Tuesday - June 17, 2008

Another picked on group heard from

A red-haired family claims to have been driven from their Newcastle home because of abuse. Why is the harassment of redheads dismissed as just harmless fun?

Here’s a joke. “What’s the difference between a terrorist and a redhead?”
Here’s the punchline. “You can negotiate with a terrorist.”

Is this offensive? If it was made in your workplace, within hearing of a redheaded colleague, would you make a fuss? Probably not.  But mock someone’s ethnicity, religion or sexuality and you will attract the beady eye of management. Make a sexist joke and prepare to be dismissed as an antediluvian relic.

Verbal abuse

Carrot-top, copper-top, ginger-nut, ginger minger, bluey (among Australians), Duracell, Ronald McDonald, Simply Red, Queen Elizabeth. And so on for hours and hours of the typical redhead’s life. No wonder some gloss over their hair colour as “auburn” and “strawberry blonde” and even “titian”.

Photographer Charlotte Rushton has been chronicling the UK’s redheads for a book, Ginger Snaps. Of the 300 she snapped, only two have been spared bullying because of their hair. She herself has suffered verbal abuse from complete strangers.

“I was on the Tube, pregnant, and I was really humiliated by this drunk yob. He was shouting ‘do the cuffs and the collars match?’ He got right up into my face. You don’t do that to other people.”

She believes the phenomenon is long-standing and uniquely British in its most virulent form.

“In other countries redheads will get teased at school but it stops when they become adults. If you are a woman you are fiery and alluring, beautiful.”

In adult life, women get stereotyped and red-haired men take much of the worst abuse. Treatment of red-haired children in school ranges from mild taunts to grim persecution.
Michele Eliot, the American director of British children’s charity Kidscape, regularly has significant numbers of red-haired children in courses on coping with bullying.

Racism row

While there has been at least one report of a serious anti-red hair hate crime in the UK - a 20-year-old stabbed in the back in 2003 - it’s unclear whose responsibility it is to monitor discrimination.
“It is certainly not us,” says the Commission for Racial Equality.

For those who claim their workplace taunts are just harmless banter, it could be stress rather than an anthropological aversion to red hair.

Workplace psychologist Professor Cary Cooper, of Lancaster University, says abuse can be “an unhealthy release valve for stress” and redheads, as a visible minority not protected by law, have become a target.

While other forms of the discrimination are the subject of marches, lobbying and education campaigns, redheads cannot expect the arrival of the politically correct cavalry anytime soon.

This one blows me away. What’s next, a news piece from Finland complaining that people with brown eyes are being picked on? Unbelievable. Thank God that Americans have somehow managed to miss out on this one. I hope.

Ewww, isn’t she just hideous? Yuck, phooey, red hair. Gross!! Gak!



and this is a dye job even

Redheads are definitely genetic outliers. Less than 1 percent of the human race may be redheads—at most, 2. Between 2 and 6 percent of the U.S. population is redheaded, depending on the estimate and definitions. They are scarcer than lefthanders or gays, almost as scarce as Episcopalians.

Yup, it’s just dog central. All the time. Barf.

CLOSE IT UP ...

Posted by Drew458     on 06/17/2008 at 09:56 AM   
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