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If I had a time machine…which coronation would I see?
If I had a time machine…which coronation would I see?
If I had a time machine, I would most certainly travel back in time…to witness some great moments in history.
The birth of Jazz in Congo Square in New Orleans, or
Martin Luther King deliver that great speech in Memphis the eve of his assassination, or
The moment the first white man set shore upon the Niger Delta.
Would I go back and see
The crowing of King George, or
Queen Victoria’s coronation, or
Would I be wicked enough to sneak into the palace of the tiny Spanish queen Anne who gave permission and cash to ‘explorers’ who’d cast caste onto the dark skins of every ‘native’ they encountered.
Caste. And race.
Without imperialism, there’d be no black stain upon my skin against which my ancestors resisted.
Without the profit of human trafficking, there’d be no need for labels like Black or white, nor
Racism, nor patriarchy for that matter, a concept squarely meant to trace intergenerational wealth Black folks have been robbed in these United States and upon these British Isles.
See, my mother tongue is English –
The language my Black mother spoke to me came through colonialism.
We were enslaved and inherited names and customs that are easily recognizable to Brits today.
This language limits how I discuss these events, and
Unless I try really hard, and make concerted efforts,
This language limits how I think about these concepts.
You heard that? The English language limits places I take myself in my own mind!
These facts are maddening.
If I describe the Spanish explorers as conquerors, and
Tell you that virtually every pope was a sinner not a saint, and
If I could go back in time, I’d slit the throat of that young Spanish queen, and
If I admit that I have nothing but disdain for every English man, woman and child who’s held that orb Charlie held this past Saturday, then
Even by my own standards, I question if I’d be the hero of my own history.
If I were to go back in time and arm Nat Turner with weapons, or
Help Harriet Tubman guide folks along the underground railroad north to freedom, or
Go further back and try, try, try to stop the entire triangular slave trade altogether, then
I must accept that I’d be erasing myself.
I’d risk robbing Congo Square of its famed place in history, and
I might not be able to hear the pop, Rock, Hip-Hop and House music blasting out of this tawdry bar’s speakers right now.
I’d risk not even being me.
This does not make me grateful for the crown, nor
Does it reduce me to resentment and rage.
It’s complicated.
I’m proud of the New World cultures Africa and her Diaspora have made from our mangled past.
My identity?
It’s layered.
As layered and, again, as complicated as all the fates of all the peoples of the Commonwealth to whom I am now tied due to, dare I say, the golden and bejeweled crown
Carefully placed upon your king’s head.
Long may he reign.
Not.
We all want our histories repaired.
And an end to monarchy.
The End.
Dancing in Congo Square, AKA The Queens and Kings of Jazz
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At The Mouth of ‘Bloody Sunday’ #Travel #Prose #History
At the Mouth of Bloody Sunday
I know the one thing we did right, was the day we started to fight. Keep your eyes on the prize…hold on. Hold on.
Bloody Sunday in Selma only highlighted the bloody Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays that Black people in America have faced from the first time we laid eyes on these shores. It took people to gather and protest to change. In December ’64, the good Rev. Dr. King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for this movement. That spring in Selma, people marched across a bridge in order to highlight the normal voter suppression practices still happening throughout the south – and still in 2021.
“If you can’t vote, you ain’t free. If you ain’t free, well then you a slave.” –Intro interview to Eyes on the Prize part 6/8.
According to the National Park Service, who oversees the important civic monument now:
“On “Bloody Sunday,” March 7, 1965, some 600 civil rights marchers headed east out of Selma on U.S. Route 80. They got only as far as the Edmund Pettus Bridge six blocks away, where state and local lawmen attacked them with billy clubs and tear gas and drove them back into Selma.”
From my 7th grade social studies class circa ‘87, I would also add: The good white citizens of Selma gathered at the mouth of the bridge for the spectacle, to witness or probably participate in the oppression. We see them in the footage, films, pictures and media coverage of the events, and we know many are likely still alive. Black-n-white news footage of the days leading to Bloody Sunday show the sheriff and his angry henchmen prodding people with their clubs, plenty of ‘regular’ people watching in joy.
The people prodded? Well-dressed and behaved Black citizens of Selma and activists who’d come to support them. According to the footage, white citizens came out in droves for what they knew would be a bloody suppression of simple voting rights. As spectators, their presence made the massacre spectacular.
