How I Feel About Being Black...

Allow me to waffle away for a little while. I'm currently in my new flat, shared with three of the nicest guys you could ever hope to meet, wasting the days away contentedly until Uni starts up again. Life is slow, idle, and just the way I like it.

But no, I'm here to talk about race. Namely mine, straight-up Black-African. Ethnic minorities are no small thing in the UK, yet 92% of everyone in the country is white. Unsurprising, certainly to be expected. This includes all the white minorities, be they European, American, what have you. I am part of a far less sizable 2% of the population who are black; and as I'm not from the Caribbean or West Africa (read: Nigeria), I am of an even smaller subsection of the population. To the point where I think my parents know all the Zimbabweans in the country by now.

The UK, when broad strokes are applied liberally, is socially structured via the infamous class-system, which divides the country's citizens into various social strata for easier classification (see how the word "classification" has "class" within it? This is social science at work). Essentially there's the working, middle and upper classes; working class being the folks behind the counter, middle class being the folks buying Happy Meals for their kids, and the upper class pulling into the drive-thru in their Bentleys and asking for medium-rare steaks. Generalisation, sure, but we all know where to place ourselves.

Myself, I fit neatly into the middle-class. I have attended both state and private schools, I have been educated abroad as well as in the UK, I abhor rap music and have a penchant for the oldies. My favourite film is Blade Runner. My favourite musician is Bob Dylan. If I had a white man's hair, it'd be long and scraggly. I took a pseudo-gap year in which I did nothing. I am studying the humanities. And yet I'm black.

Before y'all start kicking off about how it is who I am that defines me, let me be perfectly clear that I too think this should be the case, and in a perfect world I wouldn't feel like writing this because it'd just be a whole lot of fuss about nothing. But it does matter, as I am an anomaly because of something I can do nothing about. I find myself partially defined by something I go against most of my waking hours, and have no barometer upon which to measure my social activity. I am anxious, frustrated, with nary a sense of why or against whom. It's a matter of perception, not how I perceive myself, but how society has trained people to perceive me. I am unable to exude an accurate image of who I am through what I look like alone. Sure, once you get to know me perhaps it is hard to think of me in any other way, but to the uninitiated, I'm just another black guy walking down the street. Even I get uncomfortable around black people, but luckily that's OK, because I'm one of them.

Allow me to stereotype for a moment.

British society's present image of the average black youth currently revolves around mugshots and headlines. There are twice as many black people in prison than there are in university. The people we have to look up to, who have succeeded in life despite the colour of their skin are those in the music business (constantly glorifying the perks of violence, substances and the nonstop party climate that, in reality, merely results in further dismay) and the sporting world (where the only thing you need to do in life to succeed is to kick a ball rather well, or run faster than everyone else). I read something recently somewhere that sums up what I'm trying to say: "Young black people don't want to be middle class: they want to be rich." Now.

Obama has stepped in as the de-facto role model of the day, despite his dipping approval ratings and rather lacklustre spectacle once he actually became president (at least for us in the UK; then again, I have no idea who any black British politicians are). And yet it was naive to think that by having a black person somewhere attain the highest office in his country, that we would see a new era dawning for black people everywhere. Wishful thinking, perhaps.

As my rampant stereotyping and generalisation have hinted, black people are increasingly defined by what we see and hear about ourselves in the media. Young black Brits are rude boys and gangstas, whether they truly aspire to that image or not. Peer pressure discourages those who wish to become their own person, insisting on a status quo of posturing. There are not enough of us to decide what we want to do, so we merely distort the American image of the pushers and the pimps to our own ends, substitute the guns for knives, and let it all kick off. For just about 2% of the population, we certainly find ourselves in a hefty amount of mugshots. If Raoul Moat had been a nineteen year old black boy from North London, no-one would have batted an eye. You walk the streets in the outskirts of the City and count the shrines to murdered relatives, friends, gang members. A lot of trouble for not-a-lot of people.

And so here I stand. No black people make the music I like to listen to. No black actors portray people like myself. No black people speak like I do. I have no black friends apart from relatives and those I knew in Zimbabwe. I can't run, I can't rap, I can't dance. Yet I get stop-searched more than probably necessary, people look uncomfortable if I am walking near them at night, my sense of humour is increasingly defined by my ethnicity, and I find myself venting in words. I don't like how I sweat more than my friends, how I can't grow a proper beard, how my hair is so monotonous, how I could never reasonably portray any president except Obama in a hit Hollywood movie.

I am physically black, sociologically white, and unable to reconcile these hemispheres. I am involuntarily black middle-class.

True Grit

Realised the blog was getting rather dreary, verging on the depressing. And if there's one thing Nash isn't, it's depressed (then again, maybe that's exactly the kind of denial that signals the onset of huge psychological traumas...but probably not. I'm thinking a bit much of this, says I). So I wanted to talk about grit.

