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Adventures In Racism.

Maffu — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 20:31:55 +0000

I don’t have the words to express my feelings at Racist Tram Woman (youTube. Warning: NSFW language, NSFAnwhere diatribe).
My first emotion – shared, I would hope, with most decent and educated people – is obviously anger. Crude ignorance of this level breeds rage more easily than anything else – a fiery, white-hot ire that takes your tongue and leaves you only shaking and clenching fists and jaws. Unfortunately, this vileness feeds on and, in the eyes of one so ignorant, is validated by, that same rage. It’s a horrific vicious circle that takes every whit of my willpower to break away from.
Beneath the anger is a numbing incomprehension.
I believe we all tend to cast the world and everyone in it in our own image, and that image can be as simple or as complex as our upbringing and as all-encompassing or non-inclusive as our education. Our beliefs and attitudes are informed by the environment we find ourselves in, particularly – but not exclusively – in our formative years, and then we spend our lives (hopefully) expanding on those values. I have a dual heritage – black African on my father’s side, white English on my mother’s. I also have a duality in my upbringing – I lived as one of only two or three non-white families in a predominantly white-Irish area of Birmingham (though the post-code hinted at the rather gentler Hall Green, the reality of the locale was entirely working-class Gospel Farm). Brought up by a single, white parent in this down-to-earth white area, what racism I encountered – and I encountered it often enough looking back – was for the most part lightweight and low voltage enough to wash over me as the norm. It was the sort of embedded societal racism that is administered without thought or hate or any real judgement; it’s “just the way things are”. Sure, I occasionally got called Tarbrush, but at least they let me into their houses and let me play with their sons and daughters.
Don’t get me wrong – the area wasn’t a hotbed of racist fervour, filled with a gaggle of cross-burning hillbillies, chomping on chitlins and waiting for their next lynching. For the most part the families I grew up round were salt-of-the-earth hard-working folks, kind and generous, from amongst whom I still have friends to this day. But the world was a very different place then – the world of Mind Your Language and Love Thy Neighbour on prime-time telly. A world where we read the tale of Little Black Sambo in infant school and I took part – in full black-face – in The Black & White Minstrel Show for one year’s school play. A world of a thousand constant tiny reminders that you were different and therefore not quite as good or important as everyone else.
It was just the way it was.
And anyway, I was okay because I was “one of the alright ones”.
I suppose this sort of thinking led child-me to reason that racism was something that everyone faced to start with but you could earn your way out of it by being quietly good-natured about the whole thing.
This ‘merit’ system held unacknowledged sway in my head for some time and I flexed my own racist powers in the same learned, low-level way in my young years, using “pakis” – newly arrived Indian and Pakistani families – as a handy bullseye that I could share with my white neighbours . As an added bonus, acting this way towards these Asian families made me even more of an “alright one” with the people around me.
I don’t remember the specific catalyst for my own eye opening, but, through a mixture of education, self-awareness and exposure – both as a victim to more sinister and violent forms of racism, and to the victims of my own prejudice – I realised that the world was not my neighbourhood, and my neighbourhood not the world and that what people around you do and say, though seemingly The Way of Things, is not necessarily normal or the norm. I learnt that the pakis and the wogs and the ragheads and chinks were people. Like me. Exactly like me. So much so that I myself was a wog when spoken of in my absence. And that these epithets, though mildly used and low in voltage, were a convenient first step on a very dark and nasty road, full of shambling horrors and pitfalls and danger that leads eventually to places with names like Lynch-Mob and Pogrom and Genocide.
And yet all of this was simply a learned way of interacting with those new faces and sounds and smells around our neighbourhood. The people there weren’t evil, they themselves were second and third generation immigrant stock who twenty or thirty years before had faced similar prejudice. Ninety-nine percent of those people were fine people, though as ignorant of other cultures or the niceties of social integration as I was myself. If I meet any of them now they are usually lovely, warm welcoming people, sometimes a little rough around the edges, but never anything other than that.
But the other one percent…
I’ve rather bizarrely had some Facebook friend requests from some of them, only to check out their profile and see that they are BNP supporters or that every other status update was about immigrants doing this or “blacks and pakis” doing that
In these few the low-level, low-voltage seed took hold and produced unreasoning, unquestioning hatred. They not only have no frame of reference in which to reconfigure their perception of other people and cultures, they have no need or desire for it, only a world-searing, animalistic malignance that should not exist in this day and age.
No matter how many times I come across, or am the target of, such blind hatred, the thing that I find most difficult to process is not the injustice or ugliness of it, but the utter lack of self-awareness that it shows. I can’t comprehend of a mind so lacking in compassion and empathy or just plain decency, that they can’t see that the people around them are just people. That the racist could really see those people as less than the racist themselves, simply because of their colour, is so utterly bizarre to me that just about every time it has happened to me in my life, my first reaction has been a surprised half-chuckle, followed by a blinking mental reboot as I realise that no, this is not a joke: This is what this person actually believes to be true.
As I said, I believe we cast other people in our own image and we tend to project ourselves into them. I want to believe that Racist Tram Woman’s scattergun ranting is a product of ignorance and environment. That, given a light to shine on herself, she would see – as I once did – just how that way of thinking robs not only her victims but also herself – both of dignity and of experience.
But in this case I think she is of the one percent, and the light would only find a cold core of hate in a dry void.
For this reason, and those listed at length above, I am as reflexively afraid of Racist Tram Woman as she is of me and my brown skin. And like her, I can do nothing but wish her away.