I’ve visited the National Voter Rights Museum and Institute at the mouth of the bridge, and there they have an actual jar of jellybeans used to test Black people coming to sign up to vote at the local government office. Yes, sitting behind that booth was a white man who demanded that a black person – any citizen of the darker complexion – accurately guess the number of jellybeans in a jar in order to be allowed – in order for him to allow them – to register to vote. I feel like I have to repeat that, or say it in different ways because it is so unbelievable.
This September, I visited a museum at the edge of the Edmund Pettus bridge in Selma, Alabama, on the way to Montgomery, the state capital. This historical museum marks local efforts to contest voter restriction practices. These practices were heinous in tone and texture, yet creative and cringe-worthy in nurture and nature. For example, consider the ingenious of these jellybean-counting white men in DC who created the separate-n-unequal space to inspire a variety of voter suppression taxes, tests and clauses throughout the south. It is these sorts of mad men who make decisions that impact the entire world as we have come to know and understand it now.
Yes, it is these sorts of men who send politicians to the state houses, and sent/send senators to Washington DC, to cajole politicians of every hue to compromise on their values. Now, we also know they send mobs to storm the capitol on the very day all the legislators gather to confirm the election results.
I know the one thing we did right, was the day we started to fight. Keep your eyes on the prize…hold on. Hold on.
Imagine yourself standing there in a museum, looking at a shelf, and there is a jar of jellybeans. There’s nothing spectacular about the jar, nor its contents. For any of us have seen something like this in virtually any kitchen, or supermarket. My granny grew, harvested and canned vegetables, so growing up I got to handle many mason jars first hand.
In fact, I love jellybeans. I used to visit the gourmet jellybeans shop in the mall after school when I was a kid. You could pick out any flavour that you liked, and I always went for blueberry, and cherry. I loved the contrast between the royal blue and Corvette red. It is a childhood fascination that my dentists still adore me for to this day. Naturally, these gourmet jellybeans were a little more expensive than the ones you get in the supermarkets, but I liked to save my money and treat myself sometimes. Plus, it felt very special being able to pick out the ones you like, and not have to discard the disgusting ones – who ever thought licorice or cola belonged on a jelly bean!?!
As a candy, jellybeans are so visually enticing. As you enter the shop, the walls are covered from floor to ceiling with all sorts of bright neon colors. Every shade of the rainbow grabs your eyes, calls to you. Between stacks of plastic bags and scoops, you are awed by the massive jars of each individual jellybean color ready for you to pick-and-mix. There are also tables with stacks of both empty and pre-filled jars. There are jars of all sizes filled with colorful patterns of jellybeans with matching ribbons tied in bows around the lids. Of course, the entire shop smells like fruit, all kinds of fruits, sweet, succulent fruits that you cannot even imagine. You are the customer, you are king. By virtue of entering the fancy shop, this is your kingdom.
Now take all of that and put it in a jar. To get to this jar, you have to enter an official government building in the town center. Next to the entrance stands an armed, uniformed white man who gives you a disgruntled look as you enter, signaling that he’s not there for your safety but aggravation. Now, as you approach, you see the jar, sitting on a counter, and behind it sits another white man. Try to imagine this white man, probably with a gun next to him or somewhere nearby, with nothing better to do than to threaten your life. Because the town is so small, he knows your last name, and may know of your family.
Since this is a small town, he knows your employer, he knows where you live as you’ve just written this down. He may even know your family, as the local history is so insidious, his family may have even owned or overseen yours at one time. Or, at that very moment, you or a family member may work for him or his kin. Your kids might play together. You may have played with him as a kid when, for example, your mother was his nanny (read-and-said-in-the-south: Mammy). Yet now, here in a free democracy, it is his job to register citizens to vote.
It is his prerogative, the birthright of this individual, plain (white) man on the other side of the glass to demand that you count the number of jellybeans in the goddamn jar. It is a privilege that no one anywhere near here has ever questioned. So, with a smile, he plops a big red “DENIED” stamp on your registration form. Of course yo’cain’t! A “killing rage” surges. Be glad you don’t have a gun with you.
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Kisses from Granny Don’t Count! #BlackenAsiaWithLove #ShortStory
In America, and most certainly in the land of Dixie and cotillions, at the end of junior high school year we have a tradition of getting our senior class rings. By “getting,” I mean individually buying a ring from the same one or two companies in our city who cash in on this ritual annually. We knew that many of us had to foot the bill with our own after-school jobs, while others’ parents could virtually write a blank check! (Hopefully, at least, or perhaps most assuredly, somebody in the school system gets a kickback from all this cash flow.)
