Word: racistly
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...begins Meadows' film, set in Uttoxeter, the heart of Britain's former industrial midlands. It's 1983 and this declining seaside town is fired up on royal weddings and Thatcherism. A brown-skinned local businessman occasionally has to deal with racist slogans spray-painted outside his shop, but it's a world away from the violent anti-immigrant demonstrations taking place elsewhere in the country...
...probes deeper than simple black-white characterizations, even eliciting a quiet sympathy for the fearsome Combo when, during an intimate conversation with Shaun, he hints at being abandoned by his own father. Nevertheless our gaze is averted when the once sweet-and-fragile Shaun starts to change, first daubing racist abuse around the town's walkways and then terrorizing a "Paki" newsagent in emulation of his new mentor. Our fears are confirmed: Shaun has been transformed into a neo-Nazi footsoldier in-the-making...
...Meadows' attempts to humanize skinheads is a world away from the knee-jerk negative characterizations that informed cinema's previous depictions of the subculture as uniformly racist and violent. While it may be true that far-right parties no longer play any part in Britain's mainstream political discourse, other extremist movements are rising in Europe. And with the invasion of Iraq and rise in Islamophobia, Meadows suggests that This is England could be as much a warning for England's present as it is a depiction of its past...
...doesn’t determine intelligence or character, and it shouldn’t affect a person’s opportunities in life, but this does not mean it can’t alter the offensiveness of speech or writing. Race may be an artificial construct, but so is racist language. The very nature of language dictates that offensiveness is dependent on identity...
...Could society possibly arrive at a point where race had no effect on meaning? Perhaps, but it is hard to imagine that racist language could still exist in such a color-blind world. In the mean time, racism is unequal because language is unequal, and the offensiveness of what you say depends both on the color of your skin and the content of your character...