"Go back to Africa, p@ki!" and other stories of raciamalist stupiditude

On my way into the city this morning, I unwittingly walked into a private hate-fest, which was thoughtfully made a little more public for my benefit.

I had crossed the road and ended up behind two upstanding citizens - young, white men - who were fittingly (as you'll see later) wearing neon vests emblazoned with the words SEWER TECHNICIAN or something similar on the back. (I'm not using the literal definition and therefore not denigrating sewer technicians as a profession. But looking at it metaphorically, there could not be a more apt or ironic labelling of these gems of humanity.)

So the guy on the right glanced behind him, noticed me, and muttered something to his friend, who then looked back. I think his friend was trying to say "Oooh you might want to watch what you're saying given who's behind us." Or he may well have been saying "There's one of 'em now. Let's get her!" Whatever he said, his friend significantly raised his voice, and started yelling about some run-in he had had with what I gathered from his colourful language was a non-British fellow, in which the non-British fellow pissed him off by not showing him whatever respect he imagined he deserved.

Bemused by this yelling that was taking place for my benefit, I sped up a little to provide the proper audience for Mr. Sewer Technician. It seemed only right. Based on the telling, this was merely a motorist/pedestrian encounter, in which Mr. ST, the pedestrian, was either not granted the proper thanks in bestowing some kind of right-of-way on the motorist, or not given an apology for himself initially not being given the right-of-way.

During the telling of this fine tale, Shouty McSewerTechnician kept looking back to see if I, on behalf of all presumably non-British people (because ther're no black Brits, clearly. Or maybe he just hates all non-white people, Brits or not, which is not a stretch to contemplate) was being properly admonished. After he noticed how close and smiling I was, though, his look changed from one that said "I hope you're hearing this, Blackie" to "Ah shit I think she's gonna shoot us!" Cowed or criminal: those were my options.

Before he turned right and I left, the charming man made a point to look over and yell "WELL THEY'RE IN THE WRONG COUNTRY AREN'T THEY?! THEY DON'T KNOW WHAT COUNTRY THEY'RE IN!" Teacher, teacher! I know! Is the answer, um, a country that's home to racist, unenlightened bastards who ironically think they have the market cornered on civility? There are so many isms in this story, I'm exhausted just considering thinking about them. First, there's the notion that I, an uninvolved stranger, was just as good as the other stranger to suffer his abuse. How fortunate that I should happen along so he could have a stand-in. It's not like we're different in any way: one darkie is as good as the next, right? And it is this type of attitude that will see SewerDweller going down the road, having a few pints, and then attacking some man or woman based on the colour of his or her skin. In fact, he probably wouldn't have to get drunk to do it.

Second, something tells me that if this had been a white man that had failed to thank or apologize to him, there would be nothing to see there. But somehow, the rest of us are meant to be perpetually servile and grateful just to be allowed to breathe his hate-infested air. When we're bringing him food in a restaurant or handing him towels in the toilet, we know our rightful place, and all is well. But how dare we drive a car while he's walking to his job in the sewer? (I'd suspect this is his hang-up. It certainly isn't mine.) And then have the temerity to not lick his ass over some perceived slight? Something must even this playing field. I know: I'll shout vaguely threatening, xenophobic things to no one in particular and then in the general direction of this amused, underwhelmed stranger. That'll learn 'em!

The poor man suffered from a clear case of HuffPuff Syndrome: anger fuelled by no real issue, just by his own racism; no opportunity to abuse the victim he would like to abuse; and no recourse except to huff and puff within the safe company of his own enabling, unintelligent ilk, in this episode played by SewerTechnician Number Two.

I hope you get some help for your condition, Shouty. But you'd have to wake up much earlier, talk much more gooder, or try something other than your vanilla-flavoured, lame, racist panting to get a rise out of this mongoose. This mongoose picks debris like you out of her teeth.

*Yes, the expression in the title was a real utterance from a real human person.

A right to sound, dignified health care

*Also posted today at BelowTheBelt.

