West Indians in UK seek jubilee apology
On a related note; Real Britannia
I’ve found myself asking what kind of Britain is celebrating the Jubilee? Is it the Britain that lives in a two storey flat with no hot water downstairs? Or is it the Britain that has to wake, bathe and dress their younger siblings before school due to their mother working unsociable shifts to support them? Or maybe it’s the Britain that is 30 times more likely to be stopped and searched than their middle class, flag-waving, street-partying contemporaries under the reign of the latest section-60-happy Met commissioner?
Oh, for the love of god, someone please write 221B!Holmes during Jubilee.#(I mean I vote postcard for writing it #no one is surprised)
This is exactly the sort of horseshit that no one is talking about, and it is just that, horseshit. The jubilee celebrations are for a very specific social strata of people, and they aren’t my people. (Disclaimer: yes, I went to Oxford, but I went to a Catholic comprehensive school first, which meant, in my region, Irish-descended and working class. My family is from one of the most deprived areas in the UK, and when my Grandad was growing up he lived in the notorious ‘Projects’, an area of Newcastle’s East End that, as my Dad says, ‘if you called the coppers, they didn’t come.’ It’s since been regenerated, but lots of where my family live? Yeah, it hasn’t, because who gives a fuck about a bunch of chavs and asylum seekers?) So who is this jubilee for? It’s not for me, or my dad, who lost his job because the civil service who employs almost half my region ‘ran out of money.’ It’s not for my best friend from high school, a British-Egyptian girl, an ex-asylum seeker who has people shout at her in the street, who has people insult her when she speaks to her sister in Arabic in public spaces, whose country of origin still hasn’t recovered from British imperialism. It’s not for my cousin’s gorgeous little son, mixed race with a Trinidadian Dad from Brixton, who’s not even three and who’s going to have a life lived under this racist bullshit. It’s not for so so so many I people I know and love, because of their class or race or both. It’s a reflection of a country, but it’s not mine.
So, yes, add it to the list. Let’s rip this shit apart.
(An excellent novel about the time period after the British Nationality Act 1948 is Samuel Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners, about poor, working class black Caribbean immigrants in the 1950s. Read it, and get angry on behalf of these men, because they’re totally right in everything they’re saying— this jubilee means nothing but anger for them, and it should.)
(via perdito)