While class rings appeared personalized, the rings – and the ritual – were effectively mass manufactured, complete with standardized shapes and design features: school’s name and mascot – in our case a bear – class year (1993!), and maybe our initials inscribed inside. Oh, and a heteronormative adolescent sexualized ritual to which I shall return shortly.
Rings are generally presented at a school ceremony. Until graduation, class rings are worn facing the wearer as motivation towards the ultimate achievement, after which it is worn outward as a badge of pride and honor. A graduating class could all agree to the same design – usually the school colors – which I believe the majority of my class did. While I prefer the look of silver against my dark skin, our school colors were royal blue and gold, so classes at our school often got blue sapphire set in the lowest Karat gold available that didn’t look cheap. For such a notoriously liberal school (i.e., gender and racially/geographically* integrated by design), this was one of the few explicit acts of conformity.
‘You Wear it Well’ – DeBarge, 1985
The next part of the tradition is having 100 different people turn the ring, as sort of an acknowledgement of becoming a senior. The first 99 turn it in one direction, while the final person reverses the order. This clockwise/counter-clockwise turn seals the deal. Yet get this, you’re supposed to kiss the hundredth person who turns the ring. You say the word “kiss” in front of most any group of adolescents and they’ll giggle. We knew what kind of kiss was meant. FRENCH like fries! Somehow becoming a senior in high school had been coopted by this hetero-ritual, a hetero-rite of passage (het-or-no-rites!).
I am troubled that this academic milestone is linked to gender. Worse, the ritual is predictably a performance act that fixes gender to normative sexual roles; yes, heteropatriarchy. Worse still, this binary gender performance is discrete, couched in achieving a basic education.
The ring dealer comes to school and makes a sales pitch to the class, and sets up a booth in the lobby after school. In his pitch, he promises a ‘free’ glossy little form to collect all the signatures. It was a bait and switch. These dealers sold us the rings but gave us the forms, the evidence we needed to prove we’d passed another stage towards adulthood. And what were we supposed to do with the blank glossy forms? Come back to school and boast?
The first 50 or so signatures were just us. Our own schoolmates turning each other’s rings, filling in each other’s forms on the very day the rings arrived. Family filled in a lot, too. I distinctly remember a teacher or two requesting to be excluded from the tradition, or take part in the ring ritual of becoming a senior, else we whittle their fingers away.
We all know everybody only wanted to see who signed the final line – a prompt to incite heteronormalizing speech-acts. Well, a few folks weren’t single and already had that 100th spot reserved and filled by sundown. Needless to say, kisses from granny don’t count! I’m pretty sure this wasn’t written on the dealer’s well-crafted sheet. Our market dominated, heteronormative introduction to adulthood for all to see.
I’d attended the same school since second grade so I’d seen people celebrate this class ring ritual for years, and even attended several graduations. I’d watched the “Senior run” year after year – a day at the end of school, when the graduating class runs through all the halls, cheering, banging on lockers as all the kids in all the classes rush out to line the hallways and egg them on. I loved school, adored our school, adored my classmates, and even looked forward to our turn, though parting so bittersweet.
At 16, I was only starting to be able to fully disidentify with the barrage of heterosexualized norms that engulfed me. I had to disentangle heterosexuality from virtually every facet of life – even finishing high school, a normal step we’re all expected to take. It’s as if to gain access to what bell hooks calls ‘the good life’ one had to signify alignment with compulsory heterosexuality.
I knew that I could not even turn my ring 100 times without kissing a girl. No way I’d risk putting a guy’s name at the end of that glossy list – someone I’d actually dreamt of French-kissing. Not like I knew any guy who’d be game. Damn. This was a lot of pressure. This junior prom was forcing me to make all kinds of adult decisions.
“The more I get of you, the stranger it feels…”
I was 16, and wasn’t out yet. Unlike at twelve when these feelings first bubbled over, by 16 I was on the cusp of self-acceptance, and preparing to face this possibility that I was gay. Perhaps it was pure timing. By the 11thgrade I knew for sure I’d be leaving home months after graduation, which was suddenly within reach. I could chart my own homo path. But still, at that age, I had doubts. I tried seriously dating a young woman as my last-ditch effort to see if I was straight or (at least) bisexual.
Kaye wasn’t a classmate, which wouldn’t have worked anyway because in retrospect all my classmates already knew, and had decided to accept me without question. Kaye attended an all-girls’ school, so we’d met through an extracurricular, Black youth empowerment program. Kaye was clearly college bound. She had her own dreams and ambitions, and pursued them – an ideal mate for me. She was the most attractive woman I knew, both inside and out, both to me and others. Yes, THAT sister who is not invulnerable, but has it all together. If she didn’t do, then dammit I was gay!