I suspended my work as an economist to, among other things, become the Programme Director of an NGO that I helped found, called the Women's Health Advocacy Network (WHAN). I sometimes get the sense that some people (apart from my family and close friends who are my biggest fans and think me something of a superstar, as I do them) don't understand that: they don't understand creating something because you think it should exist, because it is necessary. The conversation often goes like this:

Person: So what are you doing now?
A_D: I'm a writer, and I work with an organisation called WHAN - Women's Health Advocacy Network.

(The writing part does not register at all. I might as well have said "Oh I'm an eater...and a part-time cougher." So they just gloss right over that part to the other thing that sounds more like a job, with acronyms and such.)

Person: Oh! And whose company is that?
A_D: Well it's not really a company. It's an NGO that looks at issues of women's health and sexual and reproductive rights in the Caribbean, and educates women on their patient rights...how to be agents in their own health care.
Person: Right. And who runs that?
A_D: Well I do. Along with some other very bright women. We started it.
Person: Yourself? But who pays you?

This is where people start to look skeptical and confused. They seem to be puzzled by the notion that I could have the audacity to be dissatisfied enough with the way things are being done to get up off my ass and do something about them myself. They apparently expect me to take a regular job like everyone else, and then spend all my time complaining that I had to wait two hours in the waiting room at the doctor's office, and then another hour waiting naked on his table, after which he spent 30 seconds looking at my vagina and zero seconds looking at my face. Or they expect that if I step out on my own, it should be because I've built an online business or invented some device that I can hawk on QVC, which - don't get me wrong - is never out of the question. Or they also expect that WHAN must be a little group of forlorn women who park our behinds in front of supermarkets clanging our tins for some pennies, rather than the board-run, non-profit corporation that it is.

Now there's nothing wrong with a 'regular' job. I had one, and many people I know have one. In fact, I have one now, it's just that I created it myself because it is necessary, rather than waiting for someone else, someone presumably with more power and influence, to create it and then deign to give me a job. I've decided to first earn - through work I've previously done - and then own, my power and influence. And to seek to grow it on my terms. And also to help other women own theirs. Because that attitude that leads people to believe that I don't have the right to get up and do for myself, as my mother would say, is the same one that has women believing that they don't have the right to demand to be listened to by doctors, and to be treated with dignity and respect. It's the attitude that says that as Caribbean people, as Black people, as women, as Black, Caribbean women, we should only be takers of what is given to us: takers of someone else's job that they've created and offered, takers of someone else's economic policies, takers of someone else's health care that they administer in the way they think we deserve.

I grew up in a time when our mothers were so pleased to be accessing free government health care, that they saw doctors and nurses as gods, and seemed afraid to question them, in part - and this is true of most societies - because they had knowledge our mothers did not have. But they were also afraid to challenge them lest they withhold their care, time and medicine, which many of them doled out as if we were begging, as if it was their own to control, and not the state's. As people have started to do better, and private, paid care has become the standard, that attitude has been slow to change on both ends. Many of us still believe that we're lucky to be sitting in that doctor's office, so we'd better shut up, nod, smile, and try not to cause any trouble. And many doctors still act as if they are gods come down from on high to save the stupid natives from themselves.

Well that attitude is not only annoying as all get out, but it at best potentially delays healing, and at worst, kills people. WHAN now focuses very heavily on HIV/AIDS and other STIs; sexual and reproductive decision-making including abortion; and violence against women. But we were thrust into existence on the basis of patient rights and education, because I, for one, was tired of the assumption on the part of doctors that I had nothing at all to contribute to my own health care, and tired of hearing all the stories from my friends. One of how a doctor failed to diagnose her breast cancer because he saw she was in her thirties and therefore dismissed the lump she had felt; another who eventually almost committed suicide because when she approached her doctor about post-partum depression he asked her why she couldn't just be happy, she had a baby now, and why couldn't she just get over it. And yet another who had to beg her doctor for a prescription to help relieve the symptoms of her genital herpes. Because he said it was no big deal, it's just a sore, and the medication is expensive.

