Is Black Britain an illusion?
www.charcoalink.wordpress.com/2009/10/24/why-black-britain-is-an-illusion/
Please read Charcoalink’s article before reading mine. Ta!
I love Charcoalink, she is intelligent self assured, and proud. I applaud her, she is ambitious and articulate. However her summation of my community in this post just hurt!! It was painful, i don’t think she could have gotten away with roasting any of the other british ethnic minorities.
A lot of what she said i feel, was worthwhile, but some just smacked of an outsider who had no knowledge of the community, and that is what stang, a white woman would be torn down for being “priveiledged” and thinking that one glance could deftly explain the complexities of one minority group, without study.
When my grandparents generation came to this country, they expected the welcome mat, that white colonialists had brainwashed them to expect. They were confronted with a country that scorned them. Landlords that could charge a whole wage packet for substandard housing. Police who would beat and arrest at will and whim whomever they pleased. Employers could discriminate, banks did not lend and morgages were denied not on inability to pay, but on simple discrimination.
So My community fought, they rioted in the streets for equality for all, they fought and lobbied for employment laws that protect us all today, they fought for equality across the board. Housing, schooling,employment and i for one think those are pretty important. WHY did we fight for equality, because we are a proud people We came to work and do well and we found in the late 1940’s that we could not do well because there was discrimination and opression that strangled our development.
For the Majority of the 1960’s I have been told, by relatives. that the thinking was in schools and all educational facilities, that all black children were educationally sub-normal on account of strong west indian accents, those children who did not “bleach” the sound of their mother country from their tongues, were left to languish in the classes for the educationally sub normal classes regardless of ability. Teachers were those born at the earliest 1930 or there abouts, so we can safely assume that they were brought up on tales of empire savages and slaves, it’s not a streach to see how they must have reacted to boisterous west indian children with their stecatto brash accents. So for the best part of the sixties a whole generation was written off.
In the 1970’s to early 1980’s we had the sus laws. Where british police had the right to stop, search or arrest anyone on the suspicion that they , had been, or would be involved in a crime. Black people were targeted on amazing scales and this erupted with the new cross fire. My community had had enough of the flagrant disregard of the establishment.
The new cross fire.
A party held not far from new cross gate station. Held by a West Indian family for a youngster. It was being held in a home. suddenly the house is ablaze, numerous children and young teens are seriously injured. 13 young teenagers die. The fire makes the news. The police investigate claims from injured people that there was a petrol bomb thrown into the living room. The national front had increased activity in the area and several people decide to mobilise the community into campaigning. 2nd march 20,000 black people marched for the lost youths Throughout central london. They campaigned and still campaign for justice two inquests have happened recently i am not quite sure of the exact years but we do care for our community and for our youths.
http://www.newstatesman.com/199902120015 -Darcus Howe’s feelings on the events of the night.
The kind of immigrants we had during the 1940’s to the 1970’s were predominantly families, large families. We took low paid jobs, often beneath our qualifications because we had familes to feed, it was more important that families stayed together, ate together and had a good quality of life that jet set at the exepense of having no quality of life.
Assimilation of the mid 1980’s to present. yes my community is assimilated as far as black people can assimilate. Why? because That is how our colonial background has shaped us, we have no language ties that force difference with our white neighbours, we have no religious difference that separate us from our white neighbours. Some black men (a few black women also) like having sex white people, who are we to stop them? West Indians love each other and their heritage, but we suffer a disadvantage that other minorities do not have.
Our Creole heritage ( when i use the word creole i mean it in the caribbean way not the american way) means we have some of our african traditions, but all, they have been corrupted, diffused and changed, our heritage has been anglicised, we have no language of our own “patois” is understood by all. Other minority groups at least have the option of keeping a bond by using the exclusive mother tongue, we do not share that option.
But to say that we are not proud to be black, because we utilise the term “black british”, is asinine. I am black, I am british, not untruthful, but scratch the surface and i am more than happy to tell you about my heritage. The fact that i am born and bred in England, does not neutralise my west indian culture, west indians cannot be neuteured. We are too proud if any thing.
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
STD’s don’t happen to people like you or me…. do they?
Ok, it’s time that people in the developed world wised up. In the 1980’s we developed a binary paranoia, one about HIV/AIDS, it was one that insisted that it was everywhere, but at the same time only really a threat to the degenrate. The 1980’s were so so free and accepting as perhaps we remember them, they were times of extreme predjudice, especially to the LBGT community, they were commonly held to be degenrate, not different.
