MIA and red all over

A hairdressing salon is hardly a strange place to overhear discussions on the merits and drawbacks of hair colours, but a trip to get my autumn bev curls shorn off last week at a socially-acceptably-expensive place put me in the middle of yet another conversation about redheads brought on by the web-rousing video clip for MIA’s latest released track, Born Free. The nine-minute film, directed by Romain Gavras – the son of filmmaker Costa Gavras and creator of clips for Justice and The Last Shadow Puppets – features a militant rounding up of redheads in a war-torn city and ends with some pretty graphic executions of young men. It was shocking to some in the salon, offensive to others. Most in the room, as most in the media have, missed the point that MIA seems to be making about acceptable forms of persecution in current society, backed by irony of the Suicide-sampling anger of the song’s production and its title lyric. (The beginning of the clip, in which obese people are hunted down in their apartments and beaten, has also been largely overlooked as a marker of that statement.)

The hairdresser visit (turned out great, thanks) wasn’t the first time I’d been looked at, as a card-carrying member of the ginger race (no, really, I have a card; it was given to me when I was asked to pose for a portrait series on redheads in the US titled A Rare Breed by the photographer Julia Baum) with wide eyes for some kind of comment about someone saying something about people with ginger hair. The last was when the Victorian Government’s road safety campaign in March told us that every time we used a mobile phone while driving, “gingas get fresh with other gingas”.

While it seems to be enjoying a significant revival, the idea of the redhead as ‘other’ is hardly new. The mere fact of the minority status of redheads means we’ve long been variably cast (or outcast) as insane villains (Poison Ivy, Lindsay Lohan), alien high-fashion beauties (models in the last Burberry campaign, Lindsay Lohan), irritating kids who need a slap (Junior in Problem Child, Lohan), female husky-voiced sex-bombs (Rita Hayworth, Gerri Halliwell [miscast]) and slightly off-tap, fantasy-leaning female singers (Tori Amos, Florence Welch). Even when we’re the everywoman (not man), played by either Julia Roberts or pre-crack Lohan, we want to be the centre of attention. We’re the comedic bitch (Shirley MacLaine, Bette Midler) and the dopey, working class grot (Ron Weasley, any film about Ireland).

It’s that last category that is often brought in when talking about the also well-exercised persecution of redheads, particularly in England – the tensions between Celts and Nords ‘settling’ Britain – and the image most often portrayed when ad campaigns prey on redheads for kicks, or shows like South Park or people like MIA and Romain Gavras use such persecution as commentary. Had the military in the Born Free clip shot a bosomy female singer in the head in the middle of a field, her hair colour wouldn’t have been at the centre of the message. Because the truth is, minorities ain’t minorities – and doesn’t popular culture know it.

When redheads are persecuted in popular culture – and, my experience has suggested, in everyday life – it isn’t because of the colour of their hair. It’s because the colour of their hair is a target pinned to other characteristics it’s deemed OK to prey on, all relating back to the big one that isn’t very fashionable right now to talk about: the poor. Red hair is a target on the uneducated: the poor. Red hair is a target on the ‘ugly’: the poor. Red hair is a target on the unclean, the under-confident, the malnourished, those without access to health services, to family planning services, to proper housing: the poor.

With access to those things, redheads can be the good guy or the bad guy, ‘good in bed’, ‘mischievous’, ‘angelic’, ‘psychotic’, ‘Lindsay Lohan’. We can also be none of those things, but it’s likely we’ll always attract some fairly benign stereotypes by virtue of being a minority, and we’re hardly the only minority that can lay claim to that. In the end, the message in MIA’s clip remains relevant: some of us were ‘born free’ more than others.