Disshadow'd livery

An even lighter shade of Shilpa

Indian American author Sujit Saraf published Big Brother: a tale of two white women back in January, when Jade Goody's poppadom debacle was at its height:

Indian racism is quite uncomplicated. Jade’s abhorrence of foreign races includes - in addition to skin colour - spicy chicken, smelly onions, odd accents and unpronounceable names. By contrast, Indian racism is elemental: as nature abhors a vacuum, so India abhors dark skin."

I don't believe that the article has lost any of its relevance, or indeed its dark humour, in the intervening period.

Scars of racism

In 1939, psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark began publishing papers based on experiments that had found young African American children to often perceive being white as preferable to being black. Their evidence was later used in the case of Brown versus Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, in which the US Supreme Court ruled against racial segregation in American public schools.

Kiri Davis' first documentary A Girl Like Me has won an award at the Media That Matters Film Festival, and in part of it she has attempted to replicate Clark and Clark's famous 'doll experiment' to try to gauge how much things may have changed regarding African American children's views of themselves.

I have no idea how faithful she was to the psychologists' original methodology, or how comparable the two sets of experiments really are. Despite this, the sight of young African Americans repeatedly identifying the white doll in front of them as 'good' and the black as 'bad' cannot be anything but disheartening.

Found via a Gay Persons of Colour post.

Some fill with each good rain

There are different wells within your heart.
Some fill with each good rain,
Others are far too deep for that.

In one well
You have just a few precious cups of water,
That 'love' is literally something of yourself,
It can grow as slow as a diamond
If it is lost.

Your love
Should never be offered to the mouth of a
Stranger,
Only to someone
Who has the valor and daring
To cut pieces of their soul off with a knife
Then weave them into a blanket
To protect you.

There are different wells within us.
Some fill with each good rain,
Others are far, far too deep
For that.

(14th century Persian ghazal by Hafiz — Khwajeh Shams al-Din Muhammad Hafez-e Shirazi — as translated by Daniel Ladinsky)

From Ladinsky D. (1999) The gift: poems by Hafiz the great Sufi master. Penguin: New York, via The Songs of Hafiz