I recently had to fill in a form to subscribe to a county initiative to bring archaeology to the people. Ten happy pages. I approve of all they want to do. And then I come to the last page, where I am required to tick a box (one of about thirty) saying where I would place myself in a range of ethnicities: black Irish, white Asian, pink Chinese, brown Windsor, etc. What, if you will pardon the ouburst, the f... has this got to do with archaeology?! I didn't fill in this section, just wrote a comment under "Other" that will probably end my relationship with Cambridgeshire archaeology forever.
Similarly, when we applied for a Heritage Lottery Grant to buy and develop the seventeen acres of meadowland in the middle of our village, there was a similar section, asking us to specify and quantify the various ethnic groups who would benefit from the project. As far as I am aware, the Wong family, who run our chippy and Chinese takeaway in the village, consist of mum and dad and three children, so, under Chinese, I wrote 5. Under Black African (it may have been another phrase, off-white Nubian, perhaps), I remembered seeing two pretty dusky girls in the High Street some years before, so I wrote 2.
When it came to immigrants from the Indian Subcontinent, I wrote "None, but we are hoping for a huge influx". Actually I didn't, but I was so pissed off by this time that I needed to light several jossies before I could calm down sufficiently to remember that getting the money was the object of this crazy exercise. No point in winning battles if you lose the war.
What is this obsession with race and ethnicity? Would I have a different attitude if I was another colour, had a shorter nose or different eyelids? Perhaps. My Thai friends always made reference to the fact that I was a "Long Nose", and also that I was "pat wan", which means "sweet blood" because Thai mozzies preferred me to all other food on offer. So what? In my arrogant opinion, drawing attention to people's race is itself a form of racism. I was once on a bus in Birmingham, where the conductor was really rude and unkind to a passenger. I was about to remonstrate when I held back - because he was a Cadbury-coloured West Indian and the passenger was a white woman. I have been ashamed of my silence ever since. A bastard is a bastard regardless of pigment.
My son went for a job with a local authority in London. They posed a question: if you had to let a property, and two applicants of equal merit, one Caucasian and one Asian, applied, what would you do? After the interview, he asked what the answer was and they said "You would have to readvertise the property". Imagine the attitude of the owner of the property to that piece of nonsense (quite apart from the fact that no two applicants would ever be totally EQUAL in merit).
Oh yes, and another thing: I am not even sure where the Caucasus Mountains are, let alone why I should be classified as a denizen of that region. I like to think of myself racially as a sort of wobbly pink blancmange. So there.
Grandpa, are you what they call a "grumpy old man"?
Good Lord yes!
2 comments:
When you're right, you're right. (And NOT as in "white makes right," over which wars have justifiably been fought.)
This preoccupation with race is absurd at best in a world where hardly anyone is all one ethnicity or another anymore. What is more, the concept of color is quite meaningless as every member of a single family may well be a different shade.
I would hope that as a species, we could have advanced beyond this stupid and puerile categorizing system by now.
"My heart soars like a hawk!" (to quote Chief Dan George in Little Big Man) to read your supportive comments. I particularly like the observation that even with one group or family, people can be different shades. At the moment, I have gone from pink blancmange to red lobster, thanks to our current heatwave.
What bothers me most is that the "official" attention paid to this issue is itself divisive.
God bless.
Post a Comment