The rumour that black British actor Idris Elba is one of the favourites to play the next 007 has quite a few with their knickers in a twist, as the British slang for being flustered or agitated goes. When Anthony Horowitz, author of the new James Bond novel, Trigger Mortis, told a British newspaper he just couldn't see Idris Elba in the role as he was "a bit too rough, a bit too street", the social media was quick to react angrily. Taylor Swift’s new music album ‘Wildest Dreams’ is also at the receiving end of critics who find it pandering to rich white fantasies from a colonial era because of its mainly white cast and the only two black characters appearing in the background playing soldiers. Closer home, a jewellery firm from Kerala had to withdraw an advertisement after criticisms from several quarters for being ‘slaver’. The advertisement showed a black child holding a parasol over a bejewelled Aishwarya Rai Bachchan. And, recently, a few Rajya Sabha members objected to the term black money and wanted it referred as ‘dirty money’. While the lawmakers stretched their imagination a bit too far, it would appear that more than one-and-a-half century after slavery was abolished and two decades after apartheid came to an end in South Africa, the tendency to judge people on the basis of the colour of the skin remains at the subconscious level for many. The colour-coded words and expressions have entered English lexicon and have remained a part of it years after what they described does not have much of relevance except as historical references. ‘Nigga’, meaning a black person, came into coinage in the early 1990s in the US and remained confined to the country in terms of usage. It was a deliberate and politically motivated reclamation, though in an altered form, of the word ‘nigger’, a word which had become taboo because of its use as a term of contempt by whites. The plural form is ‘niggaz’. There has been perhaps no expression stronger than ‘apartheid’ to describe discrimination on the basis of skin colour. Introduced as a policy in South Africa, it referred to segregation of the inhabitants of European descent from non-Europeans – coloured or mixed, Bantu, Indian among others. It is also one of the best examples of an onomatopoeic expression pronounced as ‘apart-hate’, joining the sound of the letter ‘t’ of the first syllable and ‘h’ of the second. In fact, this is exactly what it achieved: creating hatred by forcing two sets of people to live apart. The term came from Afrikaans ‘apartheid’, literally ‘separateness’. Thankfully, as a government policy, it came to an end in 1994. Originally used as an English synonym for apartheid in South Africa, ‘separate development’ from the late 1950s came to be used as an expression to define a systematic development or regulation of a group or race by itself, independent of other groups or races in society. To borrow from Black English, to colour your opinion in racial overtones will be a ‘bringdown’ (anything which is depressing) in this time and age.
