Racial disharmony at the school gates!!

 Good day, or rather i wish it was. Today dropping  my much younger sister off outside the school, the whistle had been blown  and i  like most of the parents and relatives were leaving.  The Stragglers were all  racing to the gates in an effort to get there before they were closed and they were officially late.

I was standing along side a family friend watching the children move in single file into the building. suddenly we heard shouting. It was the usual suspect  there is always one parent who takes it upon themself to become an unofficial traffic marshall.

A man had pulled into the curb to perform a 3 point turn or a turn in the road as you will.  Mr “blood pressure” then proceeded to race 200 yards down a hill and slam himself as close to the moving vechicle as he dare. ” you can’t come in here, it’s closed ! the same bloody people all the bloody time!!”  people were tutting , in argrement or in disargrement i do not know. the man excuted his turn and left. Mr “blood pressure” then turned to the startled learning assistant and turned on her ” when are people gonna learn! have you done anything about it?” she replied that yes letters had been sent out. “NO NOT JUST TO  EVERYONE, TO THOSE PEOPLE PERSONALLY, IT’S ALWAYS THOSE PEOPLE!! THEY WILL NEVER LEARN!!”.

It was at that point that one mother pulled up across the road . she stopped the car and the kids took off their seatbeats. the handbrake must have slipped a little but then i could see that the mother reapplied it. before her door was even open he started shouting. “OI YOUR KIDS NEED THEIR SEATBEATS ON, DON’T IGNORE ME!!! YOU MUST HAVE SEATBELTS ON IN  THE BACK.” the mother looked startled. the kids looked scared, with his big angry reddish purple face and his  clenched fist and index finger being jabbed at them.  The crowd mummered with a sense of disapproval, we had all seen that, it was simply that the handbrake had slipped and he was  being so rude.  But he was in full swing he must have thought he was whispering, because previously he was roaring. ” YOU STUPID WOMAN, MAKE SURE YOU HAVE SEATBELTS IN THE BACK!  ALWAYS THE SAME BLOODY PEOPLE, THOSE PEOPLE CAN’T DRIVE, THEY CAUSE SO MUCH TRAFFIC! THEY SHOULDN’T BE GIVEN LICENSES.”   At this point i became unnerved, he had only picked out the bad drivers of colour, the black man making a 3 point turn,the Muslim woman whose only mistake was to have not applied the handbrake firmly enough.

He is a police officer, this is the 5th time this year he has done this, singled out bad driving, or some barely there offense and screamed at the top of his lungs at someone, but only if they are ethnically different from himself. the first 3 times i brushed it off as coincidence, but after that and today i think he is acting on some bias in his mind. As  the family friend, her colleague and  myself walked away, we talked about it

Family friend: oh here he goes again.

Colleague: well he is right they don’t think about their childrens safety!

lifeisannoying: what? her handbrake slipped he’s overreacting, he should realise that he’s not at work, there are bigger and more important offenses than that!

Family friend: well it must be hard to switch off a high powered intense job like that?

Colleague : yeah i couldn’t do it

Lifeisannoying: i know a few police officers, my friend is engaged to one , but he’s never as obnoxious as that!

Colleague: he’s not a  just a police officer, he’s an armed officer, guns and all that

Lifeisannoying: WHAT THAT HOTHEADED BASTARD IS WORKING WITH GUNS!!! BLOODY HELL!!!

 My confidence in the police sank to the lowest levels since stephen lawrence was killed and the police managed to let the killers get off. How can i trust the police to be fair, just and a force for good when they arm, militant and possibly racist men?

It goes to show, the media would have you believe that the black man would get out of the car an assault the man, but he didn’t he waved his hand with a look of weary resignation and reversed out, the muslim lady did not have a bomb concealed under her chador, she shrugged shook her head at the man, watched her children across the road and got in her car, but i could see the hurt and embarrassment in her eyes. Nor did i as  “an angry black woman” go over and create a scene as i would have loved to! i simply took a look at his face, and in a few moments will report him and his  behaviour to his superiors.

To intervene or not????

Hello, i’m back after a long hiatus!! i am revitalised and ready to blog!

 What i am aim to discuss is the matter of where the boundaries of personal and public behaviour meet!

When people’s behaviour become erractic and maybe even incling towards mental or physical  breakdown/ damage, when do we as outsiders intervene? Psychologist and many an older person will atest to the general public’s reluctance is evidence of modern societies decay and malaise.

We are very risk averse as a community. we would see our young people bullied in the streets, see them tear each other up and fight, very rarely does anyone apprehend them or admonish them;  yet we  cry about the rise of street gangs, not recognising the link. we allow these gangs when we allow kids to fight and be bullied without consequence, we have become scared of our own children and gangs prey on that.

