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.
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.
I hate people who base their opinions on stereotypes.
I despise people who base their opinions of people based on stereotypes. Today has been a reall humdinger for them, they seem to be around every single corner.
Sitting down with a young colleague of mine ( well they are 22) while we had a deep and meaningful over lunch putting the worlds to right, she talked about how she hated how her community was portrayed in the media and how it was affecting how people interacted with her as a person. she is a pakistani, but born and raised here in the uk , she is a muslim and no does not wear the hijab, she is very beautiful and funny. I love this girl we have know each other for 5 years.
we were reminiscing over an event in 2004 when we were talking about our communities, we had not known each other long then, she made a hurtful faux pas. She insulted my mother, she made the assumption that my sister and i did not share the same father, when i corrected her she then assumed that my parents were not married. She was very comfortable in making these assumptions to my face and we exchanged a few heated words. i put her right. How dare she make such assumptions, she only knew me on sight, i would not have made an assumption about her or her family, because it is likely that i may be wrong and i had nothing to base them on. whoops !!!! she was momentarily cowed.
The Thursday 7th July 2005 the day that a few so called muslims blew a few tubes and a bus up and took 56 people to their deaths. This girl and myself happened to be working the evening shift together. By the time we signed in for the evening we had an idea of who had done the act, we had been seeing the scenes since 9 that morning. People started with the ignorance. She was teary eyed when we started. we talked in hushed tones, she had already been on the recieving end of harsh looks and while people hadn’t done anything she had noticed that on her walk in that people had been spitting very close to her. By the end of that week she was exhaugsted she had had a huge row at college with some very thinly veiled racism.
she was fed up by august she had gone for a week in ibiza and she had been treated like a criminal, she was singled out for extensive questioning, her luggage was searched over and over, and tipped out and all her underwear was displayed for all to see. she missed her flight and was put on the next availible one with an upgrade… little consellation. ” people see my skin and hair , they see my ethnicity and then they guess my religion and then everything changes… they do not see a person any more, i stop being singular… i become a threat, so great is this threat people have to intimidate me, humiliate me. like i’m responsible for every muslim and every pakistani.” In that moment i knew she understood why i felt so insulted when she made those assumptions. It was sad that she only understood when people started to do the same to her.
Today we sat down talking about some vast nonsense when a young guy sat down with a few cronies, they all had some kentucky fried chicken. I was being good and eating a bacon, chicken casear salad. So from where i sat the smell of the heartattack inducing fried (stroke in batter) chicken, smelt very good. i murmered something about the smell being so inviting. mr diversity 1900, said “god you black people love fried chicken do you eat anything else!” and i was scratching my head, while the table of men dissolved into laughter. where the hell did he get that impression? I generally hate chicken and white meat, love red meat, chicken is meat for people who cannot afford better animals. but fried chicken is a rarity on the grounds that it’s greasy and not as nice as wagamama’s or my local restaurant noodle nation.
I refused to argue with him on the grounds that when i try and do something like that i usually get called an “angry black woman” and that usually ends in more arguing and thus perpetuatng an untrue stereotype. they then started to mock some other black female stereotypes, this man seemed to base his entire image of black women on what you see on maury and yes he hit upon the paternity shows.
DREAD!!!! that is what i did not want to hear, i had to argue with him after he started to super impose the actions of the slutty few onto most black women. He got vile, so did i. he was being vocal about how these women. but he did not leave it personal, he said black women, i told him that black women were not the only ones on that paternity show, and i did not like the way he was broadcasting it although it was exclusive to black women. I said thats like saying that all paedophiles are white based on the fact that all the paedophiles i saw on crimewatch were white.
I thought i was doing well, i did not raise my voice, i stuck to the topic i did not even swear at the ugly cunt. but oh here is the surprise i got called unreasonable, i was an angry black woman and whats more the ugly cunt thinks he touched a nerve…… well with the torrent of abuse i got i guess the whole paedophile thing must have touched a nerve… (just kidding)
Social class and how your racism is percieved
Hi, i’m on the warpath again over Britain and it’s hypocracy. i was just reading “The Times” friday 27th february when i come to page 9. to break down the story it is about students at Oxford university. They have a student paper, the latest edition has some old school racism thrown in along with other personally libelous material, they used pornographic images and superimposed the faces of students and staff. It uses obsence sexual slurs and alludes to child abuse and zoophilia it just seems over the top. the phrases included are
“should be shipped off to Guantanamo bay and shot”
“Can’t they just stay in their own communities? They have sex with monkeys, don’t they ? We can’t have stuff like that in a white upper class male commune like Cherwell”
well apart from making apparently amusing references to the holocaust and refering to black people using racial slurs. All this is pardoned with the simple excuse that it is all Satirical, just satire. well lets just ask what the hell are the satirising? apparently another publication called the “cornmarket busker”.