1990’s allowed us to become really really lax, medicines for HIV/AIDS were improving and the mortality rates were not so great as they were in the prior decade. People in the developed world began to see HIV/AIDS as something that happened to other people, groupie infested rockstars, smackheads,black africans, famine victims, sex workers and generally people who they do not know.
The media has played it part, we never see the faces of HIV/AIDS in the west the mediacted and visually fine victims they only show us the extreme, which distances the diease from our consciousness. It’s only ever a bad thing. People begin to think ” well it’s mainly an African/black/gay/poor/promiscious thing thus it will never touch me” that is the mindset of someone who is at high risk. that is the mindset of a person who will not think to use a condom. they think the diease resides only within certain people , and catagories. they are not likely to get a screening for STD’s thus they are likely to pass them on to more and more partners.
Now i like many other love sex, i do not advocate abstience because i just don’t believe it’s healthy, but practising unsafe sex is just as dangerous. Certain people watch the news and see thining black people in africa suffering and they use that image to isolate STD’s, they reason it’s something that will cause you to be emaciated immediately and give up the ghost and die, not the case, otherwise healthy people would not have sex with infected people, they would be able to see and thus avoid infection.
I remember in 2006/7 the small English seaside town of St Ives was found to be at the centre of a clustre outbreak of HIV/AIDS. the news reporters went into the town and interviewed the towns people. They all expressed shock, they did not expect it to be in a place like their town. They did not have any foreigners (shock horror, quelle suprise!) everyone was absolutely flabbergastered! this quintisentially English 100% white anglo-saxon place “with no foreigners” had been the epi-centre of an infection cluster of HIV/AIDS so big that that the media had been alerted to raise awareness and ask that people please be tested!
So my basic point is, never feel that you are too nice, or too middle class, too white, black, asian,hetrosexual, traditional,christian,jewish, muslim, hindu, buddist,rasta, or any other religious faith to be struck down…. we are all born of man and woman and have the same equipment, there is no man made catagory that will protect you if you are not using a condom.
Oh and by the way if you come across some person who has HIV/AIDS do not respond with ignorance, that person is still human, do not discriminate, there is the chance that they have not done anything to cause their ailment, you can be born with HIV/AIDS vaginal births with HIV/AIDS can be a transmission risk, brestfeeding with HIV/AIDS is also a transmission risk, some people were unwittingly infected by tainted blood transfusions in the 1980’s and early 90’s. So they may have come into this world and developed HIV/AIDS through no fault of their own. Even if they did Get HIV/AIDS and they should have know better (ie used condom, barrier methods, used clean needles) then still do not discriminate.
Am i and the west hypocritical??
Hello again! I began to think today on my previous posts. i began reviewing them. one of them was on the topic of Female Genital Mutilation. I began on my soapbox about how it was wrong, how it could not be sanctioned and was not sanctioned by any religion or deity. How it was evil to tear through the flesh of our daughters for what was little more than vanity that could cripple the woman in childbirth.
Then i began to think, well do i condemn western women who have labioplasty to “neaten” up their labia? I haven’t but i will now have to! these women have healthy labia but feel that the look of their labia is now attractive so they go to a surgeon and slice through their inner labia. Is that not similar to a mild version of FGM? it is not as terrible as the forth variation of FGM which removes pubic fat , outer labia, inner labia, including the clitoris and then the crude sewing of the wound shut leaving only a tiny hole about the width of 5mm across and 5mm high for menstuation and urine. but it is not similiar? people have argued with some sucess that men are the agents driving FGM, some requesting it a prerequiste to marriage. Now i can only wonder , why is it that women in the west are also slicing up their genitals? because of our enduring love of pornography, men have an idelised view of what female genitalia look like, men are very fussy and reject anything that does not fit. so with nervous anxiety women who do not fit the mould rush out and seek to correct this imperfection. It saddens me.
If you have a healthy fully functioning labia, leave it be, if it’s not cancerous, don’t cut it, it is that way for a reason. if a man rejects you because of your labia he is rejecting himself. most men have a complex about their own genitalia, and most women are kind enough not to persecute men about it. If a man has a preconcieved idea about what female genitalia is let him look for that genitalia, you are a woman, not just a piece of pussy, not just a cunt, more than punani. if a man looks for a partner for just her genitalia he will be lonely, we are all blessed to be different.
heavens help if he find a labia to his liking what of that woman, what if he dislikes her nose, or her feet, will she even consider him? bowing to this pressure is bad for women and i cannot condone it no matter wher you have to live or what culture you hold dear.
The Dinosaurs, The Dodo, The African-Caribbean community???
