Here you go…
I swear some of you from the UK are tone-deaf. If you don't think that title comes off racist, it does. This is a teachable moment. I don't care if you hate Meghan Markle. That is not the issue. The white woman is a looker, but the bi-racial is a hooker. Okay! WOW. Some of you will never learn. Lady Hussey is in so much trouble because of similar actions. This is what racism looks like, even if you didn't intend it that way. Learn and grow from it. That's your right not to like Meghan Markle, but that title is RACIST and sexist. I expected more from intelligent women. If the title was reversed and Kate was referred to as the Hooker, that would never have been approved. WOW.
I appreciate you having an intelligent discussion and trying to explain the difference between UK and America, but I've been watching a lot of UK Chat shows lately. One is where Dr. Shola is trying to explain what racism looks like for her in the UK because she lives that experience every day. The hosts are trying to gaslight her.The UK tries to gaslight people of color for what racism is. All I wish is for White folks to stop telling People of Color what racism is. It is like a man trying to tell a woman giving birth is easy. They may be Queuing up but your government is not having them. they're shipping off people to Rwanda.
Here you go…
I swear some of you from the UK are tone-deaf. If you don't think that title comes off racist, it does. This is a teachable moment. I don't care if you hate Meghan Markle. That is not the issue. The white woman is a looker, but the bi-racial is a hooker. Okay! WOW. Some of you will never learn. Lady Hussey is in so much trouble because of similar actions. This is what racism looks like, even if you didn't intend it that way. Learn and grow from it. That's your right not to like Meghan Markle, but that title is RACIST and sexist. I expected more from intelligent women. If the title was reversed and Kate was referred to as the Hooker, that would never have been approved. WOW.
I appreciate you having an intelligent discussion and trying to explain the difference between UK and America, but I've been watching a lot of UK Chat shows lately. One is where Dr. Shola is trying to explain what racism looks like for her in the UK because she lives that experience every day. The hosts are trying to gaslight her.The UK tries to gaslight people of color for what racism is. All I wish is for White folks to stop telling People of Color what racism is. It is like a man trying to tell a woman giving birth is easy. They may be Queuing up but your government is not having them. they're shipping off people to Rwanda.
I actually agree with you re: the title. Mentioning Meghan’s bi-racial identity was unnecessary. Not only do we intelligent women (and a few men - hello lads) lose the argument when we use such monikers, but it gives her more ammo with which to feel hard-done-by.
I will disagree with you re: Dr Shola, though. Since the tragic, violent and incredibly cruel murder of George Floyd, many of those associated with BLM (and by extension, a few Black Britons) have been making claims re: society’s structure and British racism that are embedded in US politics - and simply don’t exist over here. The chant ‘no guns, no police/defund the police’ is irrelevant a) because the vast majority of police go unarmed and b) Theresa May cut police numbers by 20,000 during her brief tenure.
Although we are linked to the US via the (quite often one-sided) special relationship, our structural differences are as polarised as north and south, night and day. Not just because of the early elimination of slavery, but because - since the First Industrial Revolution - everything,
everything is based on class. Within three minutes of speaking to someone you know their class, education, upbringing, schooling, wealth and can recognise their cultural signifiers. Much in British society goes unsaid: ‘well, he’s…interesting’ can cover a multitude of social codes which are parsed by the listener upon their own social (under)standing. For example, I am upper-middle class: once you recognise what signifiers I display you would be able to categorise me into a neat (and claustrophobic) little box. (Getting rid of the class system altogether is a very vexed issue, and one I shall not debate here.) Now, given that the majority of those who came over from the Indian subcontinent from the 1850s onwards, the Irish who settled en masse in Liverpool, Manchester and the North-east due to An Gorta Mor (the Famine), the working-class Chinese who settled in Limehouse, the Jewish refugees fleeing pogroms from the 1880s onwards and the Caribbean born folk who came over on the ‘Windrush’, what they have in common is their class.
Any settler on our shores who arrives with little money and rents property in the cheapest area is automatically designated as working class (lower working class is a title reserved for those who refuse to work). If they work hard, they can find tutors for their children a generation later and/or send them to public/private school rather than a state-run educational institution. The child, in excelling itself and getting a good degree and place to live, is automatically bumped up to the middle class. Those whose parents don’t value educational attainment will see their lives mapped out very much like their parents: poverty, cramped surroundings, few opportunities. This applies across the board for Black children, white children, Romani children (especially girls) and so-on.
Meghan is very much of the American middle class. Her behaviour, whether auto-hugging, coming out with inflammatory and/or self-serving pronouncements, and her refusal to conform to the rigid social etiquette our claustrophobic system relies upon, makes her persona non grata. That stiff upper lip thing? Absolutely true. If you really must, you can write a book on it when all the main protagonists are dead and gone. Going on a talkshow to spill the beans? Beyond brash and vulgar - the behaviour of a nouveau riche Real Housewife. Meghan never learnt (or even tried, I believe) to understand British culture and the norms inherent in it. She appeared to believe that she could shake the entire British clas system by the scruff and it would bend and comply to her desires and directions.
We value those who work hard, make their way up the class system, are not brash and contribute to society. Meghan did not contribute. She steam-rollered. And, in so doing, she desperately disappointed many people - including me.
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