Fortunately, my girl was smart. And by smart, I mean that she was intelligent, real smart as in NOT clueless at all. We agreed to a kiss on the cheek, and she’d sign the last line on my glossy form. And by ‘agreed to’, I mean that this is what Kaye put on the table as her firm and final offer. She also had the good sense to let me turn her ring, too, but she reserved the 100th signature for someone special. I respected that. This clarified our plutonic status – no Facebook updates needed: I’m gay.
“Gotta find out what I meant to you…You were sweet as cheery pie/ Wild as Friday night”
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It’s summer in America. #BlackenAsiaWithLove
It’s summer. I’ve returned to the UK, got vaccinated, continued to work online, kept calm and carried on. Away for nearly 2 years and so much has changed. Many have spent months on lockdown, clicking-n-collecting everything they need, when what they crave is companionship – non-digital human interaction. And fresh air. Worse, for many, pandemic-induced fear and social-distancing routines have festered into genuine social isolation and alienation. Here, please be mindful that social media cannot replace what we do IRL. A comment or thumbs-up cannot replace a real conversation (surprise!?!). Besides, life is short, speak to folks directly!
Across the pond, there are hundreds of prosecutions underway against individual January 6th insurrectionists. Plus, there’s a new congressional investigation into the the insurgency; the police officers’ testimonies are damning, exposing the ugliness of white supremacy and violence at the core. One particular insurgent’s hate crime against a Black Capitol Police officer really cuts to the core. Officer Harry A. Dunn said in interviews in the days after the attack, and repeatedly in his written and oral congressional testimonies:
One woman in a pink “MAGA” shirt yelled, “You hear that, guys, this nigger voted for Joe Biden!” Then the crowd … joined in screaming…”
At the same time, the traditional celebration of Emancipation is now a national holiday. All this during global outbreaks of an unprecedented worldwide pandemic, dramatizing both all our humanity and all our interconnectedness – irregardless of any social and political/politicized divisions. Diseases, like storms, don’t respect maps. All this, and still Mr. Backlash is right on time, thus Nina penned-n-crooned:
So, Mr. Backlash, Backlash
Who do you think I am?
You raise my taxes, freeze my wages
Send my son to Vietnam
It’s summertime, and the livin’ ain’t easy. CONservatives have set their sights (of their guns) on continuing to serve a bleached version of our history next to their bleached burgers in schools. Taken right out of the Jim Crow playbook, they’re not only suppressing votes by stoking fear of foreigners, CONservatives sit in congress and call the events of January 6th “peaceful protests” to the faces of officers giving testimony, who barely survived that day.
True to Jim Crow, they keep the masses ignorant by reducing Intersectionality to ‘Critical Race Theory’, and pitting that as the enemy of America. Yet, when you present them with the facts of our collective history, say, by simply acknowledging that many “founding fathers” were slave-owners-boasting-bout-freedom, they’re as silent as an electric car (shhhhhh).
Like zombies, CONservatives silently retreat to their narrow view of their Bible “and their bombs, and their guns.” It’s as if they don’t know we can learn how to have better conversations. To be sure, Intersectionality and CRT are inter-related enemies of fear, ignorance and therefore, crucially, white supremacy. It’s not in your head, they are fighting.
It’s now summer in America and three multi-billionaires are racing to go to space. At the same time, so much about our nation is broken: outdated and decaying schools, policing, healthcare and infrastructure… and now both our spirits and democracy are threatened. Insurrection betrays the very spirit of democracy – let’s not act new! Coupled with the empty shop shelves in a post-Brexit/mid-Covid Britain, this moment reminds me of something seminal spoken-word artist Gil Scott-Heron spat in 1970:
The man just upped my rent last night.
(’cause Whitey’s on the moon)
No hot water, no toilets, no lights.
(but Whitey’s on the moon)
I wonder why he’s upping me?
(’cause Whitey’s on the moon?)
I wuz already paying him fifty a week.
(with Whitey on the moon)
Taxes taking my whole damn check…
It’s summer, summer, summertime 2021 in America and we’re still asking, “what did it cost our nation to put whitey on the moon?” Is it summer in America, or is it winter? Can’t be, there ain’t no more glaciers. Happy MF’ing New Year. Have a great summer. See you on ‘the other side of the moon’.
P.S.
