Prince Harry, the redheaded royal who stands third in line to the throne, has admitted to being the victim of what appears to be a relatively new, and uniquely British, prejudice: "gingerism."
The prince told a teenager that he is bullied for being "ginger," it was reported yesterday. Ginger is a common nickname for a redhead -- or redheadedness -- in Britain. But many think of it as an insult, according to news reports, and some fear its use is becoming more barbed.
A racially-hued slight against redheads by a recently sacked British backbencher, and news stories about a Newcastle family that had to move after verbal abuse about their red hair became intolerable, have British commentators taking the notion of gingerism more seriously.
Harry's admission is bound to add fuel to the fire. At a memorial for Diana earlier this month, the prince reportedly asked 14-year-old Maxine Broadfoot, winner of an award for counselling given in his mother's name, whether she might counsel him on the bullying he gets about his red hair.
Maxine told a reporter that the remark was intended as a joke, but the prince said he was serious about being bullied. Harry's army pals have reportedly nicknamed him "Ginger Bullet Magnet."
While some argue that gingerism is just black humour no more harmful than blond jokes, others have their doubts. Classic British schoolyard taunts -- "Tut-tut ginger nut, where d'ya get you hair cut?" -- have evolved into online petitions calling for "gingers" to be segregated, shipped to concentration camps, or killed en masse.
In 2003, a 20-year-old Brit was stabbed in the back because he was "ginger." A BBC report called it the first "serious anti-red-hair hate crime."
The Chapman family of Newcastle, six redheads, has had to move five times, according to recent reports, because of abuse sparked by their hair colour. Kevin Chapman told reporters his 11-year-old son even attempted suicide as a result of bullying.
A Conservative MP, Patrick Mercer, defended racial name calling in the British military by comparing it to the name-calling directed at ginger soldiers.
"Equally, a chap with red hair, for example, would also get a hard time -- a far harder time than a black man, in fact," he told a Times of London reporter in March. He was subsequently dropped by his party.
In 2005, red-haired Reading soccer striker Dave Kitson spoke out against widespread "ginger-baiting," comparing it to racial taunts on soccer pitches. He was labelled a "ginger whinger" by a newspaper.
While redheads get singled out for teasing in a variety of cultures, it seems to be only in Britain that the stereotyping has become so intense.
Michele Eliot, an American who runs a British children's agency and has seen evidence of ginger-bullying on playgrounds, told the BBC "there is nothing like this in the U.S. (There), having red hair is not a precursor to having someone abuse you. Red hair is considered glamorous."
The evolution of gingerism in Britain may have something to do with demographics.
While less than one per cent of the human population has red hair, the largest concentrations of red-haired people are found in the Celtic states: Scotland, Ireland and Wales. About 13 per cent of Scots have red hair, and 10 per cent of Irish and Welsh. It is believed that up to 40 per cent of the population in each of these countries carries the recessive "ginger gene."
Red hair might well have become a marker for these groups, whose history with Britain's predominant English population has been checkered, says Daniel Ames, a professor of social psychology at New York's Columbia University.
If the predominant population in a society has preconceived notions about its minorities -- that this lot are shiftless or that lot belligerent -- the occurrence of a very noticeable physical trait within the sub-group, like red hair, reinforces the stereotype, he says.
"By definition, for most of us, redheads are salient. They are a minority and they're a very noticeable minority," Mr. Ames says. "The availability and the salience of the clue does feed into the use of that (trait) as a way of judging a person, a feeling we know something about what that category of person is like."
Prejudices become part of society over generations, he says.
"Stories about groups of 'them' get passed around among 'us,' and as we grow and participate in our communities and groups, we share in these accounts and explanations and they help us seem to make sense of the world. Whether they actually do that, whether they have any truth value to them, is another question."
British gingerism may also be an extreme regional form of an age-old prejudice against redheads. In The Roots of Desire: The Myth, Meaning, and Sexual Power of Red Hair, author Marion Roach recounts legends that identify Judas Iscariot and Mary Magdalene as redheads, and notes the prevalence of redheads in vampire lore.
She also points out that the mosaics in the vaulted ceiling of London's St. Paul's Cathedral portray Eve before the Fall as a blond and after the Fall as a redhead. The connection to Original Sin and loose women may partly explain the great preponderance of adult Internet sites devoted exclusively to red-haired women.
Stephen Douglas's The Redhead Encyclopedia has collected a number of less-than-flattering aphorisms about reheadedness, like the Corsican admonition to spit and turn around if you should pass a redhead on the street, or the Old English proverb to avoid the shadow of a redhead for fear of bad luck.
But if gingerism is threatening to become more than an old superstition or a crude joke in Britain, there is every reason to believe it is only a passing phase. After all, a mere four and a half centuries ago, red hair was all the rage in London.
That was when a certain ginger monarch named Elizabeth was on the throne.
Foto Melanie Rijkers
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