I'm Not Ageist: It's the Elderly Who Are the Problem

Nina at Infinite Thought has a funny story about visiting her racist granny and links to research that purports to show that elderly people aren't deliberately racist, they've just lost their inhibitory faculties.

It's an argument of dubious merit, to be honest; the idea that we are all influenced by stereotypes but are able to suppress our inclination to believe them, at least until we approach senility. This verges on a new form of cultural esssentialism. Rather than argue that we're all naturally racist but suppress it because it's not politically correct, we're now meant to accept that we're all "subconsciously" racist, not naturally, but because our culture is implicitly racist, and that the elderly are less susceptible to suppressing that cultural racism. By that logic, we can excuse the racism of the BNP on the grounds that they're just less inhibited about expressing the racism implicit in British culture, as if, somehow, they are the "truth" of our society rather than an expression of a reductio ad absurdum of nationalist ideology.

Anyway, I'm taking her anecdote too seriously. Particularly when the first thought that sprang to my mind was Catherine Tate's wonderfully hideous Racist Cockney Gran, the most appalling and irredeemable character in comedy today. Makes Larry David seem almost benign.