Did you catch all those space-billionaire and musical references? Despite all this sickness-n-division, near-n-far, yet-n-still, “music makes the people come together… yeah.”
PIX:
Gil Scott-Heron: https://genius.com/Gil-scott-heron-whitey-on-the-moon-annotated
Whitewash History, adapted from: https://www.evanstonian.net/archived-opinion/2014/10/05/history-lessons-whitewash-history/
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Dear Black People. #BlackAsianWithLove
Dear Black People:
Remember, whiteness has been largely invisible to MANY folks for MANY generations. While one Corona-filled year can make a dent in it, these changes will hurt and will take time. For example, imagine waking up one day, seeing another Black body drop on the streets at the hands of the police, and you see the American president making mockery of it. Stereotypical “rednecks” are breaking open cans of (cheap) beer to celebrate the deaths and you suddenly realize that this – none of this – would NEVER happen to you because of the color of your skin, because your skin is white. That’s got a be an earth-shattering realization.
Dear Black people, can you remember learning something that totally shattered your world view? That’s what’s happening to the wider, whiter world right now. Like any humans, some embrace change, others retreat in defeat and plot retaliation, for Mr. Backlash is NEVER EVER late.
Dear Black people, take a deep breath. Step back and look at the arch of history. It’s a sheer miracle that you’re even here, that your ancestors survived (I’ll spare you the litany of atrocities). History shows you that these flaring moments are fleeting, that in fact, it gets better. So, keep your head to the sky! Strap up your boots, march for justice, speak up, fight for peace, raise your voices in solidarity with peace-loving people everywhere of every shape, size and color. Do these things at your own pace, in your own way, and in your own space, for every contribution towards world peace is needed. Be the change.
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They RNC didn’t address me.
On the 2020 Republican National Convention (RNC)
They talked at length about their “God-given rights to bear arms,” yet were silent about what guns do to people like me. They have little to say about religious diversity, and are silent about the bountifully plenty o’ white-American churches rooted – deeply – in racism. Equally, and clearly by the very same measure, they’ve never stood for the legal rights of Blacks to defend ourselves from tyranny. The second amendment, they suggest by their consistent omissions, is for them – only! This is how they addressed me. Give them liberty or give them (my) death…as it were. They ignore the data confirming that their own kids are more likely to shoot them than any dangers posed by my kids.
At the 2020 RNC, they talked at length about protecting their suburbs from thugs and rioters, yet fell well short of acknowledging the terror people like me have learned to live with. They talk like nobody that looks like me lives in the suburbs, and I know all too well that eerie ‘Get Out’ feeling when cruising through virtually any suburb in America. Do I belong here? Their glares and stares, and random checks let me know, #Karen and her klan don’t believe we belong together. The RNC didn’t address people like me who believe in my own state’s motto inscribed right there on both our seal and flag – “United we stand. Divided we fall.”* All I could hear from the RNC were warnings towards people like me: STFU, we got guns. Their gun cult was the only sort of solidarity served up, and so all the speakers touted that singular party line.
My party’s lines are numerous, as we’ve been casting a wider and wider net of those disenfranchised by the conservatives. Dems are ‘the others’. This year’s DNC motto seems to be this oft repeated moniker, ‘strength in diversity, unity in solidarity’. Both in rhetoric and actions they are more open to accountability for and by these so-called others. We can think, talk, walk and chew gum at the same time. The RNC didn’t address these Others, but they certainly portrayed ‘us others as a clear and present threat to their (suburban) way of life. For them, I am pariah.
Urban life.
As for cities, this year’s RNC speakers talked about rioters, but never ever spoke about what the riots were about. They touted a very uncomplicated view of rioting, and even had the nerve to claim the oppressed are crying victimhood (you know that, ‘shut up while I press my hoof on your neck’ sort of way). These conservative folks need a reading from both Sigmund Freud and the House of Labeija. Despite knowing what I know, I am still shocked at their void of empathy and disinterest in empathetic communication. They never addressed the peaceful protests, not least of which the #TakeAKnee campaign for which their leaders black-balled those peaceful protestors. You saw how the monster of that party responded to several prominent sports figures’ form of non-violent protest. I walked away from watching the RNC feeling shame for them, for I know their hearts couldn’t possibly be that cold. What comes around goes around.
*Yes, I know my state seal shows two white men shaking hands over the destinies of entire populations of Black and brown people, which we’ll save for another discussion. Rest assured, the RNC klan would say I’m using political correctness to silence them.