lets just take a look at the definition of the word satire, from my book, called “The Synonym Finder” by J.I.Rodale. 1971.
Satire, n. 1burlesque, parody, travesty, mocking exaggeration, caricature, cartoon, political cartoon, lampoon, spoof, pasquinade, squib, takeoff, inf. put down; cut ,jibe,fleer,slur.
Now what is so AMAZING that they can excuse printing pornography, and slandering people. that is not satire, it’s just bloody lazy. If “The Times” attempeted something like that and tried to use the transparent excuse of satire they would be raked over the coals and lose readership and despite having an army of lawyers probably lose.
You see i can see these incredibly talented and intellent students getting away with their offensive little prank on the ground that they are intelligent. It will be argued that really , you are offended because you do not understand, because really what they did was something amazingly clever that has flown over the average laypersons head. WE the general public, acknowledging that these people are probably imensely clever feel cowed by that sort of arguement and accept it, albeit very grudgingly.
Compare and contrast with the treatment of Jade Goody and Danielle lloyd and Jo from S Club 7. in 2007 they ganged up and shamelessly bullied Bollywood star Shilpa shetty, it took a slight racial tinge, they used the phrase “poppadom” and “go home” (thanks danielle!) towards Miss Shetty and they were vilified. Jade goody’s reputation was in tatters, Danielle Lloyd lost several modelling contracts and jo lost her business and had a mental breakdown. All of these women could all be described as solidly working class. They are not the brightests by their own admission. But what floors me is that the students at Oxford have done something five/six times worse than what these three women did but non will feel any consequence because they come from a certain class and thus are fairly insulated.
The front page of the students “satire” is to all intents and purposes a child sex story. that could be used by paedophiles to stimulate themselves. the sexual abuse and then murder of two babies at the hands of two students. well i guess it’s too clever for me to understand huh?
It reminds me of when that stupid daughter of a cuntface Carol Thatcher thought that it was acceptable to call a tennis player a Gollywog, then when Adrain Chiles reprimanded her she corrected herself and said “half gollywog then” (well he is mixed race). then she came out blaming everyone but herself. she did not even acknowledge that the racial term Gollywog was extremely offensive. she just kept on complaining that she was having a private conversation. i say fuck you Thatcher!
Thatcher is insulated by her class, if it was jo brand who had used Gollywog people would have been up in arms about how she should know better, and that there is no place for that kind of language in this day and age. but Thatcher is the Ex-prime minister’s daughter so somehow she is beyond reproach.
So all in all, if you are wealthy and educated you can be mildly racist and get away with it and claim it’s satire or simply out of context and people will take you at your word , you can get on with the rest of your life and it’s all hunky dory.
However if you are poor or only averagly educated somehow you must know know better, you are held to a stricter standard. you are not clever and probably don’t know how to spell satirical, but you have to know better than people with all the money and education at their feet.
LIFE STINKS WHEN YOU ARE POOR… NOT ONLY IF YOU ARE RACIST!
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.
The men who spoil things for others!
Today i had the intense displeasure of sharing a journey with 3/4 men who were returning from a stag weekend. they filled me (and i imagine the attractive woman they started to harass) with rage.
It’s a sunday, i a have had only 3 hours sleep after a late night. returning home from london on what shoul have been a quick and comfortable 25 minute trip. Our train company has clean and efficient trains. but due to the loud behaviour of the men i felt sick to the stomach.
i arrived on the train five minutes prior to departure and sat down in the comfy chair. Then exactly as the train doors closed and the final whistle was sounded these louts had just managed to scramble aboard. they sat adjecent to the attractive woman and myself. she was eating smoked salmon and an edame bean salad. i was attempting to discreetly make a phone call to my mother. when the chat started up at high volume.
