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.

Those Were Days Of Roses...

To begin, I'd like to assure those who came out that I had a really great time tonight (5/7/10) and the tone of my blog post does not reflect my opinion of said night out :).

I've never been one to think of myself as being one of the young guns, but I have become one of the last of my high-school class to reach the suspiciously inauspicious age of 20. The numbers themselves, seem unnerving, there hasn't been a number "2" in my age since I was twelve, and it's here to stay for a whole decade. I can't do anything that I couldn't do previously within the eyes of the law, but I am no longer a teenager, no longer a recently departed high-schooler, and now a plain-and-simple university student, pretending that the whole world is at my feet when my every academic decision pigeonholes me further into a niche which I am yet to decipher.

Also, tonight I celebrated this supposedly momentous occasion (a week late, I must add) by hitting up the now-infamous Lloyd's Bar/Oceana double whammy. I saw infamous as the combo has been used countless times in the past, largely during the reckless Year 13 which saw us all comfortably getting along with one another, forming cliques and groups, making Facebook events and relaying mass text messages. After that year ended, and summer began with the departure of several of us to foreign lands, still short-sighted to the fact that there was no constant to which to return to any more. School's out for summer; school's out forever.

Uni brings new friends, new experiences, new mindsets. The shift from dinner cooked by mum every evening, being picked up from the tennis courts or the rather small car park and going to Llandaff for chips and sweet-n'-sour sauce, to university halls, student nights and the Blackboard learning system means that what we once thought of as paramount becomes a mere afterthought, and the structures once so solid and secure become dust in the wake of this new world. We take everything we had in school and we compact, we distinguish, we discard. The friends we remain with are the ones who we keep forever (in theory, knowing full well that theory never pans out exactly as we'd hypothesised), and the ones we begin to ignore are mere acquaintances along the way; perhaps useful one day for business contacts, scrounging upon celebrity, or even just filling up seats and the wedding.

What do we do with our old friends? The ones we love, but hardly ever see; with whom we instantly fall back into comfortable rhythms and rapport, but who we no longer have on our lists of recently texted contacts. We catch up. Forever, and ever catching up; no longer a proper part of one another's lives we resign ourselves to making a dogged but ultimately futile attempt to stay absolutely up to date with the goings on of each other's lives, but are not allowed to become a part of their tapestry of life ever again. Always observing the craftsmanship and the details, but never volunteering an idea for the next chapter.

On a similar subject, here's a bit of Tom Waits, with Martha from the Closing Time album of '73; a song about catching up. It's beautiful, and when I think of what I've told y'all about tonight, it's a little heartbreaking.

Operator, number, please: it's been so many years
Will she remember my old voice while I fight the tears?
Hello, hello there, is this Martha? This is old Tom Frost,
And I am calling long distance, don't worry 'bout the cost.
'Cause it's been forty years or more, now Martha please recall,
Meet me out for coffee, where we'll talk about it all.

And those were the days of roses, poetry and proses
And Martha all I had was you and all you had was me.
There was no tomorrows, we'd packed away our sorrows
And we saved them for a rainy day.

That's What Friends Are For...

I don't know how good a friend I am; obviously my level of friendship varies from person to person, and I don't profess to be equally wonderful/obnoxious to everyone I meet. Nonetheless, it's still reasonable to say that everyone approaches the art of making friends in different ways. Mine is a more passive, blend-in-with-the-crowd method, others adopt a firm and coloured personality that endears them to some, and shuns others. My method has, as its main bonus, the ability to make friends with almost anyone I meet. My circles of friends have varied vastly, and I imagine I'll meet ever more diverse people as the years roll on.

The flaw in my method comes with the second, far more important part; keeping friends. Between the beginning of my education and now, I've been to eight different schools (KCL included), which I feel has altered my perception of what a friend is. A childhood friend for most is someone you've known for a while, grown up together, experienced all the changes of life together, and you can share that; it's natural, it's what you do. When outsider Nash comes in, you bring him into your circle and go about your lives; but the void in background means that, ultimately, you'll always be better friends with those you've known for years. You're apt to share your secrets, your worries, all the minutiae of strong casual relationships, and save Nash for the immediate and the now, the parties and the homework worries.

Coming to King's, on the other hand, has put a different spin on things. I can't rely on my previous framework, since no-one knows each other here (save for some occasional pairs or threes from the same high school). A chance to start afresh, with the shared experience of university at your doorstep. Still, slowly but surely, it's happening again. You hear conversations about events you've missed, in-jokes you don't understand, plans you weren't privy to. You hear whispered secrets and hushed voices, things you aren't supposed to hear; are people talking about themselves? About you? How did this happen? Are you predisposed to make fast friends, but shallow friends? A flaw that can only be attributed to yourself, as everyone else seems to be getting along just fine.