These gand leaders prey on our kids like paedo’s they groom them, give gifts, create an artificial community with it’s own rules and codes and modes of behaviour. It’s a sense of belonging and a strong community these kids get in these gangs , whilse we outside the gangs fail to give the kids a decent community on the outside. 

when growing up, as well as being made aware of manners and correct attire, i had a community with it’s eyes trained at me. if i was involved in any  mistemeanour the elders of my west indian community would have the news back to my various family members faster than text messages,twitter, facebook or any modern innovation. Futhermore my parents would have been dissapointed and upset and my elder relatives would have been furious that i had shamed them.

But now well some people think they know better than to raise children in the manner that people have been raisng them for millenia/ or centuries depending or not you believe in creationism.

The effect of a community was secondary in my development of a sense of moral and civil  behaviour.But for some that extra support could be that extra protection from  harm.

If you saw someone exhibiting strange or worrying behaviour what would you do? Now i am not including in this anything like dangerous,violent or psychotic behaviours just to be clear. would you approach them? would you call a  police community support officer, would you just run like hell, would youwalk by and then worry about them and what happened to them.

It reminds me of the case last year of the cyclist that died in a street, he was passed by 3 cars and no-body until the 4th car thought to call for help, he lay dying in a street and nobodygave him any aid.

it just makes me sad, he  was somebodies son, maybe husband, maybe father. But we are so risk averse that 3 cars drove past and this man expired, because of a lack of altruism.

so in that sprit today i intervened in some troubling events. I walked  uo to see two grown women and they were  arguing and a sullen child was being clutched by one woman, they child was kicking her.

The general gist was that one woman was talling the other that she shouldn’t  tell her child off. the mother was furious….. i had to step in. the child was wild and  contraditing the mother was just making matters worse. the childless woman was advocating that the child would learn what was right from what was wrong by not being informed, she was reasoning that shouting was just barbaric. Great i love it i thought, undermind the child’s primary caregiver right in front of the child! she was not smacking, nor beating, not even pointing.

so i simply walked up and offered ” lady you’re  being very inapropriate, she is not hitting the child, she’s shouting because being kicked hurts and that gets the message across!”  the mother looked gratified, the childless woman gave me a dirty look and just threw her hands up and left.

But what would her version of the world end up like? where people just  let children do what they wanted and they made up their own morality? But then again this woman was the exception, she was doing exactely what i am advocating, but it shows that some people  care enough about the society in which we raise our children, which is always a good thing.

Black beauty and self perception… shadism

 

Why are these two women in my head line space?

well i was drawn into a worrisome debate over on abagond on black beauty  and historically what that has meant. I became really troubled. Black beauty comes in all shapes and forms, i celebrate your beauty if you are fair or dark, but what worries me is that a LOT of black people do not.

For them only one of these beautiful women is truely beautiful. It’s the one on the left, it’s Cassie.  She is beautiful that is not what i am trying to raise, the fact that women like Gabrielle  are maligned for being dark. why should that be an issue in a worldwide diaspora  where the majority of that diaspora are dark skinned, where Cassie and fair skinned persons are a minority .

My arguement is not one that will degrade the beauty of fair skinned women of colour to uphold and glorify the dark skinned beauty, that is just ignorance, and not what i am about. My arguement is why sooo many people in my community hold so dear to a value system that asks them to hate so much of their self identity.

Too much of this arguement is taken up with mud slinging and to help ourseleves we have to stop.Much is  said of “fair skinned ,high yellow,redbone,red skin, clear skin…” and too much of  “nappy hair,blackie,darkie,….” no wonder we seemed to have regressed from the 1970’s and it’s high ideals of “emancipate yourself from mental slavery” To celebrate the beauty of one does not mean the denial of the other.

Growning up in the 1990’s i knew that the black women were all represented , in my community and  in black media,  vanessa williams, naomi campbell,nia long,tyra banks,alex wek,Crystal rose,Llwella gideon,Angie Le mar,Oprah winfrey,Aaliyah,lil kim,Faith evans, Mya, Lauren Hill

,en vogue ( had all shades covered),salt’n'pepper,TLC,Kele le roc, the Honeys and my favourites Eternal. By the end of the 1990’s something started to turn and i cannot say honestly i know what that was. After lauren hill had finished her miseducation releases, i noticed slowly that the women of colour in the media was tipping in favour of the lighter skinned woman. I cant say i minded a lot i will support black women  and i hope we all support each other regardless of small differences.

