Mind who you Marchons
When Patrice Evra and the French national football team lined up at Wembley tonight (Tues 17 Nov), it was a moment of poignant defiance which earned an instant place in sporting iconography.
As their world famous national anthem struck up, all brass and bravado, I shed a tear but I didn’t sing La Marseillaise. I’m not a massive fan of national anthems but it’s hard not to be a bit roused by La Marseillaise. With its ‘Allons Enfanting’ and ‘Marchons Marchoning’, the French national anthem is definitely one of the greatest. It’s the definitive anthem, there’s little wonder it gets picked to start Beatles songs and rightly has been called the greatest anthem ever.
Coverage and the relateability lie
Patrice’s reaction to one of the suicide bombs going off outside Stade de France, last Friday, was one of the images that told the world something really untoward was happening. Much has been said about how much more coverage the mainstream media serves up when these sort of attacks happen in places like Boston or Paris compared to Beirut or Garissa University in Kenya. Trying to explain the lean, it’s often argued that most people in Europe and the US have no point of reference for life in Lebanon or Kenya. Because of the lack of coverage, the argument goes, they have no idea what life might look like in these countries and so it’s hard to imagine what it means for that life to be devastated. Almost everyone can imagine what it’s like to go to gig, have a meal or watch a football match and doing these things in Paris or watching a Marathon in Boston, are things we might do at home, the story continues. Of course the real answer is that we can all imagine what it’s like to go to university (Kenya) and we can all imagine what it’s like to shop in rush hour (Beirut).
Revenge, Boys Own style
When horrendous things like the attacks on Paris happen, our first instincts are to provide succour to the suffering, condolences to the mourning and retribution to the culprits. The night after the attack, France launched 20 separate air strikes on what it said were ISIS strong holds in Syria. She promises these will continue. At home, France has carried out hundreds of raids with dozens of arrests by an extra 115,000 gendarmes deployed across France. There have also been raids in Germany and Belgium. History tells us that the vast majority of raids will prove fruitless and most of those arrested are completely innocent. This will mean nothing though because the searches found a rocket launcher. Most people will say that justifies any inconvenience felt but those innocent people who are having their lives turned upside down.
The days after attacks on the West, there’s often a security snatch and grab – this time was no different. The British government announced 1,900 extra secret service personnel and extra funding. Cameron, doing his sternest voice, said the attacks ‘strengthen the case for military action in Syria’ and said we needed increased surveillance. I imagine a young David Cameron read spy novels or comics. He spoke today about ‘cutting off the head of the snake’, about ‘COBRA meetings’ and about launching ‘a full spectrum response to ISIS’. It seems obvious that Dave thinks he’s in S.H.I.E.L.D.
He claimed that British secret services had foiled seven plots this year alone and the panic levels in the living rooms ramped up another notch.
Strange Stains
The singing of national anthems is just part of the jingoism wave that washes over nations after traumatic events like those of last week. I fear that police forces, which are already often predisposed to treating black and brown people much more harshly, are going to be encouraged to crack more skulls and scrap more rights.
While these raids are going on, Mosques are being vandalised and anyone who even looks like they might be a Muslim, is at increased physical risk.
If you need an example of what I’m 
talking about just remember the how the heightened sensibilities and more active armed policing that followed the 7/7 London bombings lead to the death of Jean Charles de Menezes.
Fear is a strong motivator and blind eyes will be turned as Muslims ,or people who look like them, are profiled on both sides of the Channel. Being black in the USA can often be a fatal condition. The same discrepancies existing when it comes to police stopping certain groups in the EU but the numbers are smaller and the officers are much less likely to be carrying firearms. So calls for more armed police on the streets of our big cities, chill me. Jeremy Corbyn was asked what he thought about police with shoot to kill instructions, roaming the streets of Britain. He said he wouldn’t be happy about that and this somehow morphed into him saying he wouldn’t let police kill terrorists if they were rampaging down Oxford Street.
