If i disapprove of your relationship does that make you feel better?
Hi all!! sorry about my absence i have started a new job and i have been away a lot.
anyhoo on with my post.
I have met a wonderful group of people. But one comment from one of these women irked me a little. We get on well and all in all i think she’s great, however she seems to be fixated with my opinion on her relationship.
She asked ” Do you, as a black woman resent me for taking a good black man?” i looked away from my screen to see her green eyes staring back at my face imploringly. Like if her life depended on my answer. I was a little disturbed by several things.
: I had only seem her man once in my 20 and some years how could i feel anything???
:Her man was a good black man? because all the rest of them are bad???? Why is he good?? He is hardly what i call stellar he is distinctly bland.
why did she seem disappointed when i told her that i had no problem with her as a white woman dating a black man. her little face sank litterally for a split second before she caught herself and smiled back. she then spent the afternoon regaling me on how many black women hate on her for taking this “good” black man.
We were quite busy and we really didn’t have time to swap idea’s on society and diversity and i would have loved to explained the foibles of my section of the uk’s black community. but as it happened we didn’t and she then went on to rhapsodise on the benefits of having a black man opposed to a white man.
Don’t get me wrong, as much as it pisses me off to see a black man i am pining for walk off with a bint (of any race), i just cannot get worked up about it. She did not get that we were in a professional work place and that talking about “a nice big thick black cock is like heaven cloaked in a man’s body” is entirely inappropriate.
She even asked me again, and i told her “really honestly i don’t mind, i do not own him or any black man” she then proceeded to ask me why black women were so jealous, i shrugged. She then came back from a fag break and announced that she had made enemies on account of her kissing her black boyfriend in front of some black women.
I then added that some women, are just jealous regardless of colour. The fact that i was not upset or angry just seemed to unsettled her. she badgered me on and off for 5 hours.
i wanted to ask her if she would be happy if i said that i disapproved, or if i stalked her and her man scowling would she at least stop asking?????
BINT
Stereotypes harm us all.
Good afternoon, i was recently sitting down with some people in a “focus group” and before be began to discuss the issue at hand we were all explaining a lttle about ourselves.
One lady was from South Africa, her heritage was a coloured one to use the afrikaans term, i would say an asian background.
Two men were the prerequisite white english fellow with their roots right here in the cold european soil.
One lady was from the phillipeans, she was a student nurse and very pleasant too!
there were two pakistani’s one male and one female.
Last but not least there was me, young gifted and black to coin the cliche, from my west indian background, or to the overly sensitive “english speaking caribbean”.
we had half and hour to go before we began our formal tasks, so we began to share and talk. we talked about this recession, moneym finances and any sign of improvement in the economy. By all accounts we were doing quite well until one of the persons above made a crushing faux pas…..
” well i’ve been out of work for 6 months now, and it would be alright back where you are from, nothing but sunshine, beaches, drinking and lazing around but i’m going to starve if i dont find work soon”
My blood pressure shot right up. i got an instant headache, i fought the immediate urge to thump this person. How could they feel comfortable enough to say that in front of people they had only just met.
This incident is not the point of this post but it got me to thinking about the state of our world and how stereotypes can negatively impact on people even when they seem positive. The person’s idea of “where you come from” seemed a virtual utopia if it existed i would go, but the point of the comment was the belittle, and diminish the livelyhoods and the work ethic of a whole nation/ ethnicity.
My favourite stereotype is the hypersexual black male. It applies to all black men, regardless of indivuality. It endows black men with a penis so large and powerful that it coined a phrase ” once you go black you won’t go back”. It bestows strength and a hyper-masculinity, agility and with it the “ideal” body lean, tall, muscular and hard. In short according to this stereotype black men are hot to the touch red hot sexual adonis’ with the sexual power to make women ( and some men) to lose all self control. Here’s the problem…. this stereotype does not allow for individuality, there is no mention of any intellect, the black man is rendered a sexual beast, with all the bodily trappings of humanity but ultimately no human faculties. I had a teacher when i was 17, she was plain teacher from the midlands, her husband was 6ft and probably about 20 stones he was obese. she was once saying to me that in a fight Any black man could and would knock out any white or asian man without ever breaking a sweat. I had to challenge her on that, my father was a slight 5ft 9 and only about 12 stones and i said “my father could never take your husband on in a fight he would be laid out he just wouldn’t have the power behind him” but my teacher was absolutely resolutely sure in the supremacy of the strong black male body.