All of the female singers that recieved good to execellent Pr in england after 2001 were fair to medium in skin tone, we had  ashanti, we had christina millian, we had of course the indestructable machine that is Beyonce knowles, we even had her sister solonge knowles. we had tedra moseswe had the rappers trina, we had jackie o. I like most of these artists and they cannot explain this, they have walked into the situation  and  they are trying to earn a crust, but where did the dark skinned singers go? It could be the record companies fear that someone who is so differnt in phenotype to the consumer that the consumer will be put off? is it the conservative hopes of a record producer who feels thata fair skinned female will have better crossover appeal.

 we had Tweet whose first two singles were an absolute treat, and they did well, but then we never heard  her songs or follow up singles , we read about them and wondered why they were not on the radio? we had India arie, who ever was doing her publicity ought to be shot…. She should have been on this morning, on evening magazine shows, but apart from “black radio stations” i only saw things about her buried deep in the papers gigs sections 30 pages in.  but instead we have the beautiful but almost tuneless Rhianna  We even had the most popular sexual rapper in this decade Khia, she must have made a mint out of the amount i have heard that song in clubs and out and about, but in England they completely remade the video with 3 or four white models and a fair skinned black woman, completely airbrushing her image out. she’s no oil painting but i feels she has her own dirty charm. she really has the dirtiest face i have ever seen, like she has just done something unmentionable and is about to do so again.

 the acting world  faired no better, Halle berry was a household name in black household throughout the 1990’s due to her appearance in R kelly videos ( the ones that can be seen legally on music tv not the ones with the underage girls) and her apperance in classic film boomerang.       she is a biracial woman who self identifies as black, we have loved her sooo long. but after her oscar win, she seemed to be the only black actress cast in anything big budget. ( we love halle , hate the game not the player).Nia long was at the corneras working hard , after love jones and soul food , the big guns in hollywood would not let her in, she has done very well for herself in third watch and boston legal. However gabrielle union has cleaned up doing it big in will smith vehicle “bad boys 2″ and bring it on.  But with film there is the added trouble of competition from actresses whose racial identity is seen as less threatening. white actresses or ambigious latina actresses

The gripe in hollywood is “it’s all about money” and if they cast two ethnic leads white people won’t watch and the movie will tank and lose money. FALSE FALSE  look at slumdog millionaire…. all entirely south asian, big hit, we empathised with them not because we shared ethnicity but because we cared.

meanwhile where is Aisha taylor?i think she’s great but if you google her for images you will get not only the actress but about 7 or 8 other aisha taylors and fun snaps they posted of themselves, the same thing does not happen  to talentless losers like audrina from the hills…. life is annoying tho  so here is a picture of Nia long because she is always cute and  all the pic of Aisha were crappy.

So to summerise i think we need to evaulate why certain things are the way they are in our communities, why with the blecahing cream? why is that a viable business? we know it can cause all kinds of medical maladies and we all condemn it use, but we should ask ourselves why people want to use it in the first place, it is not as simple as saying “it’s the desire to tan in reverse”  people can use bronzing pearls for that and the last time someone ingested mercury or benzines from that i may have been asleep (it has not happened). Blecahing creams are damging, imagine if white people’s suntan lotions were found to contain carcinogens and mercury, people would be screaming from the roofs, so why aren’t we? Is it a nessecary danger for our women folk? a means to an end?

 come on people lets have a serious debate because it really is more than skin deep!!!

Women have a right to a decision… not acording to some men.

http://field-negro.blogspot.com/2009/05/pro-life.html

(please read the above post at field negro before reading mine! ta!)

Hello, good day  to you from England. I was rather bemused to see the anti abortionists protesting at the catholic university where President obama was being presented with an honourary  degree. they were almost exclusively male. they held up a banner of a virgin mary with her halo shining out.  Mary was the ideal, she was so young she did as she was told, she didn’t  question,  and she could be controlled, by the man around her( well i wouldn’t argue with the holy sprit but…). These men are a throwbacks to the age when women did not have that much enfranchisement, when you had to have your husbands permission to take a job or futher your education. They probably want a woman in the kitchen barefoot and pregnant, cooking all day so when they get home they just glide into a chair eat and sleep (men had it sooooo good).

Let’s have some real talk now, Mary has a halo because you believe that she never had sex. well most women in a “spot of trouble” have had sex, or intercourse.  Mary was a vessel used to deliver a male child, god promised her that there would be no trouble and he would provide. Most women (dammit all women) become pregnant through men’s seed. some men do not and refuse to provide for children.Our society would probably begrudge  that woman raising a child on the benefits offered by the government, but these hicks would deny her the right to the decision.

Abortion is an emotive subject because we were all at some point fetal, in-utero and thus we may have been aborted. but these men will never be in the same situation as a woman, they will never have something grow inside of them and develop into a separate and completely different entity, men could , sometimes do run away from the situation unlikely that many women get that chance  to abandon their children.

These men probably say, well have the baby but have it adopted, REALLY THAT OLD CHESNUT!!!! that old one still doing the rounds…… our social care homes /orphanages are overun and they are under resourced by a few hundred thousand pounds if not million. Each and every child in those “homes” needs love and families but what chances do they have… with the newly born being first choice for adoptive parents, there will always be those left behind without families and is that anymore desirable than  evrything else.  but hey if you get some kids that yound you can brainwash them all with agreeing with you.

these are probably the same men with the same conservative viewpoints, who moan about single mothers and their supposed moral incontinenece. but they would want to deny that woman the right to make a decision about her own fertility.

