Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: prejudice

  • men in dreads

    Two men unfolded themselves and stood up. One of them grabbed my hand. I was passing in front of the crowded colourful stalls which sell Bob Marley t shirts and long Ghanaian dresses. They had jangly sandals on display and drooping felt hats so dusty and untouched they might have been made for Stevie Nicks. “There she is!” cried the taller one, swinging hip length dreads. “Our sister from another mother.”

    I stood still, as they must have guessed I would do. The expression on my face was conscious, self conscious, enquiring. “We have met before,” his companion told me, “we spoke with you the other day.”

    I was quite certain I had never seen them before but fear of racism held me silent. Later I wondered how many Western women they trapped each week using this same trick: liberal women, hippie women, who are afraid of seeming prejudiced. Who feel responsible for the prejudice of others and when they travel the world, labour to make up for it.

    “We love your walk,” said the man in dreads. “So free and you walk like a soldier.” Do soldiers walk free? Aren’t they more inclined to march? But I knew what he meant. I was striding and looking about me. I was swinging my hands. African women, I suppose, undulate.

    There is a faceted splendour in all the people round me that keeps me always smiling and staring. I love that we find each other so compelling. People stop me in the street to say, “I love your height.” Men say outright, “Give me your number and I will call you.” I spend all day saying, “Thank you.” I say, “Thank you! Good evening!” “Thank you, but no.”

    I buy a ripe plump mango and the stallholder slices it for me with a curving blade into the palm of her hand. Walking home I eat it with a cocktail fork. I buy a Coke bottle filled with popped millet, like tiny buds of popcorn, and groundnuts – peanuts – which is perfectly salted, and in the morning I pour it on the bowl of mixed fruit I have chopped up for breakfast. My companion has never seen fruit salad and he looks askance at my heap of mango, banana, papaya, custard apple, and popcorn. Then he starts to eat and we both fall on it, good, delicious, fresh. I was not keen on the goat gizzard skewers. I am nerving myself to try grasscutter on a stick, which is a little rat-like creature grilled over the coals and eaten off a skewer. I buy kelewele, which is plantains rubbed in spices and grilled at the roadside. It’s sweet with a toffeed sharpness round the rim. I buy a coconut and the man lops it expertly, and after I have drunk the juice he chops the wood open so I can gouge long loops of slippery flesh and drop them like fishes to a seal into my mouth.

  • the crimes of President Trump, as listed in the Declaration of Independence

    The Declaration of Independence lists crimes against the American people which drove them to reject British rule. Replace ‘the King’ with ‘Trump’ and this list still makes sense.

    “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

    “That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government… when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

    “Indictment

    A bill of particulars documenting the [President’s] ‘repeated injuries and usurpations’ of the Americans’ rights and liberties.”

    “He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

    “He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

    “He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

    “He has called together legislative bodies at places [like Mar a Lago,] unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their Public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.”

    “He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.”

    “He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

    “He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.

    “He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.

    “He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power.

    “He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:”

    “For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:

    “For depriving us in many cases, of the benefit of Trial by Jury:

    “For transporting us [if we are Muslim] beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences”.

    “He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.

    He is at this time transporting large Armies of [American soldiers to lands overseas] to compleat the works of death, desolation, and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & Perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.”

    A President “whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.”

  • by appearance

    A man in front of me got up from his bench and ambled towards the train. He was huge and had that loping, awkward walk of a boy who’s been called too big all of his life. I’d say 6’5″ or 6″. As we both sat down on opposite benches he pulled out a book and started to read. I was reading, too, in fact, hearteningly, several books appeared on that ride but the truth is I spent as much time stealing covert glances as concentrating on Mary Stuart’s court. This man was dressed in giant red sneakers, a sloppy, comfortable tracksuit, baseball cap. He was black. In America I imagine he’d have been in danger of being shot for the crime of Being Tall Whilst Black. The expression of gentleness on his face and the shy way he held his head, his utter concentration on the page, made me love him. The temptation to go up and say, Excuse me, you just have such a beautiful, gentle spirit I just wanted to say hello, was very strong. Only respect for his reading and his solitude prevented me interrupting him as I got off. And I didn’t want to make him speak out about himself in front of all those people when he was staying behind and riding further, and I was leaving: it seems aggressive, it would have made him conspicuous in a lifetime where clearly conspicuousness had been a burden. I would so have loved to know what he was reading.

