As far as PC grovelling to alleged victims goes, Britain normally follows the US, so I suppose there’s a sort of pride that can be taken in the fact we’ve now found a victim group too absurd even for America. Yep, say hello to the newest set of grievance miners, the ginger.

Really.

For the last few months, the MSM has been full of whiny tarts blathering about how tough it is when your head looks like a Duracell battery. Speaking personally, I never had any animus for the    chromologically-challenged community, but if I hear one more school yard atrocity story, all bets are off. Still, for all that, all this whining does serve a useful social purpose. Here’s how one of these mutant freaks describes the thought process that led her to join the Red Army:

Well, I have to say that although the elder of my two sons is a redhead, neither he nor I, happily, has been victimised because of it. However, my son is a composer and it was partly considering his musical future that made me think about the ginger theme.

The idea came out of a flippant conversation in which we were discussing how to market his talents and I said something along the lines of “So what’s your unique selling point? Who’s going to be interested in a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant ex-public schoolboy? – the only thing in your favour is that you might be considered ‘different’ because of your hair colour.”

Quite. Here’s the self-serving nature of the victimhood industry thrown into sharp relief.

Obviously, many of the claims to ginger victimhood are tongue in cheek, but not all of them. It’s a fascinating chance to see the creation of a victim group out of whole cloth. Sure, it’s ridiculous to talk about discrimination against redheads, but is it any less ridiculous to treat the children of a millionaire black sports star as victims ? Or, for that matter, to treat some homeless white guy as an oppressor ?

In so far as folks are apparently desperate to claim victim status, this does kind of undermine the whole point in the first place. ‘Victims’ seem to be kind of privileged actually. All the red-of-head community is doing is taking things to their barely-logical conclusion. If the government is going to arbitrarily assign special privileges to certain groups anyway, why get hung up about any particular example of capriciousness ?

There’s another upside to it all, as well. Doubtless, following previous victimhood templates, schools will be forced to take time out from teaching trivia such as literacy, in favour of ‘Redhead History Month’. There’ll be a frenzied search through the history books for any suitably red ‘role models’. Fortunately, unlike some groups I could mention, there are actual red heads in British history, rather than just, say, blondes who never definitely stated that they were not redheaded.

All of which is by way of saying that we on the Right will have to reluctantly accept that schools should teach about Henry VIII, Elizabeth I, or Churchill. It’s tough but there you have it: schools will have to teach about the Battle of Britain and the like. What a dilemma for the Left: teach the kids about British heroes, or fall foul of their obsessive PC ? Either way, we can sit back and enjoy PC’s very own reductio ad absurdum.

Said DJ @ 8:29 pm | Permalink   

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