 If you do not agree with abortion, dont have one, The catholic church have no currency with me. their leader is a 70- something year old virgin, with no idea of what a healthy adult relationship is, (here’s a clue nothing to do with young alter boys!!!) they have yet to appoint a senior figure who is female in sex they are living in a fashion that does not uphold or reflect their supposed family values.  these priests and bishops leave their family units and  become men who exist only for spriture.how can they possibly understand the troubles the average family man, who burns with passion but has to resist to save the sanctity of their marriages? these dried up men who for the past 60 years abused the children in their care world wide (america, ireland being the cases i know of)they elected a nazi to become their leader but they condemn women for making educated choices!!!

Not every woman will have an abortion, Nobody forces women to have abortions, but women do have the right to have it as an option.

when the racist is your family!!!

My cousin is a RACIST!!!!!  I capitalised it because that is how grave the situation i am glad to report that she is a second cousin. unforunatley we share mitocondrial  dna (mother’s dna  we share a great grand mother).

She is the most foul degenrate RACIST, she  despises dark skinned black people. Yep that’s what we have, a black woman who despises people in her own family. I found our due to the extrem upset she caused.

Starting at the beginning lets talk about another relative let’s call her scarlett, she is the kindest,strongest woman any person could be. she helped out the RACIST who we shall call copper(because that is the metal that the lowestcurrency is minted in). Copper i assumed was nice enough, had her little family and decided she would set up a business, who helped her out with childcare, Scarlett would never let her pay and looked after her child morning till night when she was studying to do her degree at home. when copper confided that she was upset because she could not secure enough money from the bank who dipped in her pocket because she wanted her family to suceed…..Scarlett.

Scarlett is the powerhouse behind us all. ambitious not only for herself but for her whole family. when copper jeopodised her family and got caught cheating on her distraught husband who held peace talks and convinced her husband to give her another chance…. you guessed it

Anyhoo scarlett was looking through the  albums in coppers house, she noticed several family members were missing, including the ones that she had taken with copper’s kids when she had taken away for a weekend at  alton towers (theme park). she bluffed but Scarlett was suspicious, she said nothing.

later that week my other cousin was with copper noticed the same thing and asked about it. Turns out  copper has been cropping out the dark members from photos  and  it is not only cosmetic and aesthetic , she admitted that she felt they were disgusting to her physically and  mentally not so bright (oh god she said that!!).

Her white husband flew into a rage, he is the sane one in the relationship, he told her that she was mentally unwell and that her admission had changed her in his eyes and he felt uncomfortable being with her. she felt safe enough to admit this because she assumed that my other cousin being mixed race would agree. she did not, she told us all. Scarlett went to pieces, our powerhouse was so devastated, her love and efforts were for someone who thought she was subhuman.

So why should she get a pass on her racism because she is technically black. i cannot understand where she got her mentality but here is the worry, before any of this came out, her husband being socially responsible thought he would give back to the community , by signing up to black adoption agengy.

It is an ethical nightmare, black children in care need homes, but sending them to be raise by copper is like sending them to the kkk. her husband alone … fine. Her NO WAY!If she gets a dark skin child think of the  mental damage she will inflict , if the child needs loving disciplin she wont give it, she will assume that the child is just bad and not raise it.

so do i inform the agency that she is a racist who shouldn’t bring up phelm???

What to do???

Apart from feeling ashamed?

Why can’t we all just get along??

 I was reading the  Black Snob the other day and one of her topic just struck me, it was about the  diaspora and the tensions and hatred that sometimes bubbles to the surface and the mutual distrust that  has grown up.

www.blacksnob.com/snob_blog/2009/4/20/why-cant-we-be-friends-the-diaspora.html

I am of west indian parentage and yes i am proud of my heritage, but that does not mean that i instantly disrespect or look down on any other part of the diaspora.I  was born and bred in England in the 1980’s and i grew in a large community of others of similar background, you were either white, black caribbean, asian pakistani or asian indian. that is as diverse as my hometown got. ther was only one african boy at my school and one boy did not dilute the overall caribbean flavor of the black community, we had carnivals and community evenings dances and thus it continued until the late 1990’s when we saw a lot of african immigrants mainly from southern africa and to a lesser extent Nigeria  and Ghana.

