The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) recently reported that kids as young as ten in England have taken to whitening their faces in an attempt to fit in after repeatedly being the target of hate crimes and being told to “go back to your own country” in Brexit Britain. It seems the more things change is the more they stay the same.
At twelve, my best friend was a white boy named David, who lived across the road from us. David and I walked to school together, went berry picking with his dad in summer, slept in each other’s house or pitched a tent in the back yard just for fun in stormy weather.
One day, David became ‘an accidental Skinhead’ when the barber gave him a lopsided haircut. I didn’t laugh when his white mate, Steve, said he looked just like a plucked chicken. David went back the next day and had his head shaved. He never spoke to me again…
Dreaming of moving to Africa? Hope for the best. Prepare for the worst. Expect nothing. And you should do just fine.
I’ve always wanted to move to Ghana. I fell in love with the people and the place on my first visit there in 1989. My father had always told me that we were from the Gold Coast. The Gold Coast, he said, was where our people came from before “the carry beyond”. We had been brought to Jamaica on ships long ago, but we were Ashanti people, he said. I had no idea where in Africa the Gold Coast was exactly — until I landed in Ghana on that first trip.
“You are strong in face and black like us,”…
Many people watched almost the entire first season of ‘Suits’ and had no idea the actress playing Rachel Zane was mixed-race. The first hint that Meghan Markle might be ‘Blackish’ came when Wendell Pierce arrived to play her on-screen father. The next we knew, the American actress was dating Prince Harry, with headlines appearing like “Harry’s girl is (almost) straight outta Compton”. In other words, “ghetto.”
With her ‘exotic DNA’, the British public presumed Meghan Markle would be one of Harry’s short-term lovers. However, long before Meghan came on the scene, Black Brits had often joked about how Harry liked…
My Royalist-Jamaican mother would have been smiling down at me, from her seat on the right-hand side of God, as the taxi arrived to pick me up to meet the Queen at Buckingham Palace.
The idiot Eastern European driver parks his car at a bus stop two hundred metres from my flat, so I am forced to stride up to him suited and booted with dreadlocks flowing in the cold evening wind. He looks almost straight through me just as I reach the stationary Mercedes and starts the engine to pull out into the street. I quickly knock on his window and manage to open the passenger door as he steps on the brakes.
“Are you the car for Buckingham Palace?”
“Hurry up and get in, man,” he shouts back at me, “I’m parked in…
We heard an almighty scream at Mole National Park, followed by a loud crash in the motel room next door. We ran into the adjoining room, my driver and I, to find a white American male red-faced on the floor with blood pouring from a gash in his forehead.
“What’s happened to you?” I asked, fearing the worst. He said he left his bedroom door open while he went out to fetch some documents from a hired car parked nearby. He got back to find a baboon stretched out on his bed, eating his Butter Bread.
The white man had…
The young American couple and their blonde children next door are leaving Ghana. “Too poor,” they say. They’ve had enough.
The young American couple and their blonde children next door are leaving Ghana. “Too poor,” they say. “One minute, water no lights. Next minute, lights no water.” They’ve had enough.
After five years of working to improve education in the country where their children were born, they’re packing their bags and hauling their doll-like off-springs back to the good ole U-S-of-A. Colorado, I believe.
I’m relaying this story to you, second-hand from one of their hired help. I’ve never actually seen the parents in the two years I’ve lived here, but their children have fascinated me. Lovely, well-mannered kids, but…
You were in charge as long as you were on your own. Once someone white came along, you became his or her assistant.
In the first two buildings that Ralph Swimer Limited occupied, no white person would work. Not even those without qualifications. The Swimer family lived above the shop at 22 Whitechurch Lane and their living quarters were as disgusting as the business premises below.
Ralph Swimer had advertised in the Hackney Gazette for a Bookkeeper to Trial Balance. Each applicant who turned up for an interview bluntly refused the job when offered. He was glad, finally, to sneer a well-qualified and pretty, young thing in her early thirties. …
My silence that day haunts me still.
Random acts of kindness have been the hallmark of my life for as long as I can recall.
When I was six years old, Miss Ivy plucked me from the streets of Kingston, fed me, clothed me, and sent me to school for nearly two years — all because I looked like her only son, who had died in a road accident.
At a carnival in Salvador, Brazil, a White English man in the crowd lent me £500 after my back pocket was slashed and all my cash and travellers’ checks stolen. He scribbled an address in Brixton, where I…
I could tell this wasn’t gonna go well.
We had been in some slight disagreement for the past few minutes in our open-planned office. It had started quietly at the line manager’s desk. But now, I had returned to my own workstation to continue the task she had set me, she was still fuming.
“Look at me when I’m talking to you,” she shouted; slamming her fist against a desk and throwing her voice across the office while our junior colleagues sniggered and stared.
I turned to look at her with slow, deliberate contempt that I saw her visibly shiver, while desperately trying to hold it together.
“What?”…
I had felt a guilty sense of relief when Mom finally went, and it pains me now to think that she had been any burden to me, even in the end.
I was never one to think of my childhood. I wanted to free myself from the past. I wanted to get rid of the hurt — to be born again. Now, as I prepared to bury my mother and to start a new career of which she would have been proud, floods of emotions from a childhood past came rushing back at me.
I had been operating on automatic pilot ever since Mom became ill. I was exhausted. I needed a holiday. …