After all, what's a friend? For the average guy or gal in uni, what does a friend mean to you? Is it a sounding board to bounce back the thoughts churning in your mildly insecure head? Is it a willing sidekick to your nights of debauchery and drunken mayhem, as you paint the town red in an effort to have a story to tell in the morning, complete with photos for the Book and lipstick on the sheets? Is it a repository for your deepest feelings, darkest secrets?

Somehow, I've presented my image of a friend as a guy who comes along, jokes a bit, drinks a bit, and fades into the background like a comforting mass in the ether. It'd be easy to say it takes two to make a friendship work (indeed, this is probably the most comforting thing I could imagine for my situation), but I'm just afraid that I'm the one who isn't putting the effort in.


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Now playing: The Rolling Stones - Beast Of Burden
via FoxyTunes

Stuck In A Moment...

'Tis my blog, right? Means I can talk at myself, about myself at will without recourse, correct? Class. OK, so, if some people cope with whatever troubles them through artistic endeavours or violent episodes, I'll cope with a post on this dusty old thing.

Hope all reading had a happy Christmas, and an agreeable New Year's do (somehow managed to blind myself in my left eye on NYW morning, meaning my own celebrations were sober, monoscopic and alone). The holiday has been an eye-opening one, for saddening reasons. I'm (hell, we all are) drifting away from a state that I was completely at ease with, into a set of circumstances that I don't fully know or understand. I don't know what to do about it, it's entirely out of my hands, and the groundwork necessary to maintain a status quo was necessary years ago.

I miss school an awful lot, and though uni is wonderful (and the cast of characters that I've met are an uncommonly excellent bunch of people), there was something about school that meant that I didn't have to worry about whether my relationships with my friends were being maintained. I'm not a massively social person, but I selfishly require a constant knowledge that people are there when I care to look. A poor state of mind, and I need to change it, but I've run out of time. There's friendships that are carrying on, thriving in the online cloud despite the foundation of constant contact we used to be afforded. But I can't do that, try as I might. And it doesn't stop me from missing people; it'd be a lot easier if it did.

Tried texting some people today, but occasionally the number I have is no longer valid. Nails in the coffin, I guess.

Mementos, Besotted

Last night we went to the Cafe de Paris, an apparently trendy spot where the theme was James Bond (meaning suits n' ties; no cheating and going as "casual Bond" 'cause everyone knows you're just copping out). Ana, Alix and I, them in a competition of sordid nature, I in a state of drunken contemplation. A regular state o' mind, I reckon. For me, anyways.

Who knows any more, maybe I'm just coasting through on a train of tipsiness. I mean surely by this point permanent damage has been done; I can feel my body aching away under the weight of all this fast food and liquor. Oof. I am a mess, but that's par for the course in this student life of ours; everyone's a mess, so it's not so bad. Once you get home, and realise that you're shivering all the time, and that your mom's homecooked spaghetti tastes even better than you thought possible, then you start to realise just how far gone you really are.

But one thing that sticks with me is my vocabulary, a trait which annoys me as much as anything else would. I become a li'l bit talkative after a couple, and that often spills over into a barrage of texts to whoever seems likely to reply (which, considering the erratic bedtimes of the student populace, is always a fairly wide selection of people).

Plus I make notes to myself, to give me clues as to what my thought processes were like during my drink-n'-club session. They tend to be dramatic, pseudo-eloquent, and usually pretty baffling. Here's one from yesterday:

'The phenomenon I've experience, where I've felt nothing but disdain for my fellow man, has been given a name by your constant writer; drunken sobriety (this being a common name for what I'm talking about, I was quick to find out the next day - Nash). This is when I contemplate the successes and failings of my fellow man, whilst wallowing in the vague aftershock of vodka shots and quickly dispatched cider. Playing catch-up, sharing those anecdotes of nights "just like this", and watching your liver give up the fight and take cirrhosis as it comes. Who gives a hoot? Right? Apart from parents, but they're never up to speed. Tonight is just "one of those nights". Loaded with alcohol, infused with cash, cruising to the end. Joy. Fookin' joy. "Drunken sobriety and a pack of scratchings, my good man"

We all walk a narrow path with jagged rocks on either side, but the urge to hop, skip and jump our way along is just too great. But hey, we haven't fallen yet, right?

Hopes/Dreams

You know how Hollywood love the idea of the American Dream, the unattainability of it, the ridiculousness of it, and the ever-present knowledge that while it's commonly accepted that not all of us can be the top dog, most of us refuse to accept that there may be a glass ceiling there after all, and try as we might, we can't overcome it. You'd need one sledgehammer of a metaphor to get through that, trust me.