  • white trash-talking

    The term “white trash” is so racist and offensive I cannot believe people ever use it. Like “female doctor” it has built into it the assumption that the norm for trash (for doctors) has been subverted here: that surely the usual condition of trashiness is blackness. It disgusts me that people use this term with almost a smug feeling, it seems, as though they are holding up a sign Look How Broad-Minded Am I, That I Can See How Even White People Can Be Human Trash, Too.

  • shopgirl

    Tonight I walked into a Chinese restaurant alone and was seated at a tiny table in the centre of the crowded room. The smaller tables were set out in pairs running the length of the long restaurant; the gap between my table and the couple next door was about four inches. Idly I eavesdropped on their conversation, noticing how he invariably talked and she invariably supplied back-up: Mmm-hmm, yep, I know what you mean. Oh, my. Well, that’s fascinating! Good for you.

    When their meal was done and my meal had arrived the man picked up his unused chopsticks. He had eaten his dinner with spoon and fork and now wanted to know: Sind diese zum Mitnehmen? Are we supposed to take these home with us? His companion, who was older and had a wise, patient face though she had sat unmoved through his several recitations of what sounded like mind-numbing generalisations and prejudice (“they were obviously gay, or had spent time in prison, ha ha”) said, rather gently, “I think some people use them to eat with.” Some people like the woman at the next table, for example. He tipped the long paper bag to let the bright lacquered chopsticks slide into his hand. Playfully he mimed for her their various uses: scratching his scalp with a single chopstick, tucking it behind his ear like a newspaper man of the 1920s, trapping a long moustache under his nostrils by scrunching his upper lip. After that he bunched the two chopsticks together and slid them carefully back into their paper sachet and laid it back on the napkin on his untouched side plate.

    I felt my face squinch into an expression of disgust. The woman was so startled she broke the fourth wall. “What?”

    I said, spreading my hands, “Well – if you put those back into their case, they’re going to hand them on to the next customer.”

    The man looked blank. “And?” he said.

    I gasped a sort of soundless bark of laughter. “And, well you’ve just stuck them in your hair and put them behind your ear and… it’s not very nice, don’t you think?”

    He was so mortified he stood up instantly and began fumbling for his coat. He must have been trembling because it took him a long time to work his arms into the sleeves. For many minutes he stood there patting his pockets, clapping himself up the chest and back down and round the backs of his hips with two spread hands. His companion didn’t move and none of us looked at each other. I got on with my dinner and some time later the man reappeared, smelling of tobacco smoke, and slid into his chair beside me as though no time at all had passed. He began once again describing the world to her and she consented, nodding, agreeing, supporting. He slid the chopsticks out from their paper case and set them side by side in front of him. When I got up to leave I said, Wiedersehen, and got a nod from the listening woman but no acknowledgement from the crumpled, authoritative man.

  • biggles

    But it’s not bigotry, it’s just smallotry, littlotry. What’s happening in Australia this week, laws being rewritten to accommodate cruelty, underlines the unease I have always felt about the sneering term ‘political correctness’, which seems to me to substitute rules for real empathy. Once the heart enlarges enough that other people’s humanness can be, must be welcomed, respected, gratefully loved, there’s no desire any more to ‘get away with’ demeaning jokes, excluding language, the mummifying pariah fire that dries the occluded heart. Andrew Bolt, Tony Abbott, look deeper, look closer to home.

  • stop stopping the boats

    Could our fear of brown-skinned asylum seekers with unfamiliar cultural origins actually be self-hatred? Years ago it was embarrassing in Australia to confess to “the taint” of convict ancestors. Then it came to carry a cachet. It’s true we would undoubtedly respond with more compassion as a nation if boatloads of stricken Finns, Belgians and Scots were finding their way to our shores. But I also think we are not a confident nation and this reflects in a kind of arrogance-paired-with-self-loathing. It is sad to hate boat people when we are boat people. More than 90% of us are descended from recent migrants – that is, arrived within the last two centuries. And the waxy hysteria over a few hundred vessels reminds me of the hatred of sexuality which infests certain fundamentalist churches: the Catholic Church, for example. No hatred is more personal, more poisonous, than the mother of them all: self-loathing.

  • it’s cruelty

    Racism is cruelty, what else can it be? Sometimes it is cruelty enabled by privilege & ignorance. But in such a dramatically unequal world, isn’t it our own responsibility to find out our areas of ignorance, our areas of privilege, and keep educating them?