Even tonight’s match at Wembley was be patrolled by very visibly armed police officers. The aim was to put minds at rest and, as a one off, I think we can all live with it. Long-term, more armed police will mean more dead Muslim, black and brown people on Europe’s streets. It would be hard for anyone to argue that black people living in the EU would somehow be immune to the fates that so often blight he lives of our American cousins. You don’t need to be a genius sociologist to see the boosted levels of alienation would be a recruiting dream for extremists.
Tonight as La Marseillaise boomed out at Wembley, the words were put up on a large screen to encourage Brits to sing along. But I couldn’t bring myself to sing those words. Not at the moment. My boeuf with this popular song is that it’s part of the ramping up of machismo. In a nutshell, the whole thing (the first verse anyway) is just aggressive sabre rattling which builds towards a climax of:
Qu’un sang impur abreuve nos sillons!
Let impure blood water our furrows
I can hear you screaming ‘it’s just a song!’ but these are real words which have real history. They were written to inspire post-Revolutionary France to rise up and repel the Austrians and Prussians forces who were at large ‘dans les campagnes’ in 1792. But, like all the good colonisers, France has spent the following two hundred years watering all sorts of furrows with all sorts of impure blood.
If you are descended from migrants it’s hard to hear this and still feel that you are part of the ‘enfants de la Patries’ rather than those invading ‘féroces soldats’. Throughout France’s history impure blood, whether in the MENA nations or sub-Saharan Africa, has flowed pretty freely. The revenge bombing raids, now entering their third night, suggest this will be the case in the future.
When dispossessed nations ask for reparations or suggest that historical wrongs be acknowledged and righted, they are shooed away and told that it’s time to let history be history and stop fixating. But enriched nations can virtually demand you sing about what was done to your ancestors and then they stick the stuff they are telling you to forget about them stealing in the hats of their monarchs.
Tonight, I didn’t sing. I stand with France and with my neighbours of all faiths and none. We need peace and unity not aggression and division. For tonight only, La Marseillaise was left on the bench.
Don’t make promises you can’t keep / The Politics of Business
As the general election looms, UK political leaders rally around with their party campaigning and promoting their policies. When it comes to selecting who will get your vote, close scrutiny can reveal candidates that just don’t measure up.
In a report by the Institute for Government, “two-thirds of the public say they would be more likely to vote for a party that demonstrates how it would implement its manifesto pledges.” With 64% of people believing that political parties in the UK generally do not keep their election promises.
The same can be said for businesses. There’s nothing more frustrating for your clients or customers than when a business goes back on a promise. Whether you’re delivering work to existing clients or pitching for new business, developing trust is one of your biggest challenges. If your audience aren’t sold into believing you will keep your promises, they’re unlikely to give you their vote or their business.
Read the rest of this article at Hiscox Small Business Knowledge Centre
Learning to love thy new neighbour
Deep down, I’ve always been a bit of a bigot.
That’s not an easy thing for a ranting lefty to admit, but I can only change what I accept exists so it’s time for my ego to face the music and do the dance of contrition.
Gentrify This billboard at the Cans Festival, Leake Street, London
If we are being truly open minded, our beliefs evolve, nurtured by experiences – both ours and those of other people, throughout our lives. Over the years, I’ve faced down my sexism, become comfortable with diverse religious doctrines and got over my homophobia.
There is a minority group, though, that I regularly let myself socially discriminate against, either with snide remarks on social media or just casual everyday bigotry. I’ve been pulled up for mocking the way they speak and dress.
I’ve caught myself tutting loudly when stuck behind them at the local supermarket as they squeal with delight because it now stocks some exotic produce or other.
I guess on some level I just doubted their intentions.
Read the rest of this feature on the Guardian’s website
Scotland – Don’t leave the party, help us change the music
I’ve always felt a weird connection to Scotland. I think it’s because of my surname.
Being a Mcleod allows me to wear a kilt when I want to show off at weddings but, as a descendant of Jamaica, my name probably has more to do with ownership than heritage.
Better Together?
Nevertheless, like most lefties, I have always had a massive affection for Scotland.
It was one of the few parts of the UK that refused to vote Tory even when much of the rest of the Union was greedily supping at the Thatcherite teat.
Stereotypes are always problematic, even when positive, but my view, through tartan-tinted glasses, of Scots is that they are calm, intellectual, socially-minded and humorous.