So what does it boil down to? If we can't be objectively the best that we can be, and if there's no set-in-stone marker to define who is a success and who isn't, what are the options? Basically a choice between lowering your standards until everything you do is "the best I can do" (which, while being a bit of a cop-out, is perfect valid when you consider that external opinions only have as much of an effect as we ourselves attribute them) or actually getting out there and beating everyone else at their own game. It's a shifting platform, not a level field, and if you don't make your move you'll get left behind.

"It's not about winning, it's about taking part," they say. "We're all winners here," they say. Pff...

Groups, My Liver, and the State of Affairs

I have a niggling feeling in the back of my mind more often than I'd ever care to admit these days. That small feeling that I'm being pulled hither and thither by my own occasional influences and the enternal suggestions of others into doing this and that which, in my day to day state of being, would never occur to me. Nothing which causes great alarm to others, but enough to influence what others think of me, and it causes a modicum of discomfort in my inner self.

I have no reason to drink as much as I do, and the relapse into semi-regular smoking is actively sealing my lungs away from the outside world. I'm turning into something which I dread, for fear of becoming something else. I don't know whether its worth knowing as many people as possible, because attracting a variety of worried, skeptical and downright freaked-out glances from others surely doesn't equate to making new friends.

So I'm choosing today to make my stance, and to say that I'll cut back on the drinking, the smoking and the embarrassing actions of my besotted self. And maybe I can piece something together of these watercolour days I find myself living.

How to Get Ahead In This Fickle/Wonderful World

I've been giving it my all this year. No holds barred, utmost social peak. I've met more Uni people in the last few days than I did all of last year. And all the one's I did meet last year, are still around (and hopefully still like me, despite the whole film fiasco). So I'm doing OK.

I've found the trick, though, which is crucial and hopelessly undocumented; no instuction manual for freshers, just a case of pick up n' play. Mess these weeks up, you're through, say most. Anyway, the trick is this: drink, then talk, to anyone, anywhere, about everything. Literally. Because everyone you meet has qualified to attend university, got the gall to get themselves out into public, and is as much of a drinking, smoking renegade as you are.

You can't make bad friends this week. There is no "bad crowd"; there's only one crowd. And you must be in it. That's the golden rule.

Freshers everywhere, heed my call.

And if you're stuck in private accommodation, do exactly the same at your nearest halls, but travel more. Sucks to be you, huh?

Chillin' in Tufnell Park

So, finally managed to get out and about with my hall-mates (OK, that's a misnomer for two reasons: a) basically none of them are in my halls, let alone my flat, so they're not exactly my neighbours, and b) we didn't go out, we went to the common room with drinks and stories to tell), How this all plays out tomorrow when sobriety kicks in again and we're all regretting the sordid jokes and anecdotes shared last night, who can say. A good night, nonetheless.

Also met up with Hedd, which was a nice thing to do; guy's been around forever, and always has a good batch of stories to tell. Burger and a beer later, and it's as if we haven't been hundreds of miles apart for the last bunch o' months. Classy, no?

Ash n' I have arranged our swap meet for giving each other our various knick-knacks (I have a bunch of her books and DVDs, she has some of my who-knows-whats). A civil, amicable way to move things along, rather than burning things in a fit of angst and snubbing any attempt to restore civility. We're good people don'tchaknow.

And that's basically all there is, apart from the whole finishing up that goddamn film, and going back to Cardiff tomorrow (or today? Still feels like Monday to me...); both of those are posts for sober-er times. Goodnights, boys and girls. If I don't wake up tomorrow, someone please arrange a nice (but non-ostentatious) funeral for me. With live, inappropriate music (ie. Vivaldi's Four Seasons; that'd baffle some people...).

Countdown to Uni

You know that feeling in the pit of your stomach, that harbinger of impending thrills, chills and spills, of sights unseen, places untravelled, stories unheard; that tickling promise of wonderful, fabulous, glorious events, mishaps and revelations that await around a tangible, visible corner of your life?

This is not like that; this is the sick feeling of travelling miles from home to a familiar-yet-strange city and having to do it all over again.

I do plan to be more drunk, sociable and noteworthy this year. I plan to make something of myself amongst my new halls-mates (something I didn't have last year), whilst going to Fresher's week (which I missed last year) and having a good time with good people I live with (which I barely did at all last year....last year was balls.)

So I've laid out the groundwork. I started/contributed to various discussion groups on Facebook, I've befriended a few new faces (replete with conversation, and shared anticipation) and I've bullied my parents into letting me move in only a day late, rather than just shy of a week (that's Sunday, for those who keep inviting me out in Cardiff for next week). El coolio, no?

This post makes me seem a bit weird, though. Luckily, no-one reads this thing...right?