word is not an insult and actually means , “western orientated gentleman”, “working on government service”, or similar. These are false. I have heard this word used at Indian friends in school playground in the 1970s. It is an insult.