Love Thy Neighbour

In Love Thy Neighbour episode 1 series 6, the main white protagonist gets the privilege of shaking a man’s hand who is part of the government and says that he will “never wash this hand for as long as I live”. He then goes off to the next door neighbour to tell him to take his poster of the tory down but mistakes his hand gesture as anteing to shake his so he reacts by his touch ad says “you’ve contaminated my hand” suggesting that the black man is unclean and unhygienic. This implies that the white man thinks he is superior in contrast to the black man and that the white man is more socially acceptable than the black man.

The two protagonists also end up having an argument about the posters and the white man says “you tar brush tory”. By using the word ‘tar’ he has used a common racial offence which was used mostly in America when a lot of racial movements and groups were arising and ended around the mid-1970s. This suggests that the white man, again, feels socially superior against the black man and feels he can use racial terms to associate him with.

These factors show how racism was being portrayed in media and shows how the white man has always been represented as being the one higher up than the black person. White people have been represented as ungrateful and racist and ones who always put themselves higher than anybody else, especially black people, and black people have been represented as week and socially inferior towards the white people. Both races have a stereotype against them.