I could go on and on and so much further on. And I know people will sing the old song about patients not being knowledgeable, so doctors assume a blank slate in approaching treatment. In my experience, some doctors don't assume a blank slate: they assume a stupid one. And there is always knowledge to be had from a patient if you use your limited time wisely to get it. In any event,WHAN seeks to work on both ends of the relationship, but primarily to bolster patients' awareness of their own knowledge gaps, to help fill those gaps, and to give patients the tools to make their doctors fill those gaps. You have to know what you don't know, and then you have to claim the right to find out. It is for all these reasons, and so many more, that WHAN exists, works, and grows every day.

Obama owes me $50

Dear silly mongoose,

You thought you were going to venture into the city on the eve of the G20 summit and have a smooth ride, but guess what? Your connecting station is closed, biznatch! So here, have an extra 45 minutes to add to your journey. April Fools!

xoxo,

The Universe

The actual diversion didn't really cost me more, directly, for the journey. So I just pro-rated my imaginary fee for the time taken, and when the president comes to my neighbourhood tomorrow, I'm going to fold my bill into a paper plane and fly it his way. Of course, it will probably be shot down by tiny secret service arrows before it even catches a wind, but that's to be expected. I didn't actually sense much of the hype around today's meetings, but that is not to say that there wasn't plenty hype to be sensed.

The media are already wagging their tails over what Michelle O is wearing, which admittedly is becoming more and more of a thing to behold (although she had something of a miss today what with the granny cardigan and gingham skirt, but after the yellow, cinched-waist dress she arrived in, we can forgive her that transgression.) I always love to hear Michelle speak and see her very expressive, always smiling face as she greets colleagues. You just know there's a load of smartness and sincerity about to spill forth.

But outfits and celebrity chef-procured dinners notwithstanding, most of the attention, believe it or not, was on the president today, with quite a bit also on the protesters of whom we were all meant to be so fearful.

Police made at least 24 arrests as anti-capitalist protesters tried to upstage the G20. They included 11 demonstrators trying to drive an armoured personnel carrier towards the Bank of England.

Thousands gathered outside the Bank and scuffles soon broke out. The most violent action came when a group of hardline protesters stormed a branch of the Royal Bank of Scotland, which received billions of pounds of taxpayer funds last year but has been widely criticised for rewarding its former chief executive with a huge pension.

I'm right now blinking slowly at all this, because while I firmly believe that citizen participation - whether by protest, letter drafting or other methods - is necessary to such processes, I don't understand how destroying a bunch of crap and breaking and entering sends any message other than "we really like to break things." Of course, we also have to bear in mind that we're talking about the Metropolitan Police here, who, if last year's Notting Hill Carnival experience is anything to go by, have no clue how to contain small skirmishes without bludgeoning scores of unsuspecting bystanders. So we might want to await a more balanced account.

French president Nicolas Sarkozy has also been attracting plenty attention, what with all his threats to pick up his toys and flounce off tomorrow if the G20 doesn't deliver on his desire for tighter regulation of international finance. The spirit of his threat can be understood - he does not want to waste time with a bunch of fancy, touchy-feely language that yields only promises and no plans - but I'm not sure what such an upset would achieve. A better tactic might be to continue yelling from the inside, until the final communique at least resembles a plan for scheduled, direct action.

So the summit comes to the Excel Center tomorrow. Between the nervous bankers trying to look all down and incognito in their pressed jeans, and the security officers instructing you that you must take a roundabout walking route so as to pass within sniffing distance of their dogs, it may take me a while to report. But report I shall. Because of course everyone will want to know if I in fact managed to get my fifty dollars.

It's them islands over there! Them's the ones!