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My second grade teacher was radical (For Johanna). #BlackenAsiaWithLove
My second grade teacher
Took us to her house.
It was the first time I’d been in a white, middle-class house.
In the East End.
Walking distance from the park!
We walked there from our field-trip to the zoo,
And I was aware that this was a white neighborhood.
I was aware that some of my classmates lived nearby –
They pointed it out along the way: “Oh, there’s my bus.”
Some of my white classmates lived in the East End.
I was also aware that most-if-not all of the black people lived on the other side of town –
we caught the same bus home.
Separate, but equal.
And unlike our days spent at school,
The bus was either black or white.
This was all of our first chance to meet outside the classroom, in a home.
We were six and seven years old.
My second-grade teacher took us to her house.
She wasn’t bragging about her gigantic house.
No, she wasn’t trying to show off to us.
Even at that age I could tell that she just wanted to expose us,
To help us get to know how everyone in our city lived,
And that every part of town was ours.
And that we should expect to be in each other’s house.
And that even teachers have a life.
(BTW, I am suggesting that us educators are essential workers).
My second-grade teacher took us to her house.
She’s a white woman, and I was a black boy.
She lived in the white part of town, and I in the black.
Our worlds were different,
Yet we were one, under her care.
Momma taught me that she could trust different people with my care.
I learned that I could care about all different people.
Suddenly instead of her students she treated us like guests.
She respected us and we respected her home.
She told us about the people in the pictures on the walls,
And the places she’d been to collect all those interesting things.
(I wanted to go places, too.)
We knew the profundity of the experience.
Even at that age we knew that race and class should have kept us apart,
At least according to the world outside our class.
It was all our first year at that school,
And we quickly learned that everyone knew THAT skewl was kewl.*
Radical.
When knew our teacher was radical.
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Power and Prayer #BlackenAsiaWithLove
A prayer.
It’s been over half a year since the bulk of the world began dealing with Corona. With that, neither everyday movements nor international travel has not been the same. Now, we’re midway through summer. School terms have been extended globally, altered drastically from any norm. While some are staggering their re-openings, there is no settle new way of doing old things. Educating youth may never be the same. Students are in a unique position to reform education from the ground up. This is my prayer for youth: Stand courageously as we ride these waves of change.
Travel and tourism. While could spew a bunch of statistics about this fallen industry, any of us can go through the tediousness of searching and scrolling through the numbers. It’s been over six months, so many numbers are rolling in: There are masses of jobs that may never recover. By the time people figure out what to do during this unending period of lockdowns, lock-ins, closings, shut-downs, downscales, too many bellies will have gone unfed, too many months’ rent gone unpaid. A tsunami of bills threatens to drown a plenty. My prayer is that your creativity prevails. There is no apparent swift solution to these current ills, nor can we predict any end with any confidence. My prayer for you is that you rise like the phoenix.
Essential workers. From corner shop-keepers to grocery workers, from fast-food workers to farmers, from cleaners to manufacturers, from bank workers to customer services worldwide, to all the delivery folk, sanitation folk, safety and security folk, healthcare folk, please know our eternal indebtedness to you. Your lives matter. Each one of you. You are often poorly paid, regularly poorly treated, and certainly too frequently mis-regarded. You supply the gloved hands that handle our goods, provide our services, scrape up the crap we leave on the streets … even get our bodies into beds when we’re no longer able. It is true that many societies have tended to severely undervalue you. My prayer is that essential workers be better respected, compensated and protected.
May our common, global experience of living with Corona provide us all some well-needed respite from the hustle and bustle of everyday-life-as-usual to truly appreciate the many lives that make our own lives possible. There was something eerily usual about the way emergency-care worker Breonna Taylor died in her home at the hands of the police. My prayer is that such knowledge sits less comfortably with us all, and that we seek change, no matter where we are. Witnessing the risks peaceful protestors take to bring about change, and seeing the propaganda that plays out in the news vilifying them along caste lines, my prayer is that empathy prevails.
May we all know better and do better. Do right.
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Hate crime in The Period Drama fanbase is endemic
After reading a blog by History’s Drew Grey on ‘Racism, Diversity and Contested Histories: Some Reflection on Christmas Just Past’, I began to think about my favourite television genre (by some distance), the Period Costume Drama. Reading his post took me back to when I saw David Olusoga presenting Black and British for the first time on the BBC, but more specifically his monologues about mixed-race families in Georgian Britain. Whilst Drew’s post boasts diversity in the latest adaptation of A Christmas Carol (based on the Charles Dickens story) by Peaky Blinders‘ Stephen Knight, diversity in the Period Drama fanbase is a contentious discussion.
