Question for Londoners/ex-Londoners reading~

[bellatrys]

When I visited England in the late 80's, and [white, British] people warned me that Notting Hill was kind of sketchy and I probably didn't want to go around there, was this a totally-not-at-all-coded way of not-at-all-racists telling me that there were black people there? Or just a nice, upper-middle-class bourgie inability to deal with the sort of

Comments

[raincitygirl]

But they HAVEN'T taken golliwogs away. They're still making them and people are still buying them. I know, because my (English) mother recently acquired two on a trip back home. I tried to reason with her, but she started going all bingo card on me, so I gave up.

Not that I think they should be legally banned or anything, but I am a little stunned that in the 21st century there's still a market for them such that making them remains profitable.

Well, no, but you know how it goes--

[bellatrys]

Anybody *saying* publically that golliwogs make them feel uncomfortable and is this imagery really something we want to be perpetuating in this day and age? IS EXACTLY THE SAME THING as banning them by law and confiscating them all and burning them and making it a CRIME to produce them.

Or so the likes of Luke Jackson would have us believe...

Re: Well, no, but you know how it goes--

[raincitygirl]

There's a place in the middle of Melbourne's CBD with a golliwog window display. Also, this friend of mine's parents have a golliwog fridge magnet which is, weirdly, surrounded by all these left wing / feminist / environmentalist ones. Does the dissonance not occur to them...?

Richie

Are they Ironic Hipsters, by any chance?

[bellatrys]

Does the dissonance not occur to them...?

Because that's usually the excuse here in the US. (Racialicious has had a lot to say on the subject of Ironic Hipster Racism, natch.)

The thing that gets me is that the same people who are all like "It's just tradition/art/entertainment/it's all in the past & we're so enlightened now can't you just laught at it?/ don't be so SERIOUS about it!" are, invariably, the same ones who are all WAHWAHWAH whenever they have to encounter a story in which there are any presentations of racism or patriarchy and these are presented critically - "How come *I* have to be made to feel uncomfortable and guilty when *I'm* not personally racist/sexist, just because *I* happen to be a white male? UR SO MEEN!" and so forth.

Which makes me think that the whole "lighten up/get over it!" brigade is somehow *not* speaking out of purest principles...

[fledgist]

The question would be easier to answer if they were giving you warnings about Brent, Brixton, Kilburn, Peckham, or Streatham as well. (Be it noted that Brixton was moving upscale in the 80s, as was Notting Hill, while Peckham was beginning its slide into slumminess.)

As for the golliwog thing. Well, what a pity.

Honestly, I don't *remember*--

[bellatrys]

I think that I was specifically warned about Notting Hill because I mentioned a fannish interest in seeing it, having read the ur-text of the SCA The Napoleon of Notting Hill some years earlier, where Brent, Brixton et al had no more meaning for me than Quincy, Saugus, and the other Boston exurbs frequently mentioned on the radio or on maps, but which I had yet to encounter as "That place where the Dunkin Donuts is impossible to get into OR out of" or "The one where there's no 24-hour gas station" or "the place with the one-lane traffic circle from hell" etc.

As for the golliwog thing. Well, what a pity.

And of course they would have been outraged - well, they *were* outraged, that was what the going-off about was - at any suggestion that there was anything racist in it at all. They were nice, polite, traveled, educated ecumenical-sorts of folks who Believed In The Equality Of Humanity In The Eyes Of God, after all!

Re: Honestly, I don't *remember*--

[fledgist]

There are not now, and were not in the 1980s, any exclusively black neighbourhoods in London. Notting Hill had a lot of black people, but it never had no white people. It is also adjacent to some of the most expensive parts of London. The early 80s were the period at which it began to be gentrified.

So what were they trying to say, I wonder?