I have no doubt Scotland could be a successful and vibrant independent nation but I want Scotland to vote NO and stay with us.
Many on the left, like Billy Bragg, are supporting the YES vote, arguing Scotland should be free to form a socialist utopia which would be a beacon to the rest of the UK and Europe.
The sad truth is that even if Scotland achieved the society her people are crying out for, many in England would just shrug their shoulders in the same way they currently do about Scandinavia, and carry on.
The rest of England would be that little bit more Farage-friendly. For the left, Scotland’s exit would be like a sibling moving out of home and leaving us to deal with our bullying step father on our own – we would wish them well but be a bit fearful for our future.
Maybe if Scotland goes she can take Kent and Essex with her for balance?
I’d love our Scottish allies to stay and help us take back power from the forces of self-interest and social isolation.
Democracy works best when as large an electorate as possible has equal status on a macro level and as much genuine power as possible locally.
Despite the fear of sounding like John Lennon, I dream of a world with no borders and with a much more direct technology-aided democracy, devolved down to the lowest point possible.
Political leanings can change over generations but constitutional structures are more robust.
Picking one out of an alarmingly similar bunch of bad options twice a decade is a pretty poor version of democracy anyway.
Our societies have evolved from tribes, to villages, to cities, to states, to groups of states. This natural progression, if it comes with a genuinely fair distribution of rights and powers, offers the distant promise of a truly fair world.
With good reason, many fear sprawling, distant, bureaucracies leave people with less power and less involvement in the democratic process. This is simply because institutions like the EU and UK have been allowed to become detached from the people they serve.
The task is to make them truly democratic, not to break them up into smaller invented clumps of self-interested humanity.
Despite all of this, it’s been hard not to be amused by the woefully run ‘Better Together’ campaign.
In the last few panicked days of the campaign it sent three massively unpopular party leaders north of the border to remind Scotland what she might be able to escape from and apparently hired Mr Bean to hoist the saltire over Downing Street.
When your long-standing girlfriend says she needs time to think about your relationship, the decent thing to do is to give her space. The NO campaign instead decided to turn up on her doorstep every night shouting abuse and threatening to confiscate her puppy if she doesn’t take them back.
If Scotland votes to break free on 18 September, I won’t enjoy watching Alex Salmond striding around with a blue-painted face, laying claim to the iron throne of Scotland. It will be a small step away from the unified world I want to see but the short term silver lining will be an implosion of Cameron’s leadership.
I’m hoping for a NO vote but one that is dangerously close enough to give Cameron a bloody nose and to leave the Westminster establishment scrambling around for ways to make the UK more democratic.
The Greatest Show on Earth
Football frequently makes me a hypocrite.
I’ve spent a sizeable chunk of my life thinking, writing and ranting about social justice but when it comes to football, I’m as blinkered as a Daily Mail reader.
A bunch of philandering millionaires, kicking a bit of leather around, get my full-hearted backing in a way that city traders and industry big-wigs can only dream of.
I’ve turned a blind eye to racism, violence and homophobia when it comes from men who happen to wear the red shirt of the team I randomly follow.
I’ve spent my last dime travelling to cheer a group of strangers who wouldn’t waste the steam from their Bentleys’ exhausts on me if I were on fire.
Off the pitch it gets worse.
Football is ‘organised’ by a multinational dictatorship which is dripping in blood, bigotry and corruption.
Sepp Blatter, the head of FIFA, has told gay people worried about travelling to homophobic Qatar to “refrain from any sexual activities.”
He’s suggested the way to increase popularity of the women’s game is to get women playing in “more feminine clothes like they do in volleyball. They could, for example, have tighter shorts.” Before adding “Female players are pretty, if you excuse me for saying so,”
He even suggested that racism on the pitch should be resolved by no more than a handshake.
For years now I’ve been planning my trip to Brazil for this year’s World Cup.
With my small diverse group of football watching mates, I’ve travelled the world to watch this glorious game.
I’ve hugged and cried with strangers in the Ataturk stadium in Istanbul as my beloved Liverpool did the unthinkable.
