Over de weer groeiende populariteit van golliwogs in Engeland

There is little ambiguity about these dolls; their literary presence spells it out. Blyton, in a Noddy story, has a naughty golliwog steal Noddy’s car. In her book “Three Little Golliwogs” (currently trading on eBay with the description “Banned, so bid fast!”), the characters Golly, Woggee and Nigger sing their favourite song, “Ten Little Nigger Boys”, which celebrates the death of 10 black children. In a 1975 edition of Agatha Christie’s 1939 mystery “Ten Little Niggers”, a lynched golliwog appeared on the cover. These harmless toys for white children fully dehumanise black people to such an extent that someone such as Carol Thatcher would, in 2009, refer to a black tennis player as a golliwog. It wasn’t till that year that Hamley’s banned them. By 2011, Bill Etherbridge, a prospective Tory councillor, was thrown out of the party after posing with golliwogs on Facebook. He promptly joined Ukip and recently stood in the leadership contest. He said he was merely trying to stimulate “healthy debate”. Right. He has also written a book celebrating golliwogs called “Britain: A Post-Political Correctness Society”. This is exactly how these wretched things ended up back in the shops. Two things have been going on: the ongoing lie that political correctness (basically, manners) has gone so mad that an open display of racism brands itself somehow as an exercise of freedom. Such people always hark back to a time of “innocence”. That innocence is now called white privilege.

Suzanne Moore in The ‘right’ to sell golliwogs is not something we should be fighting for in 2016 (Guardian)