Alright, so let me have some semblance of tiptoeing over this very fragile eggshell walkway.
There are a few issues for me here. First, I agree with @fatso . I do not believe that Reggie Yates has anything to apologise for.
What is the problem with saying that Jewish dudes have been successful in the music industry? Brian Epstein propelled the Beatles from skiffle outfit to fucking world beaters. David Geffen unleashed Guns and Roses unto this world, pulled Aerosmith out of their nose bags and back into relevance. If not for these dudes, the music industry might have been a lot less interesting.
If he’d have said “fat Irish manager” his comments would just be a footnote, lightly protested by a couple of people that had gotten offended. He would not be facing pressure to resign. This thread would not exist.
The real irony for me is that it is not Reggie Yates that has created this issue; it’s the reaction.
We are all subject to stereotyping by others. We Brits are routinely characterised as thuggish, arrogant, reserved, polite, sexually repressed, sexually deviant, crooked mouthed, imperialist bastards or any combination of the above. Why aren’t we demanding that anyone suggesting those things is immediately sacked?
I would suggest it’s because we’re one of the oldest continuous civilisations on the planet, and as such, we’re a bit more capable of self-assessment. It took just 20 years for highly critical accounts of British conduct in the Second World War to emerge, with the likes of AJP Taylor damning Dresden as a crime against humanity.
We were able, recently, to look hard enough into ourselves to realise that our approach to solving the Troubles in Northern Ireland had utterly failed.
All of us own Empire in some way. We’re all too aware that some of our ancestors were, in our context, proper cunts. I find it impossible to walk around London or Liverpool without being minded of where a lot of that opulence came from.
The new nations of this world do not have this, and I’m not singling Israel out for this. I consider the US to be toddlers with shotguns, especially after the ascension of Trump. I think post-defeat France is a fundamentally different entity to the Republics that preceded it, as is Germany, steroid pumped full of investment cash because the US didn’t want it going Commie.
I don’t know why we listen to them.