My second favourite stereotype is the Shy muslim Pakistani woman. Of late the world has started to fetishise women of Asia but lately i have noticed that the religious element has crept into it all. This stereotype renders all pakistani muslim women , silent, shy , bashful, oppressed, humble and shamefaced. The stereotype is loaded with inuendo and imaginings of women whose bodies are fetishised by the fact that they are almost entirely covered. Well let me burst this bubble because it almost makes me weep with anger. whoever thinks that being either pakistani or muslim makes a woman silent or opressed is a moron. because whenever i hear those things come up, it is almost always men who say it and they say it in a way that makes me feel that women who are silent or being silenced are something to be coveted. As a woman who has many female friends who are pakistani’s and muslims, can i just say… they are as shy, as bashful, shamefaced,opressed and as humble as the rest as all womanhood. There is an increasing amount of men who see women from the desi community walking by in their nijab with only their eyes showing and try and read the eyes of the women for passion and imagine the breeze passing between hidden bare legs….. these men are perverts. the reason why some men claim desire for these women is to belittle women who they feel are in opposition to these; little more than mysogyny they construct a womanhood they feel is pure , silent, free from all the nagging other women do. the shyness is is opposite to the forthrite manner that most women have. they imagine it is a womanhood that stands in the shadows and is a drudge for her man. To finish i would just like to add pakistani women/ muslim women are women alike us all and to part them from humanity is beyond fetish, it’s evil, i do not want to brush away any oppression issues that the pakistani community may have vis-a vis honour killings but all communities have problems and the pakistani community are changing from within.
The stereotype i love best are those about black women, of course they are closest to my heart. they all contradict each other, so how they have survived so long i do not know but here lets talk about them. Sapphire, the black woman consummed by rage and anger, she is always shouting, she corals the world with her tongue.she drives all sane loving men away she is loud and vocal, she is physically strong, in short she is like a gorgon, an amazonian siren who cannibalises men with her incredible spirit. Then comes the mammy , fat mentally slow, reliants on others overly motherly and desexualised, this stereotype is a nuturer like the name the american mammy which i presume is the version of mummy the english word equivilent to mommy. then there is the jezebel the youthful, vigourous , wetly pouting jezebel. the stereotype is all sex and trades on the curviness that black women are famed for , the typical african hips that give black women their shapely behinds, the full hard bosoms the waists that appear unusually small in juxtaposition with large hips. this stereotype cannot get enough sex and would often “devour” men until the man was spent of all sexual energy this stereotype is the female partner to the hypersexualised black male. well these stereotypes are laughable because they all contradict each other, sapphires are gorgons spewing bile and hatred , while mammy’s are loving warm and fat, while jezebels are curvy sexual and desirable. these stereotypes were made up to demonise black women and make other races of womanhood look good. the ideal when most of these stereotypes were created was white womanhood, white womanhood was presumed to be silent, quiet and faithful, slim and loving to her husband. so casting black women as the opposite was not only giving white womanhood an opposite but making it seem better.
while writing and debunking the stereotypes, i could not help but notice how womanhood’s stereotypes expose the misogyny in our society, if a stereotype is “positive” the women are silent, or quiet or shamefaced. However if the stereotype is bad the woman is considered loud, or vocal, or confronatinal. so in essence this world has to tarvel a lot further than a few nice paper laws that say woman are equal in status to men when obviously we have many entrenced social norms.
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.
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?
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 ”
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.
When your friends are right wing fascists???
Thanks to the joy of www.facebook.com i have had the joy of hooking up with friends who have drifted from me. People who i loved and supported from 1997-2001-2003. Yound adolescent girls have an instrigic desire to form strong bonds of friendship with other females in their age group i was no different. I was a little bit more outsopken and honest but i was no different. The wonderful thing about youth is that we are so open, young minds are beautiful and we express all our sentiments without being bogged down by the weight of political correctness (percieved) or social norms, we called it as we saw it.
So hooking back up with my best gal pal from 1997-2000 lets call her ellena. Ellena was beautiful, still is tall lean with beautiful chocolate brown hair ( back then she dyed it sunshine gold because she presumed it made her sexier). She came from a home somewhat like my own, two parents , happy. the difference was she had twin brothers and i was at the time an only child, oh and i’m black and she is white. But we were so close and loving. she was quite conservative and in a way quite naive about the outside world, she was compared to me sealed in a hermatically sealed bubble of Ellena land.
I could see a world beyond my boundaries, i could emapthise with people who did not share my world view and she could not. Case study our differing views on the murder of Stephen Lawrence. (for those of you not in the know allow me to explain. In 1993 Stephen and his pal got off a bus on the way home , they were surrounded by 5 white men all of whom were known to the police. and slaughtered. when the police arrived instead of aiding stephen as he lay dying, they interogated his friend, ignoring the injured stephen and asked if they were carrying drugs if they had any enermies. stephen died. in the resulting inquiries they interogated his parents was he in a gang? Did he take drugs? and all kind of nonsense. The men were broght to trial but they were aquitted beacause the evidence that the police collected was too scant, Two of the males fathers was fairly close to the police officer in command, the evidence was tainted because it had been gathered with the assumption that the victim was guilty of something and not innocent. By the time the five men were brought to trial and aquitted a tape surfacced in the press that showed the five white males posing with knives and saying how they would “chop up N!663rs and leave them with stumps and throw them in the ocean and tell them to swim home” the tape was several minutes long and really quite damning in light of what they had done. A second trial was brought against them and yet again they got off! The men laughed as they left the court. A few years later the metropolitan police release the Macpherson report that explained that the police was institutionally racist and because of this the case was processed and handled incorrectly. It was an absolute revelation the police has come on leaps and bound in reforming itself. It has increased its intake of people from ethnic minorites and is striving to pull itself away from its racist past.)
