The black tax!
when i was growing up, my mother taught me about the burdens that i may have to bear. Of being a woman, of my impending menstruation and the pain of childbearing and the like. then she told me about the black tax. ” you will have to work twice as hard and peddle twice as far to be considered half as good and go half as far as your white friends” it seemed a little unfair.
my mother has always been absolutely honest with me , she has never lied to me. ( she tells me the truth even when it hurts and makes me cry) so i took her words on board. they stayed with me. My parents being excellent they had already instilled in me a proper west indian work ethic in me, i was always industrious but in school i was even more so. I had to be to survive some people i came up against.
I went to a primary school in one of the poorest area’s of town, in 1989 it was almost completely white. one black boy in the year senior to me, one mixed race girl in the year senior to me also and that was it in a school of about 120. it was a different world, only 8 short years since the brixton riots in 1981 and toxeth (same year). Baroness Thatcher was in government, anti immigrant feeling was quite high, and unemployment was quite high and thus immigrants were blamed (how orginal!). My father was naturalised in the 1970’s my mother was born of immigrant parents in the 1950’s so thus was british; however it counted for little our skin is dark and still to this day i have my fellow country-people asking ” no where do you really come from? no no you can’t come from here , what about your parents?”
I had the customary racist roughing up by the kids. in hind-sight i can see that the kids were probably being fed racist crap by their parents, what 4/5 year old thinks oh, those dark people are obviously responsible for my parents troubles, they have tails , and all that shit. But i kept my head down and slowly won their acceptance and friendship. it was all good till september 1991, i had a teacher that i will dub “mrs Empire” she was a woman of around 50- 60 years old. she was a well known harridan. she shouted and bellowed her class regularly. she spoiled my childhood.
Racial ribbing from kids, i can forgive because it can be argued they did not know any better, and they were too young. Old age bitches should know better. my mother caught her in a lie once. let me tell you how. My grandmother died that october and i was heartbroken. i started weeping the moment my mother disapeared from sight. It had been explained to “Mrs Empire” that my granny had passed on and that i was a little tender. so what did she choose to do. she paraded me in every class calling me a “awful crybaby” and demerited me for ” weeping and wailing and carrying on like a squalling little monkey brat.” my father having just lost his mother was not in his right mind and had arranged to fly out to the west indies after parents evening for the funeral. He cried before he left, but he was furious when he returned.
Mrs Empire had insisted that i had used my grandmother’s death as an excuse to avoid working not hand in my work sheets. I had hidden my work book because i had not done any work since my granny’s death. i had apparently been heard boasting that having a dead granny was great because you did not have to do much for a while. My father was a teacher, he is a tough but fair-ish teacher. he never lies to parents. he took her work as gospel. I was smacked for the second time ( i have only been smakcked 3 times in my life). i was given the harshest words and sent to bed and was not allowed to see him off at the airport. The arguement raged all night between my parents.
something was amiss. A week after my father had left, my mother decided to see mrs empire. The fact that my mother came unsettled her. her story started to shatter. Who exactely had reported to her my words, when had i said these things? where was my missing book and where were the missing worksheets? the biggest spot of luck was on my side when my mother glanced over mrs empire’s frame and saw behind the hideous fatty a blue book labled “lifeisannoying’s english work book” then my mother kindly told her that
“you are not to ever refer to my child as a Squalling monkey brat again, in public or private!” it was my triumph but with grief clouding my father, he could not ever remove the woman’s vicious lies from his mind and the notion that i am lazy stayed with him.
Now some may say ” oh she is of another age! she grew up on the british empire heathens savages and white missionaries!” i say So bloody what we all have to adapt. she carried on with her distaste of ethnic minorities. the Black boy who was senior to me I’ll dub him “shane” shane was an average 7/8 year old and he loved rough and tumble, everyone knew that. so on one cold wet muddy day she let the boys out to play football and then after playtime she pulled him up in assembly next to her pet aimiee.
Aimiee had hayfever so stayed glued to the empire’s side. Empire was giving an assembly on hygiene and cleanliness. she took a flannel and wiped aimiee’s obviously clean face. and then she wiped the mud from shane’s face. ” see, aimiee’s face and flannel are clean and white and shane, well oh dear it’s all so dirty!” and the dropped the flannel in disgust. she kept this behaviour for a year.
When i finally got to middle school, i thrilled my father by arriving in top set english, and science. I was middle set maths but it was an improvement. i was swimmingly well for a whole 8 months, Mrs Empire (how kind) came to visit us. i heard her with my own ears. “lifeisnnoying really struggles with ….” and what do you know i got bumped down the very next day. maybe coincidence but maybe not. I worked hard for the next four years and when i moved to secondary education, surprise i am top set everything again. I had to work so hard and see my white peers do a middling effort and get futher.
So after a university education, i thought screw this, eff the black tax, lets work on equality, lets see how far i get works as hard as i need to. well guess what folks, The black tax is there for my own good. I have seen 4 people that i have trained personally in my company become my senior so lets see that’s take them 2 years. whilst somehow my management think i haven’t got the right experiance.
So my arse is in gear i am aiming for the stars but i’ll probably get a seat in business class.
Rememeber what the black tax is about.
White women
Madonna makes sexually explicit book sex= sales, praise, kudos
Black women
janet jackson accidently exposes ugly saggy boob= moral indignation, poor sales,media outrage, lawsuits,hate mail, condemnation.
White male
Justin timberlake lets the aforementioned boob fly out.= no problem just lay low. aka SCOT FREE!
now just imagine if a black woman had been in on the whole “no panties” crazy a la lindsay lohan, paris hilton, britney spears. it was pukesome. but if they had been black they would have been roasted