I’ve been swamped by cheering Portugeezers after they knocked England out on penalties.
I’ve watched open mouthed as Zinedine Zidane, the greatest footballer of his generation, said goodbye to football with a head-butt.
Brazil promised to eclipse it all.
If England is football’s biological father, then Brazil is its spiritual home.
You can keep your Wemblies and your Stades de France, watching the World Cup final in Rio’s legendary Maracanã, would be a football Haj.
Three years ago I accidentally (don’t ask!) went on a two week holiday to Brazil and feel in love with this amazing nation.
The people are warm, the climate is beautiful and the setting is stunning.
While it isn’t quite the post-racial melting pot that it is sometimes held up as, it has some interesting things to say about the transience race.
Until last year, I was making my plans and looking forward to this summer.
Then 2 million Brazilians took to the streets during last summer’s Confederations Cup finals and I took notice.
Despite Brazil’s rapidly increasing wealth, there are many who have been left behind.
The favela’s, which are still predominantly black, are still places of squalor perched on hillsides overlooking some of Brazil’s most iconic sights.
The Brazilian World Cup will earn FIFA £3.5bn from the month-long tournament but Brazil’s poor face draconian policing and very little else.
The government has trampled on homes and uprooted communities to prepare for the games.
Some estimates say the bill for hosting the World Cup and Olympics two years later will be close to $1 trillion.
Brazil’s President Dilma will claim the bill won’t be that high and that the spending will provide a lasting legacy for her nation. Brazil’s poor will be wisely sceptical that any boost to the economy will trickle down to them.
Watching the World Cup leaves me way more excited than is acceptable for a grown man. This year I’m doing it from my living room and in the pubs.
Despite the lowlifes that run it and the dodgy politics that surround it, the World Cup is still the greatest show on earth.
This year, for once, football won’t make me a hypocrite.
Can Coca-Cola ‘open happiness’ in Swaziland?
Five years ago, I found my father via Facebook.
I had always known he lived in a small African nation called Swaziland but hadn’t seen or spoken to him since he returned there after a short stay in the UK in the 60s.
My father sadly passed away six weeks before I first stepped foot on Swazi soil but I have been lucky enough to visit the country four times since. I have met seven new siblings, gone to my grandmother’s 100th birthday celebrations, taught in rural schools and got to know something of this verdant, undulant, landlocked little nation.
Swaziland is one of the world’s last absolute monarchies. The present King, Mswati III, has enjoyed total power over his million subjects since his coronation in 1986.
The 45 year-old has a personal wealth estimated at £65m, two private jets, a fleet of luxury cars and last month, married his 15th wife.
Yet he rules over one of the planet’s poorest nations.
Almost 70% of the population lives below the international poverty line and Swaziland has one of the world’s highest HIV infection rates (26%) and the one of the lowest life expectancies (49 years).
Placed strategically between regional powerhouse South Africa and the potent Mozambique, resource-rich Swaziland doesn’t have to be poor.
But it’s hard to swim in a stagnant pool and the monarch’s tight grip on power has led to cronyism and an ineffective government.
Read the rest of this feature on the Guardian’s website
By a jury of my peers
12 people in a carriage.
Two Galatasaray fans, dripping in red and yellow, on their way to watch their team in the Champions League. Clearly on TV in a Turkish bar, since Gala are playing in Istanbul tonight.
An Asian Brit, knowledgeably talking to them about violence in Turkish football – apparently, it’s all Trabzonspor’s fault.
A very smartly dressed, middle-aged Indian couple. He, in a shiny suit with a hankie poking out of his top pocket. Her, in a white sari and glasses that would have suited Gina Lollobrigida. Take in the scenes on the tube as if observing Dalits during the Raj.
A Canadian sounding young same-sex couple poorly pretends to be just friends. Holding hands, whispering and furtively looking around to gauge the reactions of the rest of the carriage.
A white architect in his 50s. Dressed in the scruffy way that says ‘I’m an intellectual’, buries his head in his impressive looking plans.
A couple of work colleagues, who ‘have been around as long as they have’, gossip about their mutual office hate figure who really doesn’t deserve the easy ride she gets.