His post reminded me of my dissertation where I was looking at my roots. Finding myself. Lost in my race-identity politics, it feels like a decade ago reading Reni Eddo-Lodge’s Why I’m No Longer Talk to White People About Race for the first time. A text that colleague and blogger @paulaabowles calls “a machine gun,” (with a smirk). It’s simply relentless. However, it was David Oyelowo’s quote in the Radio Times that’s stayed with me ever since.
“We make period dramas [in Britain], but there are almost never any black people in them, even though we’ve been on these shores for hundreds of years. I remember taking a historical drama with a black figure at its centre to a British executive with greenlight power, and what they said was if it’s not Jane Austen or Dickens, the audience do not understand.” – David Oyelowo (in Eddo-Lodge, p55)
Oyelowo goes on to say “I thought – OK – you are stopping people having a context for the country they live in and you are marginalising me.” So, is it any wonder why so many of our Black actors have gone to Hollywood and made it big? Idris Elba made it as Stringer Bell in The Wire before we knew him as DCI John Luther. Oyelowo was Martin Luther King in Selma (as well as his British co-star Carmen Ejogo as Coretta Scott King), and has had roles in The Help, Queen of Katwe and Disney’s Star Wars Rebels. John Boyega was in Star Wars and Daniel Kaluuya slayed as Chris Washington in Get Out.
Whilst many of these works aren’t all costume pieces, the fact that Black actors have to go overseas bothers me. Yet, Black History to British audiences has always been African-American history. To find Black British history, you really have to look for it. So, when we see characters like Kitty Despard (Poldark) or Miss Lambe (Sanditon) or even Dev Patel as David in the upcoming The Personal History of David Copperfield, it’s in opposition to the histories we think we know, the histories we were taught at school.
So, why is there such a backlash to non-White people in this genre? Is it one more example of Black and brown people being where they shouldn’t? You know Black faces in White spaces? From the streets of Georgian London to Walter Tull mobbed by 20,000 Bristol fans in 1909. Or is it a consequence of a population bludgeoned by historical misinformation? After all, isn’t the best way to have complacent people, to cut them off from knowledge? And if you don’t know your own history, do you know who you really are?
Photo Credit: Camille Silvy (September 1862)
In the same century Charles Dickens was writing about Jacob Marley, Scrooge and Tiny Tim, Queen Victoria’s African goddaughter Sarah Forbes Bonnetta was growing up in England wondering the streets of London, as “part of Britain’s imperial project.” It’s the story of Black Victorians, many of which could “only be told through the words of others” (Olusoga, p331).
Whilst these discussion forums, are majorly female, they are some of the most misogynistic places I’ve seen on the internet. There’s one Facebook group where I have been labelled a “troublemaker” for calling out racism and homophobia, as many members are also American, card-carrying Republicans who voted for Donald Trump. And feminism is only White. They see intersectionality as an inconvenient myth and the stories of non-White women in history an afterthought. That’s how White Privilege works.
This culture of hate against non-normative voices is dominant in the Fandom Menace, as I like to call it. The online forums are infested with racism, misogyny and homophobia: from Gentleman Jack to Beecham House, Drew’s descriptions of the backlash to the mixed-race Cratchit family act as a metaphor for a toxic fanbase, and contesting these histories can often be a homophobic act, a racist act, even if it’s born from ignorance.
There is an endemic problem within society, where we allow older generations, including “sweet old ladies” in The Period Drama fanbase to get away with hate speech because that’s “how they are” and they “don’t really know any different.”
What’s more, and what was great about A Christmas Carol was how unapologetic the makers were about their diversity. This family were Black and they were White. This was mixed-race Britain in the 19th century. Moreover, Mary Cratchit and how Black women take on everyone’s emotional labour. Be it modern times or Victorian times, Black women are in the business of saving grown-ass men from their own emotional work!
Mixed-race inclusion is a testament to our history and a thumb bite to Englishness as a synonym for whiteness, and the colonised imperatives that continue to dominant storytelling, as said (but not so bluntly) by Darren Chetty in ‘You Can’t Say That! Stories Have to be About White People‘. Due to the inherent whiteness of institutions, they recruit in their own image, and history is no different. What’s that saying about apples and trees?
Certain members of the Period Drama community would like to believe Britain was only White before the 1950s. No, it’s simply the establishment has done a grand job of writing us out of British history books, but Black people have been part of every era of British history. I can tell you that.
