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.

Offence: give and take

Nigger by Drek Davis

Two BBC News stories that were originally posted within 25 minutes of each other today:

Race complaint over Dandy reprint

Publishing giant DC Thomson has been criticised after it reprinted a 1939 annual which contained racist references to black people. A reader condemned the inclusion of a comic strip from the original 1939 Dandy annual which included a term deemed unacceptable in modern society."

'Offensive' poster banned on Tube

London Underground (LU) has been accused of censorship after refusing to put up posters for a comedy show. LU said adverts for the show Pride and Prejudice and Niggas by African-American comedian Reginald D Hunter were 'likely to offend'."