And me, looking quite ghetto but wishing the too-cute-to-approach, corporate woman reading this over my shoulder knew that I was a writer.
The ugly underbelly of private renting
When my mum first came to Britain from Jamaica in the 60s, overt racism was just a normal part of her day-to-day experience.
She never tires of telling me about the famous ‘no blacks, no Irish, no dogs’ signs that landlords put up on properties.
pic by Paul Joseph
In those pre-equality regulation days, bigotry didn’t need to hide behind plastic smiles, it was allowed to roam free and unashamed.
The Race Relations Act 1976 was supposed to put an end to all that and the Equalities Act 2010 seemed to reinforce the message that discriminating against someone because of the amount of melanin in their skin was simply not acceptable.
Among other measures, the Act made it:
“unlawful for a person who has the authority to dispose of premises to discriminate against or victimise someone else …by not letting or selling the premises to them.”
An undercover investigation by the BBC’s Inside Out London programme into discrimination in London’s private lettings industry aired last night. It showed that, for some letting agents, these laws are just obstacles to be navigated….
Read the rest of this article on the Guardian, Comment is Free
Black history gets the Hollywood treatment
Hollywood has a very dubious history when it comes to telling the stories from Black history.
For years America’s guilt at the way it has treated it’s Black population saw Hollywood airbrush Black people out of many of the stories it told.
If Native Americans were vilified in many Westerns, Black people were pretty much ignored. The almost all-white Wild West presented in these films bore little resemblance to the reality in which almost a quarter of cowboys were Black and even more were Hispanic.
Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained (2012) was widely credited with giving a more realistic view of the Wild West, and while it was a hugely entertaining and successful film, Django’s tale still had the familiar ring of the poor Black man being liberated by the kindly white man.
The ‘white saviour’ narrative has been repeated over and over again and has allowed stories that America finds difficult to tell seem more palatable.
For a film to work for mainstream audiences the perceived wisdom seemed to be that the stories of ethnic minorities need to be told through the lens of a character white audiences can relate to. Using the white saviour ploy allows a white audience to watch a film about oppression, even with white oppressors, and align themselves with the good white person and Black ‘victims’.
Read the rest of this feature on the TV Collective.
The Butler serves up a chronicle of the Civil Rights movement
I sat down to watch Lee Daniel’s The Butler, unsure about what sort of film I was about to see.
The film tells the story of Cecile Gaines, a black butler who served under seven presidents at the White House while the battle for Civil Rights engulfed the US.
I feared I was in for another sanitised view of the this tumultuous period of US history with black ‘victims’ nobly shouldering various insults with dignity and honour.
There were easy parallels to draw with The Help, Tate Taylor’s Oscar nominated screenplay, which looked at the lives of black housemaids serving white families in the Southern US during the same period.
While I enjoyed The Help, I was left feeling unfulfilled because the film focused so much on the White Saviour.
Even the title of Lee Daniel’s film brought up unpleasant memories of 80s Soap spin-off Benson, which saw Robert Guillaume play the eponymous wisecracking butler who had ideas above his station and on hearing the doorbell would frequently enquire ‘you want me to get that?’, infuriating his owners (sorry I mean bosses) the Tates.
What I got was in fact a nuanced look at the civil rights era through the eyes of Gaines, tenderly played by Forest Whitaker.
The film, based loosely on the life of former White House head butler Eugene Allen, chronicles Gaines’s journey from the cotton fields of Georgia to Obama’s Oval Office.
Daniels, the director behind the excellent Monster’s Ball, The Woodsman and Precious, uses Gaines as a symbol of the African American generation that came before the revolutionaries of the 60s and 70s.
In the opening scenes of the film, a young Gaines watches as his mother is raped and his father is shot dead by a white cotton field owner.
We later hear Gaines describe the world he eventually finds beyond the cotton fields.
“No one would give me a job or food, no place to sleep. Any white man could kill anyone of us at anytime, and not be wanted for it. The law wasn’t on our side, the law was against us. I was hungry all the time.”
Much of the film’s drama revolves around the tension between Gaines and one of his two sons, Louis, played by British actor David Oyelowo.
