I wrote this spoken word poem after the collection of essays ‘White’ by Film Studies academic Richard Dyer
In order to have Blackness or Brownness, we must have Whiteness
talking about racism puts the onus on the victim
without any inclination to discuss the system
it’s easy to talk in the language of DiAngelo or McIntosh
that keeps it between people, not how White power has quashed
and undermined movements like the Black Panthers
and DiAngelo tells a clipped narrative that doesn’t really answer
questions about history and we got to this
since White supremacy is fluid and adapts and disjoints itself to fit
cus terms like “fragility” and “privilege” tend to only flirt
at the frames of…
In light of the BLM protests and race being at the nucleus of Coronavirus, I thought I would post this poem I wrote a while ago
Let’s talk about race
let’s talk about the things
I saw in front of my ten y-o face
when the white kids
called all kinds of slurs
in every cricket match
it was always “yes sirs, no sirs”
in every rugby game, I’d go the distance
simply to assert my existence
clichéd like White authority against Black resistance
like being stung by swarms of wasps
spiders crawling over my shoulders
in a landscape of spoilt rich kids and shareholders
we sit for match tea, them watching
me put food in my mouth, like I’m any
different to them, that confident clout
they’d picked up…
As the world is blighted by Coronavirus, the real pandemic has yet to come — the one of mental health. More specifically, loneliness, an affliction that won’t just hit the elderly.
When I started my undergraduate degree in the autumn of 2016, many said “uni will be the best years of your life.” They talked of how easy it was to make friends. I suppose that privilege comes with living as an extrovert in a world that was designed for extroverts in mind. Not so much the introvert. The pressure to make friends at university was intimidating to no end. However, now doing my postgraduate, I am bit more content. Pressure-free. …
It wasn’t until I was twenty years old that I found out I come from a very recent Mixed-Race background — when my father told me my great-great-grandfather was a White man from Ireland.
Dad went on to tell me about how my Great-Grandma Jessica was Mixed-Race, and that’s essentially where my grandmother’s fairer skin tone comes from. He then, in-turn, is Mixed-Race, passing on this Multiracial lineage on to my brother and I, his children — who have grown up believing ourselves to be monoracially Black. That’s my paternal grandmother’s family tree going back over 100 years. This has lead me into lots of thoughts, and that my recent family history wasn’t just built on the backs of enslaved Africans. …
In 2016, Professor David Olusoga released his documentary series ‘Black and British: A Forgotten History.’ In episode one ‘First Encounters’, archaeologist Dr Richard Benjamin talks about how proud he is of the men that stood watch at Aballava.
Whilst watching the first episode featuring Aballava, we must acknowledge that Olusoga and Benjamin were also not the first Black and Brown scholars to discuss Black history — from J. A Rogers and his work that combatted racist views of history, to Trinidadian Ron Ramdin on the working class, resulting in The Making of the Black Working Class in Britain (1987). A short breath after Peter Fryer’s Staying Power (1984). An argument could be made, though, is David Olusoga was the first to take it mainstream.
Anyone that was came through the British education system would have learnt about…
I wrote this poem inspired from a thread on Twitter I saw not long back all about the language Caribbean people use, something I have oft seen in members of the Windrush.
You know your conversationalist
is a West Indian when they sit
mugging the Queen’s English
growing up I recall
my grandmother and her friends
proclaiming Will Shakespeare “a jobsworth”
you know them ladies
with their diddly hands
like a cantankerous rex in the front room
instead of calling us kids rude
they would call us “boisterous youths”
or “rascals.” Women with names
like Phyllis that’d say
“I’m jos going out to the veranda”
using words like finicky
as she plays with her needle and thread
labelling her niece, a “craven buzzard”
for taking the last piece of plantain
like “highfalutin rapscallions”
I wrote this poem last year inspired by the these leaflets going around Bristol which got me thinking about Englishness and different white identities. This piece also somewhat comes inspired by ‘White Teeth’ by English novelist Zadie Smith.
This would be an opportune moment to direct you to a great piece of poetry by Northamptonshire’s own Will Reid with his ‘My England’
A few months ago
there were leaflets going round Bristol
saying “it’s okay to white”
but that is not the same as being English
race and culture split like Brexit
I have been told I am English
but what is English culture
cus the Scots, the Irish and the Welsh
have theirs, with a pride in self
the etymology of English / England —
etymology meaning word history — comes from
the Old English pertaining to the Land of Angles
who were Germanic in origin
so, when the far-right boast English nation
history replies with songs of immigration
what…
Not wanting to get sucked into the recency bias that comes with new dramas, I waited three weeks to watch Bridgerton.
Writing as someone that watches an awful lot of historical dramas, it is by no means a surprise to see that Bridgerton was attacked for its inclusion of Black and Brown characters by the usual racist hordes in the period drama fandom. Also disliked by some for being ‘too modern’ in its construction, the modern-ness reminded me of what happened in the 2005 adaptation of Charles Dickens’ Bleak House on BBC One. During the mid-naughties, the Andrew Davies adaptation of the classic Dickens novel took a massive step forward in the way television programmes of that kind were made…
There’s been lots of chat on Critical Race Theory, so I wrote this poem after a piece I heard performed by Jess Green at an open-mic night in Kettering, Run Your Tongue open-mic (2018).
when I was doing my undergrad at university,
it was by chance I found out about Critical Race Theory
that there was scholarship that articulated my encounters
with Britain, as numerous just pass racism off as banter
I found out my life is also grounded in an academic position
pioneered by the likes of Richard Delgado and Patricia Williams
but Kemi says that critical race theory is regressive and racist
and she’s showing how Whiteness is more than white faces
in that debate, you saw this was more than denial
as she then proceeded to put Black Lives Matter on trial
but when you follow the theory…
Most of us went to school learning how activist Rosa Parks sat down to stand up, but her activism didn’t start here and her story is one that fits into a range of subjects — from history and PSHE to journalism, criminology and the social sciences at large.
Recently in conversation with a friend about how the world wars are taught, we came to the agreement that the inter-war years are treated like they don’t exist. That void of 1919–1938 where race riots could be be found in many British cities, and the infamous Tulsa massacre of 1921. …