WARNING: THIS TEXT IS WRITTEN IN TYPICAL A TYPICAL WEST INDIAN RUM SHOP MANNER! NO BULLSHIT, NO POLITICAL CORRECTNESS, IT IS NOT WRITTEN TO OFFEND, NOR DOES IT INTEND MALICE, IT SIMPLY AN ARTICLE OF OPINION!!!!!!
Stop the press!! A study commissioned by Equality and Human Rights Commission has reported that my beloved African caribbean community is set to vanish. I read the headline with great alarm in the Sunday Times yesterday. The cause is apparently good news for the state of multicultralism. it means that white people are just more accepting of interracial relationships, the African caribbean community dies out by default of not having enough people to sustain itself in the face of such rapid absorption. thus we die out leaving only the notting hill carnival to atest to our presence.
This is not really a surprise though, it’s an unplesant thing but all in all we knew we would arrive at this predicament, with the way that things are in the dating market. Allow me to illustrate to you our rates of interracial out-dating the study show that 50% of all black African-Caribbean men have a partner of a different race, 20% of black African men have partners of a different race,10% of indian men and women have partners of a different race. 40% of chinese women have a partner of a different race, the pakistani community (of both sexes) has an percentage of 4%.
when looking at the figures you will notice that largely black women are invisible, we are not note worthy, i know of 3 black women who are married to white men but i doubt that they alone make up 1% of the African-Caribbean community.
What it does make me wonder is why is my community up front and centre on this trend? we are the smallest minority (surely) in the country (england).
Well we could argue that our heritage is one that is one that leans heavily to anglicisation, we HAD to assimilate to get by and get jobs, our cultral values while not exactley the same are very similiar, our countries were part of Britain well up into the 1980’s and we largely are Christian.
we could also Argue that there may be a tenuous colonial thing going on here? Franz Fanon legendary author (and arsehole) of martinque (french speaking caribbean) said “there is only on destiny of the black man, and that is white”. calypso’s (popular topical music of the caribbean) of the early to mid 20th century often rhapsodised that the ideal woman was rich, white and stupid.(i don’t know if that is more racist or sexist but it sucks all around). The white woman has a special position in the Caribbean, she is rare, coveted and protected, so when you have chance of having your very own white woman aren’t you going to celebrate and grab that opportunity as soon as you can.
Or the third arguement is the sappiest pile of crap i have ever been forced to swallow, “Black women are just too difficult to please”, well excuse us for exepecting not to be crapped on. Like those arses have never bumped into a white woman who is less than courteous.
The truth as i see it, is that Black men from my community like white women, just accept it. the fact that they can get their hands on white women renders me and other women who share my background obselete.
In the dating world, we are the dregs, Asian women are feted as beautiful,seductive innocents. White women are the rulers of the western world they have the media are their backs, playboy, hustler,loaded,maxim,FHM,nuts etcetera. Latina’s have a reputation of passionate lovers and sultry loaded looks that set loins afire.
What about us black women what do we have, a reputation as being little more than beasts of burden oh and Robert di nero and Robin thicke…. that is some team there!
Arse on a bike…. i should immigrate back to the caribbean at least the weather is nice, if i am doomed at least i could do it in the warm.
ps to all those idiots who thing that having a very mixed society obliterates racism please take a look at brazil….
ps i may just hev been a little bit sacastic at times in this post, it’s just the way i’m feeling.
Tradgedy worldwide…. why doesn’t nigeria get on the news?
Sometimes i don’t wonder why people think the west is myopic.
Mumbai is a slaughter house and despite being in asia, a firm attack against the west. The hostage takers looked for British/American people or people who happend to be jewish. Those people were then terrified and if unlucky then they were killed. To be balanced i have to point out that many Indian nationals were killed also, especially those who tried to protect others. sectarian violence is an ugly thing. you only have to look at the partition of India in 1947 to see the bloody scars on the nations that were born on the people. It affected all. on the way to and from what was called “western” pakistan now just Pakistan and “Eastern” pakistan now Bangladesh. It is horrendous and quite rightly is on our pages.
Now unfortunatley we have an almost unreported human tradgedy that doubles the death toll in mumbai. In nigeria this week 400+ people have been killed in clashes between Christians and Muslims. Due to being almost absent from british news broadcasting and news papers i am woefully uninformed. i only know from a small column in the middle of the “daily Mirror” it was no more than 4 cms long. That country is also a commonwealth country, that has a large diaspora in England why in the name of god do those 400+ people not even warrant a mention on one of the three daily news programmes on any of the 4 terrestrial channels?
Disgusting!
Is decency wrong when you call it political correctness???
Greeting from blighty, it’s nearly novemeber 2008. what i have decided to talk about today is a problem that has been growing over here in england in particular.