Listen to Yourselves

Maffu — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 22:57:08 +0000

“You need to identify this man before someone kills me”
David Calvert

No, they need to restore order and reason before someone kills you.
I hope the tabloids are pleased with themselves when someone does get hurt.

.44 Blues

Maffu — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 22:43:19 +0000

Finally figured out a reliable way of mounting my camera onto my guitar without a/ making it unplayable or b/ being in danger of twisting the neck off.
Anyway, for your delectation, here is my rendition of 44 Blues…

Steak and Ale Pie!

Maffu — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 21:16:21 +0000

A guest recipe for a delicious Steak and Ale pie, by Mike Cummins.

Ingredients:

Rump steak – about 6oz (uncooked) per person
1 bottle of good ale, porter or stout
½ tsp Herbs de Provence
2-3 tsp of sunflower oil
1 medium or ½ large onion
½ lb Chestnut or large flat mushrooms
1 tbs of plain flour
1 tsp of english or 3 tsp of grainy mustard
1 pack puff pastry.

The night before:
Dice your steak into good mouthfuls and put into a bowl with the bottle of beer and herbs.

2 hours before:
Drain the steak into a colander or sieve, reserving the beer (place the sieve over a saucepan).

Method:
Put a heavy based pan onto the stove under a medium heat with the oil. Coat the (now dry) steak with the flour. The easiest way is to get one of the plastic bags that your veg comes in, put the meat in, then the flour, twist the top enclosing a fair amount of air and give a good shake. Chop the mushrooms into bite-sized pieces.
Put steak and all of the mushrooms into oil and seal (brown all over) making sure that bits of the meat get seared (important for flavour). If you have cheap meat, make sure you have driven off all the water.
Dice the onions finely.
Take out the steak & mushrooms and put into a bowl.
Put more oil into the pan to heat and add the onions. Cook until translucent.
As the onions become translucent, add all the mushrooms and the steak.
Slowly add the reserved beer, stirring constantly, so that the flour absorbs the liquor.
When all the beer is in (covering everything), cover and simmer for about 40 mins.
Remove cover and continue simmering whilst reducing the stock to a gravy-like consistency. Add the mustard after another 10 minutes.
Put the oven onto gas mark 7.
Take a pie dish (whatever) and cut out a pastry lid from the puff pastry. If the pie dish is large, I use an egg cup in the middle of the pie dish to stop the pastry drooping.
Put the contents of the casserole into the pie dish, put over the puff pastry and add any off cuts of pastry as decoration.
Make two cuts into the pastry to let the steam escape. Optionally (I don’t), brush the pastry with milk/egg yolk.
Place pie dish into the oven for 25-30 mins, by which time the pie crust should be nicely risen and a golden colour.

Serve with mash with 4 oz of cheese added whilst mashing plus whichever green vegetable you like – I normally use green beans. More of the same beer is the best accompaniment.

Pasta Sensation!

Maffu — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 21:12:36 +0000

Named by an old flatmate the first time she tasted it, Pasta Sensation is NOT for those on a diet or for anybody going out on a first date the next day, but mmmmmmmmmmm! Cook it the next time you have a few people to feed.

Ingredients:

2-3 Chicken breast fillets
1 small tin of sweetcorn (Green Giant is the only edible one I find)
2 medium or 1 large green pepper
½ pound of small cup or button mushrooms
5 cloves of Garlic. Yes, five.
2 large green bullet-chillies (or one flat teaspoon of chili powder)
1 packet of Cheese Sauce Mix (or Four Cheese Sauce Mix – or if you know how to make your own Cheese Sauce even better)
1 carton of double cream
375g (uncooked weight) of dried pasta (preferably conchiglie shells or the little twirly ones)
Some olive oil
A very large bowl
Some hungry people.

Method:

First prepare everything.
- Open and drain the sweetcorn.
- Crush or very finely chop the garlic.
- Slice the green pepper into thin (2mm ish), short (2-inch) strips.Finely chop the chillies.
- Mix these four together and put to one side.
- Cut the mushrooms in half and put to one side.
- Slice the chicken fillets into strips or bite sized cubes [ the aim is to get the chicken, which shrinks when cooked, to end up the same size(ish) as the pasta, which grows :0) ]
Now start the the pasta cooking. I like to use a Knorr chicken stock cube in the water instead of salt, but whatever.
In a large frying pan or a wok heat the olive oil until it is very hot – just shy of smoking.
Drop in the chicken and stir it around to sear and seal.
Reduce the heat and then add the mushrooms. Stir for a couple of minutes.
Add the pepper/sweetcorn/garlic/chilli mix and stir in.
Reduce the heat to very low.
Prepare the cheese sauce mix as directed on the packet then transfer it to a large saucepan.
Add the chicken, peppers etc. and stir.
Your pasta should be ready by now. Drain the pasta and put it into the very large bowl.
Pour the cream into the chicken/cheese sauce mix and stir.
Let it heat up so that the sauce thickens, stir to prevent sticking or burning.
Pour the whole thing over the pasta and stir well.
Feed the hungry people.

Serves:

Many :0)

This actually tastes amazing if you leave it overnight – the spices have time to really come out. You can then eat it cold or microwave to heat it up.

Enjoy.