Why England Is Debating If Calling Someone Ham Is Racist
England is freaking out about ham, or more accurately, gammon1. The controversy isn't actually of the culinary variety, however (please refer to The Great British Baking Show for that) — it's political.
Over the past year, British liberals have been mocking pro-Brexit conservatives by comparing them to the pink, uncooked pork product. According to The Independent, children's author Ben Davis first came up with the now-popular comparison in a tweet.
The insult has spread, with figures like Matt Zarb-Cousin, former spokesman to Jeremy Corbyn, using the term to describe conservative activists on Twitter.
Over the weekend, Member of Parliament Emma Little-Pengelly, belonging to the religious-right Democratic Unionist Party, took issue with the pejorative on Twitter, suggesting that the term was racist because it was based on skin color.
Some liberals have espoused a philosophy of an eye for an eye, noting the frequent use of "snowflake" and "libtard" by conservatives online, and racist debates hidden behind arguments of free speech and political correctness. Others have called the row a distraction created by the media's double standards.
But the dismissals of the insult struggle to grapple with the fact that at the end of the day, it is based on skin color. So does that make it racist?
An informative debate to look at while making this judgment comes from America's history white-specific insults.
In 2016, Kirsten West Savali echoed an applicable argument for why slurs like "white trash," "cracker" and now "gammon" are not in fact racist:
White people in the United States have the dubious honor of not being subjected to systemic and institutionalized oppression based solely on race. This means that one cannot fall under the privileged umbrella of whiteness and not be a beneficiary of racism. It is impossible. Whiteness dictates that black people were never supposed to survive free in this country at all.
[The Root]
This argument could easily be applied to the critique of gammon, given that English white people are the grandfathers of systemic racism and oppression via colonialism, and still maintain an unparalleled position in the global power structure.
In The Times, Lucy Fisher suggests that the insult is more complicated than that, writing that Gammon is an intersectional insult, targetting lower-class whites as " backward, provincial embarrassments."
Classism in white insults wouldn't be surprising. "Cracker" has its origins as an anglo insult for poor whites in New England, and eventually turned into a Celtic-English slur before turning into a general term for a racist white southerner. "White trash" was first used in the early-1800s, and has persisted as an intersectional critique based on class and race.
In the New Statesman, Anoosh Chakelian argues that the claims of classism in gammon are off base, noting the primary consumers of the meat are simply old people: "As a rather old-fashioned, traditionally English food, it rings truer to me as a lampoon of older people who are suspicious of change." While lower incomes and education levels were correlated with votes for Brexit, so was age.
Even if gammon has a tinge of classist sentiment, Kirsten West Saval argues that the concerns should be dismissed concerns, noting that in America, poor white people ended up collaborating with rich white people in the Ku Klux Klan, and later in the election of Donald Trump, among other conservative politicians. The same could certainly be said of Brexiteers.