The right wing media rages, political corrcetness has gone mad, it’s eroding our way of life, it’s banal stupidity, we can no longer live our lives the way we should.
well they usually site things like stupid local councils refusing to decorate their town centres for xmas, in case the celebrations offend non-christians (i know that is grossly stupid) or when some off-colour old school celebrity comedian complains that they can’t tell jokes about darkies, chinks, pakis and the like that it’s hard being white because you are oppressed in your own country.
It’s all nonsense of course I imagine even if you add up all the minorities in england, and counted the collective wealth we do not have the clout to oppress the white majority. we probably only amount to 11% ( i have not researched that though its probably less ).
the fact is all political correctness should amount to is decency, not being abused on the street because you skin is darker than what europe managed to evolve, or because your hijab marks you out as different. i have been called a “wog” , a “blackie” and other various terms that are less polite than black (which is fairly harmless as a description). it is decency folks not an oppressive assault on anglo saxons.
lately i have noticed with the lurch to the right in politics, that many of these ignorant mouthpieces have come to the fore; complaining about how slowly “the silent majority” (favoured by the right wing rags and bnp) of white people are sick and tired of multicultralism and how they feel so invisible and insulted. well they say they are tired of apologising about the british empire (seriously did they ever start apologising?) and they want to celebrate the good work that it did. mmmm ok so you ended polygamy (hope thats the right spelling) that’s good, spread protestantism by force (mmmm) and re-invented the map. now what about your part in the forcible removal of 10million africans from their continent for forced labour and cheap good? what about the starvation in the indian continent and how you left them to die when they could have been saved? what about the irish potato famine and the fact that we could have saved them from death with the surplus that we had harvested that year? (we could have been the earliest humanitarians but we sold the surplus for profit and watched people die). what about the horrendous mess we made in the middle east after the collasp of the ottoman empire? we fucked up large , look at what our failure in what was then called Palestine has done, the holy land has more bloodshed and death and evil acts than in hell, the suffering, we all suffer for the failed resolutions of 1918.
well i want to write my own rebuttal to the ignorance out there. firstly this is an overwhelmingly christian country although we have sizeable Jewish, Muslim, Hindu and Sikh communities. Futhermore i have never heard of any one of those communites condemning the celebration of xmas or easter as offensive, so shall we just chalk any instances of aforementioned circumstances as councils making assinine assumptions that are totally false. So that has nothing to do with our ethnic minorities pressuring the anglo-saxon majority.
Now to deal with the old school comedians who love jokes that mock and use crude stereotypes to belittle the ethnic minorities. well here’s the thing, it’s no longer 1949 and you cannot do it. when a person from an ethnic minority starts their family in this country the one thing they will do is raise that child with respect for this country, and all of it’s cultures. how is that child to feel when their background/heritage/appearance is taken for mockery? will they grow up to be the fodder for extremism? maybe? we all need acceptance and we all execept this culture for what it is and if you want people to respect the culture that you would hate to belittled do not belittle other people.
now all those right wing bastards can shut the fuck up!!!
ZIMBABWE! SOMEBODY CARES FOR YOU!
I care! If i had power , i would aid you. save you. you are not just a story to me, you are human to me and i would save you.
mugabe is a vampire, he feeds from the blood ,body and flesh of his people and his land.
maybe the world thinks that it is okay for Zimbabwe to burn,die and fester, they say ” no oil, no incentive” , i do not feel that way. He has been steadily building to this point since 1980. he was in ian smiths government a trained guerilla fighter, he has never lost his hardened edge, he has slain people in their thousands and this is not recently many cases were in the 1980’s and they were black. thus not newsworthy. How can we sit back and watch, when women , children and men are abused in such a fashion. It grieves me, to see in the papers the swollen beaten bodies the brutality. we cannot turn away from it.
now the flux people get themselves into when they start thinking about Zimbabwe is one of simplistic racial slurs. they see a maniacal black man killing white farmers ( read the news). but it is more than that.
lets start in the 1880’s just a short century before independence in Zimbabwe. the british decide that, crushing people in the british isles is not enough, southern africa sounds nice to them. so they build upon the exeperiance that they have had in west, and south africa . they meet with fierce opposition but eventually overcome and suppress the indeigenous people. the indigenous people are throw off of their ancestral homesteads, in favor of english styles farming and serfdom (yes i know what that word means and i feel that it is appropriate .) the indigenous people, like most people who were colonised by the british suffered. the indigenous people were no longer in control of large scale food production and their situation became greatly reduced in society.
relics from the past from great zimbabwe were taken as proof of a lostt white civilisation, even though most evidence pointed to a shona past. to cover this up myths were hastily written up, about ophir a mystical city of gold, solomon and sheba’s love nest, solomon’s salt mines, lebenese ship builders etecetera. even in the passing years of ian smith’s governement and carbon dating, artifacts were tested and re-tested .
so when finally a black man came to the helm in zimbabwe there may have been a sense of relief, from all the colonial bullshit. but no he was just a new terror to endure, Zimbabwe has endured his massacres and terror for too many years.