  • tall

    The other day we found a bookstore which has a cafe in it. These are little paradices, or is it paradie. What a sweet cool feeling to leave behind the clamour of the street and let the doors close on a spacious room whose wall to wall shelving is interrupted only by a serving counter, an espresso machine, a stack of cups.

    We separated and began foraging round the overfull shelves like fish nibbling at the walls of a fish tank. I pounced on exactly the book I wanted, Alan Bennett’s diary extracts and essays; he carried to the table a small pyramid of Marshall McLuhans. Our coffee arrived. We began to read. The older couple at the next table got up and came past us on their way to the counter. The man, a bluff, rural Queenslander type, addressed me across my companion’s back. “So. How tall IS he?”

    I said, “He’s right here. Why don’t you ask him yourself, if you want to know. Don’t you think it’s rude to talk across somebody about them, without addressing them directly?”

    He was hurt. “I just noticed as he was wandering round the shop. I kept wondering, how tall is that bloke.”

    I put my hand on my companion’s beautiful shoulder. He closed his book. “Imagine he gets asked that question a lot. Imagine we both do. Maybe it feels dehumanising to constantly be asked about something you can’t do anything about. I get asked it, too.”

    His wife said, “Our daughter’s tall.”

    I said, “Well, then, she will know what it feels like. It’s amazing how people feel entitled to ask that question when we are not even in conversation, we haven’t even spoken. I’ve even had people ask me my height, and then refuse to give their own – as though mine were some kind of freakish public statistic but theirs is personal information.”

    “Our daughter’s six foot two,” she said, gamely. “Me too,” I said. Her husband said, across me, “Seven feet?”

    “Nearly,” said the Marshall McLuhan fan.

    “He’s about six foot eight,” I said. A series of fresh questions ran through my head: How old are you? How much do you weigh? Have you measured that beer belly, what’s its circumference? But the poor man was labouring so hard to restore the goodwill he imagined he’d lost, was so awkward in his warm-heartedness, that I didn’t want to make the point because clearly he would think I was being hurtful, he wouldn’t get it, he would perhaps even not have the resources for self-expression and processing his emotions that some of us have worked hard for, and I didn’t want to leave him with an insect sting all the rest of the long hot trafficky afternoon. The only thing I feel certain of in life is this: you don’t gain ground by hurting the people who have hurt you.

  • bigness

    bigness

    Deciding not to put up with the height shite any longer has been inneresting. 18 months’ Northern Europe offered a break, I suppose, from the constant commentary that has been part of my life uninvited since I was 11 or 12 and now I see it so sharply and can’t stand it anymore. It’s not so cruel I think as the more dangerous kinds of discrimination and prejudice people encounter, for example on the basis of race. But its essence is the same. You are different to me; what I am is the norm; that gives me the right to comment uninvited and pass judgement on your qualities that are not behavioural, are simply genetic, that exclude you and you can do nothing about.

    “How’s the weather up there?” reminds me that to some it’s surprising to realise we are both living in the same shared world. “You are both too tall!” as the girl at the fruit shop blurted this afternoon invites only one answer, “Too tall for what?” and it’s simply not convincing when she smiles encouragingly, comfortingly, and assures me, “Good! I meant it’s good!” No, you didn’t. Any more than the oft-repeated “Jeez, you’re a big girl! How tall are you?” is persuasive when followed with, “No, no, it’s a compliment!” I get that great height brings with it presumptions of power and influence, particularly for people who are still responding, in their hearts, every time they look up at someone, the same way they felt when they were tiny and everyone taller than them was a teacher or parent or adult and thus had mysterious power and authority over them. But the compliment, if there is one, is something like, “You are enjoying an unearned advantage, you have a natural wealth that I don’t share in, I am envious, your life must be somehow easier and more pleasurable because of it and I imagine you coasting into things I have to work for….”… “You are different from me, I resent that.”

    I can’t imagine tackling some stranger with their back turned to me on the bus with a question like, “Jeez, you’re a big girl, I’m not sure I’ve really ever seen a girl as big as you…. How much DO you weigh?” And then persisting when they say they’d rather not say, with “Oh, no – it’s a compliment.” I learn a little something about our rudeness to each other every week of adulthood. And strangely I have no regrets about not getting to know the very short, very bald guy who came up to me on the dance floor when I was all lissom and loose and had forgotten my height, weight, age, address, ambitions, and day job and only the sweat held me down beneath the floating plastic ceiling of the music and smiled greasily and said, like he was making me an offer, “I’d like to climb you.”