I couldn’t lie and tell you that there was rioting in the streets. But what we have is many communities co-existing that are mainly separate. The older generations i know generally were told in their youth under the british empire that  they were vastly inferior than white men who lived in britain, but even though they wereinferior to white anglo saxons in the mother country (England – what fucked up rhetoric that is !!), they were of course miles better than those other black people who had been cleeved  from them in the past.  Colonialism worked not only for the  advancement of the english language but for some very messed up racial ideals. the kind of racial ideals that asked people to devalue themselves   and invest in a racial hierarchy where they were almost always at the bottom, so colonist invented a hierachy where black people could place other black people at the bottom.

 My grandmother was amongst some of the more priveilaged black people in her island home, she grew up on a farm  that her family owned, her family employed others, she received an education beyond the reach of most of her peers she became a nurse. she recalls a missionary from scotland coming to preach, she was in her nursing station and remembers overhearing this missionary  preaching to sick children.

” You must strive to be as good as the pure white children in my parish in london, you must elevate yourselves above your  base instincts, above the savagery behind africa,you and your progeny must be above your own origins “

It was 1957.  My grandmother did not hear the end of his speech she had to tend  to an old man.

She assures me that she was fed a steady diet of such contempt for africa and aficans. her own grandfather was a white irish man who had married a black woman and her mother (my grandmother’s mother)  had angered him greatly by having babies with a man with an african mother. the “mullato” classes were socially engineering themselves to be less and less visabily black and those who flouted those convensions were punished harshly. It was the mental  and physical distancing of black people in the caribbean from slavery and africa, this was a country where to be black or african in appearance was to be a slave.

It’s understandable, i would not want to be a slave nor mistaken for one. thus began a west indian pathology that saw africaness as something terrible, something to be despised.African coming to the caribbean after the Emancipation in 1838 were speaking african languages,  some reminants of those languages survive but  that was all. their  languages were banned and mocked by the ruling classes as jabber, mumbo jumbo. it was seem in those less pc days as stupidity, any  person with a brain could speak english after all…

When my grandmother arrived in England after a journey across the atlantic to spain and a train from southern spain to northern spain and then a ferry to england to meet my grandfather. Her eyes were opened to the lies of her colonial upbringing. England was not the home of christendom ,most of the people there were not even as half as devout as most black people back “home”, she saw licentiousness on a scale she had never seen. She was told that in her homeland that black people were the base and carnal by nature and sexually incontinent. but she came to a land where it was all much worse!

After 3 months she met a fellow medic at work Dr (spelling may be wrong) Ateti from somewhere in West Africa she forgets (bless her she is an old lady after all). They shared many silent lunch breaks. one day they started talking and he confessed that he was  surprised that she was not loud, agressive criminal or ignorant as he had grown up believing west indians to be. they had cross words but then realised how they had been bamboozled by colonialisation. they had a good friendship until my Grandfather put a stop to it. He  was not having his wife form friendships with any other man. he was less educated he was not coming from a wealthy background and probably held the friendship to be a threat to the marriage based on the stereotypes he had been fed about african men.

The 70’s were a blur of confusion, some parents fed their children the same crap that they themselves had been fed about africa  and africans, until Reggae and Rastafarianism took off. The final nail in the colonial bs in my community was alex haley’s roots and the  tv series. that and actually meeting real flesh and blood africans, no they did not seem that different! they were not sexually incontinent, nor  the vicious villains of the colonialists.

I can only speak from experiance and cannot say what things were like on the african side of  the fence. But i can say it was not only a west indian to African line. Starting primary school i was ruthlessly teased and punched( to the point of nosebleeds) by lets call him AA, who joined in the racist bullying by calling me “blackie” i pointed out that he was black too but  that was apparently  not important since me reasoned  “yeah ,but you’re blacker than me!”  But i sweep him under the carpet.

I want to talk about my ExBoyfriend who is African his name is Brown,  we have a backstory if you want to know more check out my other blog  cold nights no romance.

www.noromance.wordpress.com

 

 we dated for 3 years in that time he called me jamaican (i am not jamaican),said things like “you west indians” in a tone i doubt he would tolerate about africans. “you are all the same so why can i not call you jamaican” (it takes 4 hours on a jet to get to jamaica from my island and there is not even a direct flight. he mocked my cultral  heritage glibly and refused to acknowledge it until we were screaming at each other and i pulled up something african and used it in the same  context. we parted ways on non ethnic basis BTW.

That is how far we have come, we can date  but  we need to realise that yes we can be proud of our cultral differences without it being a denial of someone elses culture, when i say Anansi stories are integral part of caribbean culture i am not denying it’s ghanian roots  what i am saying is that it is as much west indian as african. Anansi had to evolve in the middle passage, we have different stories and different situations. we owe you the chracter, but he is ours too!

i digress, we have to do a lot of soul searching all of us and recognise that we need to emancipate ourselves of colonial blinkers over our eyes.

I know jesus was jewish, why is that problem for others?

I was reflecting on the images i have seen over this holy season, Easter the very festival that makes me christian. Easter is the reason why i am not part of a jewish faith. I love and respect the old testement as much as  i do the new.