It was only a matter of time before the long finger pointing from the global North in the midst of the financial crisis extended outward towards the Caribbean. Much is now being made of the role tax havens have played in this economic depression, and the Obama administration is being joined by its European counterparts in stamping out "harmful tax competition", with the Cayman Islands featuring high on the US's hit list. While Obama's laudable come-in-and-clean-up attitude has undone many of the foolish and frankly unconscionable practices of his predecessor's 8-year term in office, he has to take some responsibility for the facts not only that George W Bush halted the OECD plan to ferret out secrecy jurisdictions at the beginning of his term, so sending these economies a very clear message of non-pursuance, but that small island states have increasingly been pressured to implement "more competitive tax policies" in order to grow their financial services' sectors. So while it may be desirable to uncover the tax practices and offshore destinations that have removed a large part of the tax burden from the wealthiest citizens of the US and Europe, and to have a small, convenient scapegoat in the South at whom to point the finger, we need to consider the repercussions of such an immediate blow to some of our smaller island economies.

Now one might argue that each territory has its own responsibility for how they structure their outward-facing industries, and that the onus is on developing nations to diversify their economies away from products that are so wholly subject to the whims of larger countries. But we all know the politics of the international financial architecture, and a big voice from a small territory is still just a squeak in the grand scheme of things.

For years, Caribbean countries have been doing the rating agency dance - nipping and tucking their financial practices in order to avoid the damning "inhospitable business environment" label of the S&Ps and the Moodys. And for as many years, the haves of the North has been benefiting from the very practices they now seek to condemn. To be fair, Obama has always been ideologically in favour of a Stop Tax Haven Abuse Act, which in itself is not undesirable, but whose implementation and economic fallout for the developing world have to be fairly weighed before ploughing full steam ahead.

And let us not be fooled that "more compliant" territories like Barbados are exempt from scrutiny simply because we employ a silly little thing called a Tax Information Exchange Agreement (TIEA). TIEAs are quite close to useless, since the requesting body has to know what information it's looking for in order to request that information. Wrongdoing can only be uncovered if specific wrongdoing is suspected. So TIEAs aren't fooling anyone, least of all the big sticks that are going to be coming poking around in the affairs of small, Caribbean offshore financial centres. Negotiation (and by this I mean real negotiation rather than economic threats) of new terms for TIEAs would be one possible, measured advance towards the elimination of tax haven abuse.

I have always been uneasy about the irony of the offshore financial centre: we provide the means by which richer nations can increase the global inequality that maintains us as essentially colonies to their empires. So I am not at all opposed to increased regulation that is introduced in a way that does not leave developing nations disadvantaged and stripped of fundamental sources of income. What I am not in favour of is the demonization of these nations at a time when it is convenient to pass the buck - for governments to say "No it wasn't us, it was the bankers," and for financial institutions to say "No it wasn't us, it was the evil island economies." Seriously? Of these players, with whom does the majority of power disproportionately lie? You can argue over whether it's the government or the finance industry, but you for damn sure can't say it's Caribbean economies. It's not that tax havens have not contributed in some measure to the poor regulation that led to economic collapse, but who were their beneficiaries and originators? Let's keep things in perspective, and acknowledge that when you ask the right questions, the fingers are going to point right back in the opposite direction.

Our "let's see what they hand us" approach to doing business with the world's economic superpowers is not going to cut it this time around. (Did anyone notice how the region's grand policy idea for a response to the crisis was to beg for more money? That's some inspired economics right there!) We're going to have to do our homework, get it together and strongly represent our interests.

Note to future self: nopales are never delicious

In one of my moments of silly idleness breaks from a hectic and wildly exciting life, I came across FutureMe.org, a website that allows you to send a message to your future self.

