Independent - Philip Hensher - Was Mason a racist, or just an imbecile?

Wittgenstein would have been greatly interested by the case of the BBC Bristol presenter and the taxi cab. Anyone looking at it will find it difficult to classify some of the statements made in the course of the events as meaningful in any sense.

It began when a BBC radio presenter in Bristol, Sam Mason, called a local taxi firm to book a cab for her 14-year-old daughter. Off the air, but from the BBC Bristol offices, she requested that the driver not be Asian because "it would freak her out". "I don't want her to turn up with a guy with a turban on," Ms Mason went on airily, "she's not used to Asians." The taxi firm operator told her firmly that in their view, the request was racist. Ms Mason was flabbergasted, and promised that if it were her, she "wouldn't care if it had two heads, but it's my little girl we're talking about".

At this point, perhaps startled by the comparison of an Asian taxi driver to a freak with two heads, or perhaps not caring for the word "it" in this comment, the operator passed her on to a supervisor who refused to take her request. Ms Mason seemed very surprised by this refusal, saying "I work at the BBC - I'm far from racist." And, after all, she had started the conversation with the words: "I know this is going to sound racist, but I'm not being."

Anyway, the BBC have sacked her, to the noisily expressed outrage of a lot of contributors to various Bristolian outlets. In a poll conducted by the Bristol Evening Post, up to 82 per cent of those asked considered that it wasn't racist to specify, er, the race of the person you wanted to drive you. Or possibly something which no one should be allowed to object to. Of course, they venture, Ms Mason wasn't being racist, and if she was, she jolly well ought to be allowed to be. This was just a case of Political Correctness Gone Mad.

The West Country is not widely known for being welcoming towards people of different cultures. Frankly, I doubt many black or Asian people choose to spend their holidays there. The largest minority ethnic community in Exeter, a city of 111,000 people at the last census, numbers 378 people of Chinese origin. Padstow was still mounting something delightfully called "Darkie Day" in the 21st century.

Bristol does much better than many places, with a recorded total of 28,936 people of non-white ethnic origins - still well below the national average - of which 10,859 are from the Indian sub-continent. Ms Mason's daughter, who is 14, lives in a city where about 6 per cent of the population is non-white. Why, I wonder, did her mother firmly believe that the sight of an Asian would "freak her out"? Why, more to the point, does she feel that her extraordinary and, I must say, incredible belief about a daughter's racism is in some way "not racist" because she says so?

If ever this column set eyes on the epitome and pinnacle of what Doctor Johnson called "unresisting imbecility", Ms Sam Mason is that unresisting imbecile. If she were merely a freak on display in the great circus of human stupidity, one might leave it there with a merry chuckle. But it is that up to 82 per cent that terrifies; the people who believed and voted to the effect that the sentence "I know this sounds really racist, but I'm not being ... please, don't send anyone like, you know what I mean. An English person would be great," could not reasonably be classified as racist. The philosophical semantics of this one are quite beyond me.

And it's beyond me too and I just feel a weariness descend. A weariness that makes me ask, not just "Do we have to do all of this again ?", but "what is it in society that keeps allowing this to happen ?" Why is it that simple acceptance and tolerance seem impossible, even for somebody supposedly educated like a BBC presenter ?

I used to just accept the casual racism of people in Essex (nowhere near the West Country, this is the "metropolitan South East") as just being some cultural stupidity. My mother's hairdresser bleating about all the black people presenting the news. But I now fear it is a deeper maliase of not accepting difference, the result of 7 years of being told to be afraid of the the "other" has made people xeonphobic in a way that stunned me when it smacked me in the head. If we can't do it in our personal space, then how the heck could you get people to vote for them ?

Obama in UK ? No hope, no chance. Sadly this is not change I can believe in.