It is not just a case of a crazy black man, it is simply a case of a man who, is evil to his very centre. how can we the world stand by and let this country perish ! I have seen the pictures old women and men, pregnant women, even children beaten. his goons urinating on opposition supporters.
God I pray for you tonight ZIMBABWE! that your suffering may not be long.
Why little englander’s are scared!
Well here is another observation piece, if you choose to believe me or not that is your choice. just a little history of the great tradition of english nimbyism (Not In My Back Yard mentality ). little englanders are worried their colonial chickens have come home to roost. What i say is harsh but i say it as affectionate republican black woman( just a note republic as in NO ROYALTY , not as in i love DUBYA, i hate dubya.) i love england but Little Englanders grind my gears.
England should have remained a rain soaked catholic country on the periphary of the great catholic powers of the italian states, france, spain and france. as it happened england had already taken an imperial attitude to it’s neighbours wales, scotland and the ancient ireland that was yet to divided . the welsh royal family is so long lost that most britons do not know of their existance. ( they assume that the title of prince of wales is something as simple of being granted a peerage.) cut the story short the entire welsh royal family was so descimated that not a single heir is found in the other royal houses of europe . if that is what they did to the royals please imagine what they did to the average welshman or welshwoman. the welsh fought long and hard and unfortunately they sucumbed to english imperialism .
Scotland and England have been at constant loggerheads for centuries until the birth of the united kingdom. (please remember the union only came about because Elizabeth the first died heirless and had to name her scottish nephew as her sucuessor.) Even still the English thirst for conquest did not stop, they cleared from the highlands of the indigenous folk and well unfortunately for them they had the choice to either rent back their own land at exorbitant rents , join the budding navy, join the army or become a settler in the new world.
Now here comes the horror that is the venture past the pale in ireland. The english ( sorry my heart is with england it where i was born and bred here but SHIT WE REALLY FUCKED UP!!) the potato famine could have been avoided, when the land was consficated from the irish the english were producing suplus goods, beef, milk, wheat but choose to make money and export the surplus and let the irish starve.
Now there is that sorry tale called “our fun in the new world” Creating a happy place for europeans called A-merry-ca. Well there was a small bone of contention , there are some people already here and they totally screwed up the vision of the new (jewish, moor free) protestant haven of christianity. after they have helped you survive winter in this new land give thanks, they still screw up the vision though, never mind there is small pox and fire and starving people out. kill their livestock .
then there ar the caribs and arawaks to the south, the arawaks are short work, the caribs fight, so warfare it is, exile them to uninhabitable places. tidy work. then ship in the Africans, after travelling the alantic covered in vomit, blood and shit they are traumatised and they still try and rebel, well many centuries of unending toil and no thanks surely must do for them.
Ah the wonders of asia, the jewels and wonders to be stolen. the diamonds for the queens crown, the crops for export. now around about now the emancipated slaves are demanding higher wages and they have downed tools. what excellent timing we have a food shortage with the indian sub- continent let us send off the famished indian labourers and their families with promises of money and dividends. so low wages and unhappy proletariat all round.
Africa’s spell, the white man’s burden, to spread across the face of the earth, confiscating private property and claiming it as his own. so carve up an entire continent giving no concern to the people and natural boundaries that occur. women are taken and paraded round practically naked. to add insult injury when Sarah baartmann dies they stuff her corpse and continue to parade it around . when public attention turns against that sort of behaviour you hide the corpse. and refuse to bury it, only in the 21st century do we the english hand the body of miss baartman to south africa where she recieved a proper burial.
So when the Little Englander sees the immigrant with skins of , olive, brown, black and every variety and hears the lilt of a gentle welsh woman talking to her children in the street and a very proud scottish man heading their country and irish pubs getting supremacy above their own, they tremble. they fear extermination, obliteration, genocide. “we are being swamped!” they cry.
but baby this is a long time coming, you have been everywhere, in everyone else’s country ( and it has almost always been devastating) now you are fearful that it is pay back time.
not to worry we are here to work, do an honest days work for an honest days pay. build families. we are not here to swamp, exterminate, kill a way of life( be honest you could not claim likewise). so little nimby’s
CHILLAX!!!!!!
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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