 I have seen so many aryan jesus depicted, jesus is always depicted hanging from the cross with a giant loin cloth, disguising his circumcision, when in all truth people were probably crucified nude. Nowhere is he depicted with his curly hair which is noted as being “like woodshaving”.

It does not matter in the grand scheme of things, but i think it will do a great deal to erase some of the anti semitic elements in some churches, who hold to the idea that jews killed christ (idiotic at best, deadly and racist at worst). You only have to look at the horrendous tirade that Mel (drunk as a skunk)Gibson made. The arguement that jewish people killed christ does not hold water, judas may have betrayed him but does one man hold responsibility for all men of their race? No one ever sugguested that italians are responsible for the flux that is the middle east; really by that flawed logic you could say they caused it because the romans expelled most of the jewish people from the holy land 90 or so years after the death of jesus. Nope not heard that one.

I have seen people depict mary and infant jesus in many different ways but i have never seen a mary who had the stereotypical jewish phenotype, not to say she should  be wearing a yellow star or have exagggerated  features  but never have  i seen a young mary and seen the looks of a woman who was born  and bred in the middle east, who was racially(more importantly religiously) jewish. I have seen depictions of women who look like their entire genome belongs in scandinavia,the netherlands or northern europe.

It is not really the images that matter to people who have true faith, but i feel that christianity does have problems in relation to the jewish faith, we need to have more respect for people of the jewish faith and the jewish  faith itself, they gave us the old testement, and in return for the past 2 millenia we have repayed them with pogroms, hatred, discrimination and forced conversions. we need to grow the fuck up! our religions are divergent but that does not mean that we have the right to pray for their conversion(just insulting), or to confront them with things we know to be offensive or dirty to them (if you do that, pig is the right name for you).As for the lies and mistruthes that their is a world wide network of jewish people ruling the world…..PAH!!! what a load of nonsense, sorry if there was a network of jewish people controlling the world tell me why isreal the jewish homeland is constantly at war internally or externally,   people need a stable base to control things outside their domain, look at the british isles, in  10th century england was created 955ad. then it rapidly started  it’s colonial conquest of wales and scotland and made a furtive  grasp for ireland. whilst those nations were still grasped by internal conflict and eventually over the years they fell to the organised ( and contempt worthy) england. My point is if the idea wasn’t so powerful it would be laughable.

Can we all repeat after me “there is nothing wrong with acknowledging  jesus was Jewish and if he were born today he would go to synagog, The jewish faith is just as sacred as my own ”

Female body image and pornification

Good afternoon!  i was watching a programme on channel 4 last night and it got me to thinking, about the way in which women and young girls are  having their body image affected by the media. I have an 8 and a half year old sister and she is rapidly developing as she nears puberty,  I  admit that i am deeply worried for her.

The programme has a website and you can catch it at www.sexperianceuk.channel4.com

 it’s title is sex education versus porn. Pornography is an adult thing, unfortunately it has been seeping into evryday  life little by little and duee to poor controls  many under 18’s are able to acess it, maybe accidently maybe not. But  how is it affecting them?

On the programme, what really shocked me into researching today was the moment that the school children when confronted with photographs of say 10 real breasts and 1 pair of falsies they all gravitated to the falsies, they seemed repulsed by the natural boobs of all differing  shape and size and their reaction to normal and varing vulva was of abborance.

The boys were quite blase, with their put downs and i could tell thses girls were suffering with really abnoramlly low  self esteem because they did not  mesure up to porn stars or the modified bodies of glamour models.

 when i was growing up i was soooo far removed from the ideal phenotype of desirability that i did not even attempt to measure myself against any scale, the ideal was at the time Jordan aka Katie price, who is a size 8 ( maybe even a six) and her breast were massive absolutely huge we must have been talking about at least 32g. so while i was also size 8 i was 32b , i was also black with natural hair and i was short and i had arse that you could lay your lunch on, that back in the day was deeply unsexy, while the narrow barely there cauasian backside was deriguer.

 But now we have various black/ multi ethnic visions of female desirability in the media which my sister will have to contend, the video models with their barely brown skin, their waist length weaves, their super large breasts and tiny waist, with our parents genes she will have little trouble with the  full backside, but the whole thing is tyranny.

I do not want my sister stepping of the shower feeling shame, or inferiority when the scale that she uses is a false one, at least we have parental control on our family computer, but what about the outside world? we cannot sheild  her from that.  I’m glad there are representations of black and nonwhite women out there that are beautiful and desirable, but at what cost? To our collective self esteem?  when i grew up the only black women on tv were depicted in characture really, fat , loud, agressive, really 19th century mammy types apart from the women on desmond’s (rip). That was just as damaging but still i feel the more we as women conform to this porno- coded acceptability the more difficult we will find it.

katie price is an admirable woman, she rolled up her sleeves and plenty more items of clothing and she made a fortune, now she is expanding her  resume now she is a wife and mother, what about her copy cats will they be that lucky? are they as brave as she was to start with? did they alter themselves because they wanted to or because they thought it would be more sexually desirable to men?