You know grit, everyone does, especially in these hard times of freak snow storms and torrential flurries. Grit is the backbone of winter society, it allows us the mobility and freedom to move about in the world, to carry on business as usual, to maintain the stiff upper lip of British endeavour and enterprise. Grit is often under-appreciated and overused, to the point where the only social discourse about grit seems to occur when it's absent from our roads, and we realise just how much we need it. Grit is probably our only true weapon against the elements, possibly against climate change itself. It is crucial that we make our appreciation for grit paramount in the days ahead, in order for our nation to prosper as it should.

I want to invent self-gritting shoes, but I lack the technical expertise, financial requirements or the can-do attitude necessary. Anyone who steals this idea will have to answer to a sternly worded Facebook wall-post.

Bankers and Politicians

I like the news these days; good news is always a nice, heartwarming thing to have but bad news will guarantee a healthy audience and stir some motion in the social ocean. And boy have we had some bad news of late.

First off, I have no income, no job, no real raison d'etre at the moment; I'm in between university courses without anything to do until September. I have no mortgage woes, no pension worries, no political allegiances. I find the news to be quite riveting entertainment. It's actually a whole lot of fun to watch these tales of bitterness and money woes; I feel I shouldn't be enjoying it so much, but I do regardless. Like the Enron scandal, but for the entire world.

Every MP, banker, or general rich person in the world right now is feeling a weird, underlying guilt, even if they've "done nothing wrong"; or at least they ought to be. The environment for this crazy state of affairs has allowed them to flourish, but even within the rules so carefully guarded and upheld, everyone's now seeing that it wasn't so foolproof after all. I mean, hardly anyone's actually broken the law; it's just that everyone with the power to screw up the economy in a little way has done so, and these things accumulate. Resulting in a massive shitstorm of outcries and uproar. Everyone on the news is resigning, all the banks are saving each other from collapse, all the investors are gazing dumbfounded as the stock market does it's thing.

MPs started getting greedy, at a time when they really, really shouldn't have. Feeding the hard-to-come-by money of the taxpayer into the whole allowances model doesn't seem right to begin with, but it's understandable; after all, they do need a place to stay in London while their families chill out at the house in *enter-constituency-here*. Just, y'know, should have given them a little bit less, that's all. Maybe they don't exactly need multitudes of bedrooms in the finest neighbourhoods in the city; if we (a loose we; not really a taxpayer at the moment) are paying for their houses, surely we should be able to see what extravagances they are allowing themselves.

Greed is contagious, and greed is inevitable; but this kind of thing could have been stopped. I honestly don't think that MPs are in much money problems anyway, even if you don't count the allowances. But I'm no authority, I'm just the freeloader in Cardiff, watching the entertaining news and wondering where it's all heading.

Eurovision

OK, no-one's a fan of Eurovision, at least not in this country. And I'm talking about real fans; average British Joe might enjoy watching the spectacle of watching the crazy Europeans and their weird songs (which are 50% techno, 30% power ballads, and 20% actually weird, but strangely awesome). Most everyone quietly revels in the constant stream of disappointing votes tallied up by smiling, ecstatic people speaking flawed English in various accents. There's a community about it, watching the British effort go sinking into the mire of political voting, and Wogan's calm contempt tickling our ears. At least that's how it should be, in any case.

Now however, we've got this mysterious jury subtly tweaking the results behind the scenes, and all of a sudden the UK finds itself on the left hand side of the panel. Furthermore, we're in the top-5. That's pretty badass (if Eurovision can ever be called badass, that is). However, it also robbed me of my annual dose of malaise. It became an actual competition for the Brits again, but also made us hope again. Balls that it wasn't political this time round; of course it was. And the UK will never win, unless we really rock the boat, and we all know that's never gonna happen. We'll field some safe bets from now on, I think. No more Scooch for us, for better or worse. (Personally, I thought Scooch actually brought us closer to our mad songwriting brethren on the continent, rather than further apart. Also, remember that Andy Abraham came second in a certain UK talent show, but Europe decided it only deserved 14 points last year.) Didn't care for Jade all that much, some dodgy lyrics, but a solid song. We can do better. Ronan Keating being Danish all along was a shock, too.

Norway's entry was the usual Euro fare: catchy chorus, an off-centre instrument choice (this time the violin, and prominently), dancers, all that jazz. Some kid singing an English song he wrote about long lost love, whilst whipping out his violin for some mad licks now and then. An overwhelming win for Norway, even beating Lordi to the topspot in the Eurovision record books. Not bad. A certain Norwegian is getting laid tonight, I'll tell you that.

Also, Graham Norton wasn't half bad, thankfully. Taking more from Wogan's past efforts than from his sickly talk show, he got a thumbs-up from me.
A surprising Eurovision.

Nash's favourite ever Eurovision song: Bosnia & Herzegovina - Laka - Pokušaj