” so i’m for it when i get home” the men roared loudly while swiging from a shared bottle (unspecified energy drink). ” she is gonna come with the whole that is our babies inheritance, what if you lose your job….blah blah. humourless bitch” alll the men roared with laughter in approval. All i could think was WAIT THIS IGNORAMUS HAS A BABY TO TAKE CARE OF AND HE BLEW £400 ON A NIGHT OUT!!!! THERE IS A RECESSION DAMN FUCKING RIGHT HE IS FOR IT WHEN HE GETS HOME.
Oh but it gets worse he divulged that £300 of that £400 pounds of the savings for the baby , was spent on a private dance from a stripper. “best blowjob i ever had!!!” they all laughed. All i could see in my mind was this image of a woman holding her baby in tears.She must be the brains of the relationship, she has just had a baby, the econmy is sliding down shit creek into the cess pool and my man thinks that he can still spend £400 of rainy day money on getting some anonamous stripper to suck him off. Not to mention they now have a baby to take care of. If they were just a couple with no kids by all means knock yourself out truth would out and she could leave him at the side of the road….. when you have a child things change overnight. Chances are she is still on maternity leave and economically challenged. That baby is still related to horse shit daddy for better or worse. she could take the child and move back to her family but that is not always viable.
I felt the tears inside me, i did not physically manifest them but i felt them. they then moved the conversation to the attractive woman sitting opposite to me . “i like blondes, especially ones with nice tits, they are even better when they wear blue.” they started sniggering and the poor woman went as red as a beet. another one took up the thread ” you know why i like blonde women… you can always tell when they are turned on… they get all flushed in the face and on their chests.” the woman dropped her spoon into her edame beans and her face was immeadiately lowered. i stopped looking at her. we had looked at each other during the previous conversation and shook our heads and and even guffawed at the outrageous behaviour of these louts.
Another one of then men started up with a story to graphic for me to attempt to tell. to cut the story short and sanitise it, him and another guy who was at the time still asleep in the hotel in london. had taken a stripper back to their room, completed a few unsavoury sexual acts and then pissed all over the woman. they took delight in the fact that they hadn’t asked her if it was ok. “The look on her face was classic…. (laughing too hard )……… she went (gasp) and she looked like one of those blow up dolls (mouth gaping open in mock disgust)……(laughing again)…. (bangs fist on table) then i told her to get out and pete gave her some money for a taxi and shut the door on her.” I looked at the seats behind the men and saw a very angry looking dad and his young daughter. he had stuffed his i-pod into the childs ears and she was merrily crayoning away. his face was so red i thought he might punch one of them.
The men continued with their behaviour and they clearly still drunk, smelling of alcohol at 12.30pm going home to their wives. they carried on with this tawdry talk for the whole duration of the journey. Without a thought to the fact that families were travelling with their young children, i imagine a few curious question will be asked ie ” whats a blow job?” “whats spunk?” “whats a gangfuck?”" whats double penetration?” ” what is a cunt?” “why does that man call his wife a bitch?”. But here is what was really damning….. Not one of us disgusted passengers thought it was safe to cahllenge the louts. Too often we see good samaritans and have a go heroes being killed for doing the right thing. so we choose to tolerate them. i have to tell you it is not a nice choice. it not one that leaves us with dignity.
SO HERE IS THE POINT OF MY POINT, IF YOU ARE A WOMAN CALLED JANE, YOU HAVE NEW BABY, YOUR PARNTNER IS IMMATURE WHITE MALE 20′S/30′S, WENT TO A STAG WEEKEND/NIGHT 20TH/21ST FEBRUARY, CAME BACK SMELLING OF JACK DANIELS , HE HAS A CANDIAN FRIEND AND YOU HAVE A JOINT ACCOUNT, YOU LIVE IN THE SOUTH EAST OF ENGLAND, OR EAST MIDLANDS…….
CHECK YOUR BANK TOMORROW MORNING FIRST THING, YOU DESERVE MORE AND BETTER THAN THIS ARSEHOLE. MAKE YOUR OWN PLANS, WHATEVER THEY ARE I WISH YOU ALL THE BEST.
SOME MEN MAKE ME SAD SOMETIMES, EVEN THE ONES I DON’T KNOW AND SHOULDN’T MATTER TO ME.
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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