Now i am not casting aspertions on any of  the three ladies above who in order say they are silcone enhanced (katie price aka jordan tope left), natural god given (esther baxter), or natural but no one believes it (angela lola luv). Good for you if you are grown and know what ur doing great! but  be wary that puberty is difficult enough let alone being compared to  these uber women. I know i will never have legs that are long lean and thin , like keri hilson’s but at least i am grown up enough not to let it bother me. If i were still developing and has the same enviromental pressures on me as young girls today, i would crucify myself..

 Growing is an extremely long aduous journey and we all have to come out of the other end intact mentally as well as physically. what is disturbing  is that  some young women as young as 18 are having surgery when they have barely started to fill out. Trust me little girls at 18 i was 32b  at 20 i was 32c a few years down the line i am almost a 34d and still in size 10 so please wait for your body to settle down.

At the moment  the woman du jour is cheryl cole  a nice enough geordie lass who can pack a punch ( she beat up a nightclub attendant boooo-hiss) whats worrying she may be a similar age to me but she appears to have lost sooo much weight that her pretty face seem gaunt!!

 this is an old pic and well she looks fab but what i am worried about is that alexandra burke’s mentor is an icon for so many girls of my sisters age and as stunning and untouchable as she is in the pic imagine how much more she is  in the next photo

 she is naturally slim but maybe a little too bony here. she is lovely and while i am waffling at this point, i want all girls to feel that way.

It’s not thse women ’s fault they are photographed the way the are due to something called the male gaze that my fellow blogger abagond has written about.

 we need to tell each and evry young girl and developing woman aboyt the way that affect female depiction in the media, and that is how we can attemppt to inoculate against feelings of inferiority.

just my 2 cent

Housing crisis and bigots!

Whats been irking me for the best part of the last decade is the housing crisis and misguided peoples false beliefs that all the blame can be laid at the door of immigrants. One group  of  papers that  is partial to this particular line of journalism, is “the DAILY MAIL” and the “DAILY EXPRESS” i find that their mild brand of xenophobia is cultivating a culture of fear amongst the cherished “middle  Endland” that they foundly talk of.

They bolster the cries from the far right, that  “african immigrants are given council homes above waiting english tenants” or that “asian immigrants fiddle their benefits to cheat” or  “polish people are taking all the bedsits”. I can barely read one of these papers without runing into the shrill cries of “white people will be  minorites in our  own country!” these are the phrases  of the far right of course,  The aforementioned papers are a tiny bit more respectful than that. That i believe that is down to the fact that their journalists are a tiny bit more educated than the average far right politician/supporter.

Now  i feel that the housing shortage in this country  is a lot more complex than just “bloody foreigners”.  i will outline my beliefs below.

-In the 1980’s Margret Thatcher sold off a large portion of our social housing, thus places are restricted.

-People  are living longer thus they are not returning housing stock to the market, thus increasing the “value” of the remaining houses on the market by the scarcity of the commidity.

-the buy to let market is one that has allowed several wealthy, or middle class persons to buy up second homes, or several properties. this increased their own personal wealth, while pushing the housing market further  skyward by  making the commodity even scarcer.

-People are living differently in modern society, the housing stock is still largely consistant of family homes, 4 bedroom, 3 bedroom houses. While many more single households are existance than ever before. so thus if the needs of people who need to be housed are not being met by the houses that are suplied we obviously have a situation when people will have to wait for an adquate house is found, they may watch people with differening circumstances  appear to waltz in and be housed straight away because the house best suited to their requirement is availible.

So there we have it, in my opinion.

What really pisses me off is that bigots take the easy route they do not even try and be intelligent about it they just pull thoughts out of the sky and do not be rational about  your arguements.

they cant see that life exepectancy would have anything to do with it. if people used to die at  maybe 65-73 and now they die on average 79-100 that is about 20 additional years that their home will be occupied, thus a family who is waiting for that home when they are 65 will have to wait 35 years for that home to become availible, by which time lets assume they have grown up and  their children might be awaiting  a home.

Margret thatchers government sold off a large portion of social housing,  that stock was never replaced, despite the growing population, the tory government was selfish, greed was good, and in essence i can understand their arguement that home ownership is a good thing, but it was not given a sustainable plan.

The buy to let market has also chocked the private market as well.  This market  has been driven by greed, it took up homes that struggling families needed and  priced them out of  the market.  This is especially hard in rural areas where the wealthy city living elite bought up summer homes in beautiful areas  that they only inhabit maybe 3 weeks out of 52. meanwhile the local folk often on vastly different wages  look on  while their housing market ascends out of the range of their pockets, they cant afford the homes in the region and sometimes have to move away from  their area to raise families.

