After the story, he said: "I don't know why he bothered. I mean, I can tell you now — he's Chinese. He's got straight black hair and he's got squinty eyes and yellow skin." Murray was left speechless for a brief moment before replying: "That would be a very rough description."
Mangos has now apologised "unreservedly" for the comment. "On the Paul Murray programme I made some off-the-cuff remarks about a Chinese lottery winner," he said.
"The remarks were meant to be light-hearted and under the pressure of live TV my words were poorly chosen. In hindsight I can see they could offend and I apologise unreservedly for what I said. I am an Australian of overseas background myself and I am sorry for causing offence to anyone."
You can see the clip here.
6 comments:
At least his apology is worded so it actually reads as a genuine apology. He's not just sorry if he offended someone. I would forgive him. If I was Chinese, that is.
Aren't most Australians "of overseas origin" unless they are Aborigines?
Even Aborigines are of overseas origin, they just immigrated there first.
I think I would have a hard time accepting the apology. It might be worded like it's sincere, but still... people don't make "jokes" like that out of nowhere. And it's not just that the joke was "poorly worded," it's that the sentiment behind it was "they all look the same," which suggests that he's ignorant about Asians, at best -- and probably racist. It's hard to imagine that he's had an education or a change of heart overnight.
Saying they look all the same to me is not racist if you recognise it's the fault of the imperfect "face recognition software" in your own brain and not the actual sameness of the other people. I have a hard time distinguishing the characters in Chinese or Japanese films because my whole life I've been immersed in a sea of white European faces, and that's what my brain has been calibrated to know, but I don't think that makes me racist in any way.
Mentioning this particular flaw in your brain's processes and assuming (perhaps even correctly) that most of your audience shares the same flaw does not automatically make you racist or ignorant, it's only stupid and shows poor judgement.
I'm with Insolitus and it works both ways.. My partner's mother is a maths teacher, she recently was called in at the last minute to monitor an exam, an exam which included some of her students. She asked where one of them was and the other monitor told her "right there, seat "(say)"4B". Turns out that lots of Asians think we can't tell the difference and the student had her postgrad cousin sit the test for her. She even had the student's ID sitting on the table and nobody except the teacher noticed.
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