BBC’s A Christmas Carol shows why representation matters and that history is not only the responsibility of historians. Artists also carry the load of telling these social histories (that’s what Dickens is) accurately and they can do better when it comes to the spectrum of diversity in the Period Drama.
And due to how History has been taught to every generation at all levels of education, is it surprising I encounter “sweet old ladies” using “historical (in)accuracy,” as a conduit to enable their racist, homophobic and misogynistic views?
Works Mentioned
Chetty, D. (2017). You Can’t Say That! Stories Have to Be About White People. In: Shukla, N (ed). The Good Immigrant. London: Unbound Publishing, pp. 96 – 107.
Kwakye, C and Ogunbiyi, O. (2019). Taking Up Space. London: Merky Books.
Lodge-Eddo, R. (2017). Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race. London: Bloomsbury.
Olusoga, D. (2017). Black and British. London: Macmillan.
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On finding out I was Black: I was five years old
In a society that defines you by race (through othering of non-whiteness), it wasn’t until I was five I realised I was Black. This was the first time I was called nigger. It was in the school playground and I was a little youth. You will notice that I call it by its name, and not “The N-Word.” And to call it by its name, I believe, strips it of the fear attached to it. Though, made popular by mainstream rap music, including artists I appreciate like N. W. A and Public Enemy, when I think of the word, I envisage scenes of burning crosses, the KKK, and chattel slavery.
Growing up, I saw Black people hating themselves. That level of self-loathing is something I’ve seen in different characters throughout my life. Women that grew being told their hair was “wild” and “unruly.” Questions like “how can you tame such a wild thing?” bring me back to slave markets – the prodding and poking of the Black torso. Descriptions of the Black body, including “savage” and “animalistic,” and that includes hair, and those are connotations of The Word rappers love to use in lyrics. And how do Black rappers use the word, despite the rise of White nationalism worldwide?
I have seen men like Chiron and Kevin from Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight thinking they have to assert themselves because that’s what the environment demands. I see it on campus, Black students from London. But you don’t have to do that in Northampton. And these people all have stories of racism. Racism is trauma and I can bet you any money that most of our Black population (including mixed-race) have stories about the first time they were called nigger, be it from strangers or their family members.
Finding out you’re Black is not always something so hard-hitting as being called “nigger” in the street. Sometimes, it’s being the go-to in conversations about race. When and if you learn about slavery at school or university, it’s everyone staring at you when the discussions occur. It’s being told in not so many words by White people to “know your place” and “be grateful.”
However, hate crime has seen a spike under Brexit. We have a prime minister that’s comfortable comparing Muslim women to “bankrobbers,” and Black people to “piccaninnies.” But you know, the UK is one of the least racist societies in Europe, or so I’m told by White British people who do not have to have to choose carefully where they holiday, in case of any (specifically) anti-Black racism they may encounter. If you’re White British, you can realistically go to any country and be okay. That’s White Privilege.
My race is part of my identity because my environment made it so. From eight years old, I was told by my parents that you’ll have to work twice as hard for half as much … because you’re Black … just like they did, and their parents did, who are Windrush Generation migrants. I was born Tré Ventour – who liked to read, and play in the park and watch films and collect Pokémon cards and do all the dumb stuff children like to do.
But until I was five, I didn’t think of myself in regards to my race. But “nigger” is in the Queen’s Honours. It’s in knighthoods, OBEs, MBEs (etc) and Empire. It’s in UKIP and the Daily Mail. It’s in the structures. It’s in colonial statues and The Academy. It comes from slavery, Jim Crow Laws and Apartheid. It’s in art, culture, literature and the social fabrics that make up this country, which is institutionally, structurally, and “100% racist,” as Stormzy was misquoted. And, I’d argue there are flowers in his misquote.
Is Britain 100% racist? Definitely, 100%, it’s beyond the individual racist, it’s in the institutions; from Macpherson to the Lammy Report, Britain has a serious problem.
At five years old, in the bloom of childhood innocence, being called “nigger” and “wog” by other children set me up for life as a person of colour in Britain. That’s when I found out what racism was, in the prologue of Enid Blyton novels – learning how great Columbus was, not how he opened the doors to the European pillage and plunder of the American continent.
Yet our structures continue to show how it doesn’t trust us or want us, unless you’re grateful, “a good nigger” scaling apartment blocks or bowing to babylon, being named in the Queen’s Honours and OBEying come New Years Day.
Thoughts from the criminology team 