[bellatrys]

Because it wasn't at all gentrified then (that I could tell) at that point, but it wasn't at all "scary" the way they were talking about it, at least not by my teenage standards of scary meaning "more boarded-up windows on the street than unboarded ones, that is, unboarded ones with the glass still in," which described the (now rather better) block two streets up from where I had my piano lessons as a kid, and still is a pretty good operating standard, though the neighborhood a mile from here with the apartment buildings that melted is more sad than scary, really. (I don't even *notice* cars-on-blocks until they are pointed out to me, let alone as Blight, which says a lot about how I grew up, I suppose. You mean *everyone* doesn't have an old dead stove sitting in the back yard?)

And yes, there was some Arabic graffiti, but all that made me think was "Gee, Toto, not in Kansas America any more" because, wow, foreign writing on walls that wasn't in a museum? Wicked cool

[lyorn]

I was in London in August 1986 on a school trip, and the roach hotel we were staying in was three minutes from the Notting Hill Gate Underground station.

We were not warned about anything except not to get run over by cars coming from an unexpected direction, and there was nothing there to even slightly worry a 17yo German small-town kid. Except the roaches. Now, Brixton, that was scary: too empty and too silent and closed-down, like something from a horror movie.

There was only one black person (a teacher) in the small town I grew up in, so even I might have noticed if there had been a significant number of black people around. There were a few Indians, which I felt was very cool. Consider that I might have been somewhat underperforming in the fear department.

I found San Francisco around Union Square in 1993 much more disquieting, with the dirt and the poverty. But then, again, I had got older and easier to scare.

Well, yah, but your advisors were all Decadent Europeans!

[bellatrys]

Germany is only a *little* less notoriously Decadent in US conservative mythology than Holland (and that's because Holland is considered to be some sort of mix of Mos Eisley and Babylon.) Why, you folks didn't even consider it obscene to have bare breasts in knitting magazines back then!

Ahem.

Maybe it was some kind of major conservative paranoia on the part of my hosts, which I didn't recognize as being insane because we were *all* insane in my circle, then? Just being freaked out about The Big City and a part of it that wasn't all shiny and kept up for the tourists and the CEOs downtown? --Like the rich people from the next town or two over who will go to Boston to Fenway Park or the theatre district to see Cats, but won't drive in my neighborhood with their windows down for fear of being carjacked, nevermind that I can't come up with a single instance of that happening in all the time I've lived here. (Road ragers in SUVs on the highway, OTOH...)

I'm even more baffled now than I was then!

More decadent than you can imagine.

[lyorn]

In London, you could buy chocolate bars in the corner store at 10 pm! When in Germany all the shops had to close tidy and orderly at 6:30 pm, and if you needed chocolate after that, you were SOL. Talk about decadence

Respectfully requesting further explanation

[rozasharn]

I thought 'golliwog' was a variant of 'pollywog', a synonym for tadpole. It has another meaning too? Or did no one ever think it was a variant form of pollywog except me?

Re: Respectfully requesting further explanation

[fledgist]

See here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golliwogg

Re: Respectfully requesting further explanation

[rozasharn]

Thank you. I keep forgetting to check Wikipedia. Sorry to trouble you.

Re: Respectfully requesting further explanation

[fledgist]

Oh, no trouble.

[anna_wing]

I was in London in the 80s, and I only remember being warned about not leaving my luggage unattended. The Notting Hill thing baffles me too. Perhaps you were being warned about bohemian non-conformity (ie strict conformity with the rules of bohemianism)? It was already beginning to be a posh neighbourhood then. Not grotty like Kilburn, say.

I had a golliwog when I was a child. I don't remember when they disappeared. Where I was there was no-one who was remotely black so I think I was in my teens before it registered by pure accident that it had referred to actual people, rather than just being a black doll. In Germany, I found marzipan versions in a confectionery shop in Munich in 2001. I was quite surprised.

[lyorn]

I had a golliwog when I was a child. [...] Where I was there was no-one who was remotely black so I think I was in my teens before it registered by pure accident that it had referred to actual people, rather than just being a black doll.

I only learned that "golliwog" referred to a doll some time last year or so. Before I knew it only from "Professionals" fanfic.

At 4 yo I desperately wanted a "Negerpuppe", because every doll but those and every child but me had straight blond hair. Never got one, but I got a "grizzly" teddy bear for Christmas, so that was OK.