FAIL

[kateorman]

International Blog Against Racism Week 2009 runs from 27 July - 2 August. And I ain't ready. I had mad plans to write up a big essay on slavery in Australia (oh yes) but I just haven't managed to do it in time. Next year. I will post the links I collected while writing my Time Unincorporated essay, though.

Comments

[alawston]

I thought about participating, but I think I'd be a bit too downbeat. During a lengthy piss-up in the small hours of last Tuesday, a South African neighbour took my desire to live in Richmond as a clue that I was a secret apartheid enthusiast or something, and unleashed a foaming rant about Black South Africans that I can just never, ever repeat, including several 'jokes' (they had to explain some of the words to me) and, of course, a five minute whinge about how he wasn't racist, it's 'just the culture'.

Most of the time, I'm pretty positive about how far society has come in a single generation, but that arsehole majorly shat on my buzz. I've joked for a long time that South Africans come over to London because South Africa isn't quite racist enough for them any more, but it was horrific to be proved right in quite so much detail.

[kateorman]

Gah, I hate being on the receiving end of that crap. It's straightforward to deal with it when it's some random stranger, but much trickier to handle when it's in the tearoom at work or anywhere else that you really don't want to respond with appropriate rage and violence. Sometimes "I'm afraid remarks like that make me terribly uncomfortable" doesn't quite cut it.

[alawston]

Luckily there was enough drunkenness involved that a couple of us did finally tell him to just shut the f*** up. And after we did so, there was an awkward silence and he had the nerve to say 'Well, that's ruined the party.'

I hear a lot of carefully vague racist crap from the South Africans around my part of London ("The ANC have done nothing for the country", "It's gone too far", "It'll become another Zimbabwe"), but this was the first time I'd heard one of them come out and say all the vile things I've always suspected them of thinking. It's probably no coincidence that he'd only arrived in the country a few days ago.

[kateorman]

There's your convenient ready phrase for such occasions, then: "Watch out, mate, you're not in Joberg any more!"