Black History Month

Artist

On my way out of school this morning there were two Afro-Caribbean mums, who were both double parked, screaming abuse and threats at each other at the tops of their voices. It made me laugh because they were so undignified and they were doing it right in front of the school, but then I noticed the sad, crestfallen face of another black mum who was trying to hurry her little son away. I’ve always wondered how I’d cope if I had a black son or daughter, trying to make them proud to be who they are in the context of a predominantly white society. But I’ve never really though about the problems that other black people must present for black parents.

It is black history month and the year three children at my daughter’s school were all asked to make a poster about a famous black person they admire. The only famous black person my daughter knows about is Mary Seacole but she’s already done loads of things about her so her diligent mother set her to researching Nelson Mandela. She did an excellent poster but I don’t think she’ll win the prize because her friend Hiab did a poster about Pushkin who had Eritrean ancestors!

I was driven home last week by a taxi driver from Somalia. He’s very interesting to talk to because he’s mad on news and politics. He was telling me about how he lived in Brixton when he first came to the UK. He hated it because he doesn’t like the way that Afro-Caribbean people behave. He told me that he said to a friend of his, “You people must inhale the drug from the air when you are babies or you must get if from your mother’s milk, that’s why you are so crazy.” His friend said, “You should be grateful to us, we are the front line soldiers for all black people.”

Andrew Marr recently made some interesting comments about the liberal culture at the BBC.

…the BBC is not impartial, or neutral. It’s a publicly funded urban organisation with an abnormally large number of young people, ethnic minorities and gay people. It has a liberal bias, not so much a party political bias: it’s better expressed as a cultural liberal bias.

I think that it is a cultural liberal bias that has prevented there being a public debate about the damage that certain aspects of Afro-Caribbean culture do to the wider black community. A while ago it was considered risky to talk about the issues of Muslims and integration, until Jack Straw bravely brought the whole discussion out into the open with his comments about veils. Maybe we still haven’t gone far enough in our discussion about how Afro-Caribbean culture fits into our society. We do after all have a responsibility to all those black parents who’d like to see their children appearing on posters during Black History month.

Race and education | Bad attitudes | Economist.com