So instead of everyone  realising or trying  understand they are assaulted with this mistruths that  it’s all down to the fact that foreigners are comeing into the country and other such vagrants. The question is when was the time when we did not have foreigners coming to our country? Queen Elizabeth the  first was dismayed at the sight of so many “blackamoors” and  the tolerant folks up north had several anti jewish pogroms in the middle ages as they were seem as foreigners.

Yes we have people coming to the country and if they pass all the revelant tests then they will be housed in  the same fashion to you.But our problems started with us and the way we have handled our housing and business over the past 30 years.

I hate people who base their opinions on stereotypes.

I despise people who base their opinions of people based on stereotypes. Today has been a reall humdinger for them, they seem to be around every single corner.

Sitting down with a young colleague of mine ( well they are 22) while we had a deep and meaningful over lunch putting the worlds to right, she talked about how she  hated how her community was portrayed in the media and how it was affecting how people interacted with her as a person. she is a pakistani, but born and raised here in the uk , she is a muslim and no does not wear the hijab, she  is very beautiful and funny. I love this girl we have know each other for 5 years.

we were reminiscing over an event  in 2004 when we were talking about our communities, we had not known each other long then, she made a hurtful faux pas. She insulted my mother, she made the assumption that my sister and i did not share the same father, when i corrected her she then assumed that my parents were not married. She was very comfortable in making these assumptions to my face and we exchanged a few heated words. i put her right. How dare she make such assumptions, she only knew me on sight, i would not have made an assumption about her or her family, because it is likely that i may be wrong and i had nothing to base them on. whoops !!!! she was momentarily cowed.

The Thursday 7th July 2005 the day that a few  so called muslims blew a few tubes and a bus up and took 56 people to their deaths. This girl and myself happened to be working the evening shift together. By the time we signed in for the evening we had an idea of who had done the act, we had been seeing the scenes since 9 that morning. People started with the ignorance. She was teary eyed when we started.  we talked in hushed tones, she had already  been on the recieving end of harsh looks and while people hadn’t done anything she had noticed that on her walk in that people had been spitting very close to her. By the end  of that week she was exhaugsted she had had a huge row at college with some very thinly veiled racism.

she was fed up by august she had gone for a week in ibiza and she had  been treated like a criminal, she  was singled out for  extensive questioning, her luggage was searched over and over, and tipped out and all her underwear was displayed for all to see. she missed her flight and was put on the next availible one with an upgrade… little consellation.  ” people see my skin and hair , they see my ethnicity and then they guess my religion and then everything changes… they do not see a person any  more, i stop being singular… i become a threat,  so great is this threat people  have to intimidate me, humiliate me. like i’m responsible for every muslim and every pakistani.” In that moment i knew she understood why i felt so  insulted when she made those assumptions. It was sad that she only understood when people  started to do the same to her.

Today we sat down talking about some vast nonsense when a young guy sat down with a few cronies, they all had some kentucky fried chicken. I was being good and eating a bacon, chicken casear salad. So from where i sat the smell of the heartattack inducing fried (stroke in batter) chicken, smelt very good. i murmered something about the smell being so inviting.  mr diversity 1900, said                         “god you black people love fried chicken do you eat anything else!”  and  i was scratching my  head, while the table of men dissolved into laughter. where the hell did he get that impression? I generally hate chicken and white meat, love red meat, chicken is meat for people who cannot afford better animals.  but fried chicken is a rarity  on the grounds that  it’s greasy and not as nice as wagamama’s or my local restaurant noodle nation.

I refused to argue with him on the grounds that when i try and do something like that i usually  get called an “angry black woman” and that usually ends in more  arguing and thus perpetuatng an untrue stereotype.  they then started to mock  some other black female stereotypes, this man seemed to  base his entire image of black women on what you see on maury and yes he hit upon the paternity shows.

DREAD!!!! that is what i did not want to hear, i had to argue with him after he started to super impose the actions of the slutty few onto most black women. He got vile, so did i.  he  was being vocal about how these women. but he did not leave it personal, he said black women, i told him that black women were not the only ones on that paternity show,  and i did not like the way he was broadcasting it  although it was exclusive to black women. I said thats like saying that all  paedophiles are white  based on the fact that all the paedophiles  i saw on crimewatch were white.

 I thought i was doing well, i did not raise my voice, i stuck to the topic i did not even swear at  the ugly cunt. but oh here is the surprise i got called unreasonable, i was an angry  black woman and  whats more the ugly cunt thinks he touched a nerve…… well with the torrent of abuse i got  i guess the whole paedophile thing must have touched a nerve… (just kidding)