Louis represents the civil rights generation. He’s ashamed of his father’s bowing and scraping and his father sees him as a hot-head who is doing nothing but bringing trouble down on the family and the black community in general.
Looking back, it’s easy to take Louis’s side in this argument and dismiss Cecil as an Uncle Tom who was too afraid to stand up and demand his rights in the way that his freedom bus riding, Martin Luther King following, Black Panther son does, but this would be a mistake.
The film shows just how perilous it was to be black in the US in the first half of the 20th Century. Young Gaines and his generation had to endure the Strange Fruit of black bodies swinging from trees and the hand-to-mouth existence outside the quasi-slavery cotton fields.
It was their suffering that emboldened their children’s generation and gave birth to the church groups that cradled much of the early movement.
As Gloria Gaines angrily tells her son at the end of dinner scene, “Everything you are and everything you have is because of that Butler”.
Criticising this generation for not standing up to their oppression is as ridiculous as black people who now say, “I would never have been a slave, I just wouldn’t have put up with it”.
While those people definitely existed, most didn’t exist for very long.
The film also shows that Gaines eventually grows to appreciate the struggle that his son goes through. He realises that he should have supported him more and judged him less.
This is a message for both generations. We see how both relied on the other and that the political earth is constantly shifting beneath our feet.
The film, which also stars Oprah Winfrey as Gaines’s long suffering, sometime cheating, wife Gloria; Cuba Gooding Junior as his wisecracking fellow butler Carter; and Terence Howard as his cuckolding friend Howard, topped the US Box Office when it was released there in August.
Much of the interest was in the portrayal of the seven presidents that Gaines serves under.
A host of stars including Robin Williams as Eisenhower, James Marsden as JFK, John Cusack as Nixon and Alan Rickman as Reagan help give the story its historical context.
Most are shown either to grudgingly accept the Civil Rights movement or to be against it.
Ronald Reagan’s son Michael, has accused the film of portraying his dad as a racist because of his resistance to sanctions against apartheid South Africa.
Reagan’s supporters point out he and Thatcher were worried about communist elements in the ANC which they feared would turn the country into another Cuba if the regime were brought down.
I believe you can never call anyone a racist because you can’t know another person’s soul. You can only judge their actions.
Whether you call the act of bolstering a regime, which was brutally oppressing its subjects on the basis of their skin colour, simply to ensure US and British companies continued to benefit from the oppression ‘racist’ or not seems a moot point.
These presidents and their various stances on black equality are a sideshow anyway. The film doesn’t claim to be a documentary, it’s a look at the 20th century black struggle in the US.
Another criticism which has a little more depth to it is that the film is yet another presentation of the suffering black people endured in past and is a form of guilt porn for white liberals.
I’d argue there are plenty of films portraying contemporary black life and either glorifying or denigrating the hardships this often involves. Reminding people how these hardships came to be is a good thing.
Louis progresses from a freedom rider, taking the abuse and turning the other cheek, to the much more radical Black Panthers who believed in delivering material benefits for black communities and determined self defence.
“We ain’t getting beat no more”, he tells his parents over a fractious dinner.
Eventually he becomes involved in mainstream politics and helps get Obama elected.
It’s this analogy for the black struggle that I have the most issue with.
The presented narrative is: things were bad, black people grinned and bore it, then they rose up, America saw sense and now we have a black president.
This is far too neat a tale and the ending which sees Gaines walking into the brightly lit doorway of Obama’s Oval Office to meet America’s first black president as if walking through the pearly gates, is an image too far.
No wonder Obama is said to have wept watching the film.
While I realise that this is a tidy way for the film to wrap up, I would have liked to see at least a nod to the continuing struggle.
Without this nod, The Butler feels like it lets modern America, the America of Trayvon Martin and Jonathan Ferrell, off the hook.
Jonathan Ferrell died for being black and scary
It seems to say: “Hey, your folks did all that horrible stuff but you guys voted for a black president, so we’re quits”.
I’m proud to be a member of Writers of Colour, a collective of writers trying to bring more diversity to mainstream media.
Mouth of the Marmoset 