It was at this time a little while after the macpherson report that Ellena became very upset. “well it’s all very fine and good. When white people die it doesn’t get this much attention, it’s like we don’t matter.” she said putting her hands under the handdrier. I was baffled she was not the brightest girl but surely she was not stupid? i explained that yes white people matter as well but Stephen Lawrence was something very different, he died because instead of the police woman on the scene trying to stem the bleeding or attempt to revive him or call to check if the ambulance was on it’s way she was interogating a witness like a suspect. she did not check his pulse or try and communicate with him. i tried to reason with her the police officer in command did not step aside when he realised his prior connections with two of the suspects. The interviews with the Parents of Stephen Lawrence were more akin to interogations than interviews.In one instance questioning brought Mrs Lawrence to tears by it’s heartlessness. Ellena’s responce? So the police were doing their job, what was he doing out at that time of night anyway he could have been doing something dodgy? well i’ll be i thought to myself. If Stephen was white , would his friend have been interogated ? would the Police Woman have attended to him and his injuries (surely a live victim is better at talking than a dead one?), would the police officer in command have stood aside? would the evidence have been collected properely and without the assupmtion that Stephen had sone something? would those five white men have passed him by if he and his friend been white? Ellena had her mind made up it was media circus over nothing. i had to disagree because of Macpherson the police had to reform itself and i felt that i could begin to hope that my community would be treated with something that resembled fairness.
So i let it lie, I could not win all the time! she was beautiful but naive and i was brainy and worldly. then she went to Austrailia and came back everything was Paki this and Paki that. I asked her not to use that work because it was offensive and she countered that everyone in Austrailia said it and it was not swearing, it was just an shorter form of Pakistani. I countered that she should know better and that all that Aussie sun must have burned her brain out, She knew it was offensive that is why she did not use it before she went to Australia, she used Asian for short and Pakistani in all other situations. We grew up in the late 80’s early 90’s when “paki-bashing” was all the rage with neo-nazi scum in this country. she could not miss it her Area was closer than mine to a Pakistani stronghold in town. Sometimes i wanted to strangle her she was so ignorant.
Ellena had a secret that we shared , her grandfather was German and she was so worried about that, i had a feeling that she might have been entirely anti-immigrant had it not been for her German granddad. she cried in history class when a teacher picked up on her anglicised german name. It is name that almost english but it’s sound points you to holland and Germany. It was a lesson on Nazi’s and she left the room red faced and within 5 seconds of reaching the toilets she was collasped on the ground sobbing , she bore some guilt unnessarily her grandfather had left germany in the 1930’s although he wasn’t a jewish man. but the weight of other people’s assumptions crushed her so i let my 5′11 cry on my 5′0 shoulder. It’s so stupid but it was moments like this i felt like yelling, see the world isn’t clear cut and you need to look at things from another perspective! but it would do me no good
So when we linked up on facebook how not surprised was i to find that she is married to a guy in the forces. Bless she was always patriotic, but then so was i i just did it in a way that i considered not blind to the rest of the world. she sent me a link to join a facebook group after Prince harry’s “paki-towelhead gate” furore and it said “support Prince Harry” and i pressed the ignore button. Because there is not a “FUCK OFF” button. we were talking the other day jsut reminising over old times when we started chatting about the economy she reasoned the reason that we are all in such strife is that we have too many foreigners taking all the plum jobs and sucking benefits. “if you cannot prove that your roots are 100% here in the uk you should just resettle in the land of origin and that way at least we can get our balance back” i shook my head and i pondered if i argued with her would i be the big bad scary black woman who made that poor sensitive white woman cry? i decided yes i would being playing into her hands, so i took the gentle approach. “you know at least 25% of you belongs in Germany , are you going to remove a leg or an arm?” she blushed and i think she finally understood what i had been trying to drive home to her all these years.
Why can’t we all just get along??
April 28, 2009 at 12:29 pm (Africa, Africans, bigotry, black community, black people, britain, colonialism, colorism, colourism, ignorance, media, multicultralism, racism, shadism, the caribbean, the diaspora, the world, west indians) (Africa, black community, black history, black men, black people, Black women, britain, colonialism, culture, hatred, Injustice, literary comment, multicultralism, race, racism, stupidity, The black diaspora, the caribbean, the diaspora, West Indian, west indies)
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.
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