I can think of several uses for this handy little tool (or at least I could if I turned my brain on today. So far, it seems not to be cooperating), including a portal for reminders of lessons that you've learnt and want to remember when confronted with similar situations. It would certainly have come in handy for me when I was trying to end a particularly toxic relationship with a man whose manipulation arsenal included the manoeuvres of pretending he hadn't heard the "we're through" from a previous conversation, and then showing up for the regular movie night with a tape (yes I'm old) and candy while you blink and wonder if you'd dreamt the whole ordeal the night before; or trying to distract you from what he knew was the impending breakup conversation with news of some manufactured crisis: "Do you remember Charles who came with us to the grocery store that one time and didn't have enough money for cheese and we had to buy it for him? Well his mother's neighbour's dog stepped on a nail at the airport and was detained by security and Charles had to borrow the car to get her out but when he was driving into the airport ran over one of the nails too and now I have to go get them all with just my bicycle!"

So after I had had enough of all this, I decided to make breakup reminder posters. So that the next time he revealed his true asswipey self - which he inevitably did since he was made of pure, 100% unfiltered asswipe - I made a large poster that said "BOB (let's call him Bob) IS A ****! BREAK UP WITH HIM NOW!" and stuck it above my bed. And since I'm hapless before self-imposed instructions and to-do lists, it worked. And Bob was no more.

Of course, if I had had Futureme.org, the whole process could have been considerably more labour-saving and private, and Bob would not have had to see the actual poster. (You are not allowed to feel sorry for Bob. Bob was a ****, remember?)

So while I coax my brain over the Monday lag, regale me with stories of how you could have used or would use Furtureme.org. (By the way, the title refers to my apparent inability to remember that I do not like nopales and never will. As much as I love my Mexican sistren that I've spent so much time with, stop trying to feed me that thing. It is cactus and tastes like it.) What do you want the future you to learn or know or remember? I await your brilliance.

Quick! Flush the mauby!

Well now I've seen it all. Arrest on suspicion of mauby possession?

Police have issued an "unreserved apology" to a musician who was wrongly arrested at gunpoint on suspicion of owning potential bomb-making materials. He said police also pointed guns at his partner and their 12-year-old daughter who were at home at the time. He was arrested on suspicion of "possessing materials likely to be used for making explosives". Police told him there was a list of "suspicious items" which were found at the music studio including a broken guitar, a broken tape machine and a West Indian non-alcoholic drink called mauby found in a fridge.

Having run out of bogus but socially acceptable reasons to persecute immigrants, we've now turned to the downright stupid and bizarre. I guess we're all supposed to drink only PG Tips. Learn the language, drink the beverage, and get out of here with your backwoods, voodoo concoctions.

Real Women, Fake (White) Noses

I haven't so far been very impressed by the exploits of Coleen McLoughlin Rooney (she seems to go by both names separately) in Coleen's Real Women. (Are we not meant to notice the Photoshopping in the promo pic?) The premise of the show is that each week, Coleen - who became famous for marrying footballer Wayne Rooney and then carving out her own career as a writer, model, businesswoman and wearer of expensive clothes - does her own casting calls to find 'real women' who will compete with career models for high-profile modelling contracts or spokesmodel positions. As you'll guess from the name of the show, it's based on the notion that there are in fact beautiful, non-model women walking British streets who are just as appealing as and perhaps more representative of certain brand philosophies than your typical (UK) size 4 model. Ignoring the annoyingly over-used and disingenuous 'real women' caption (which implies that smaller women are either Barbies come alive or figments of our imagination), I was willing to give the show a chance, mainly because I like (the media image of) Coleen, who seemed confident, not very far up her own trasero and earnest in her quest to make everyday beauty more visible.

Except, I don't think she's doing that well. She does find gorgeous women of all sizes, but the women who ultimately win the contracts are not too far off from the model industry standard of beauty. I've also found it curious that one of Coleen's candidates always secures the job, but let's assume that I'm willing to suspend disbelief concerning that, and just go along with the idea that Coleen is just so convincing and pioneering, that all of a sudden these industry professionals see the light and are lured to the fat side. The thing is, they aren't really lured to the fat side. If anything, they're lured to the just as conventionally beautiful and carrying a little water weight side.

But the show fails in other ways, and that failure could not be more evident than in last night's re-aired episode, where Coleen and her assistant were trying to satisfy a Superdrug spokesmodel brief in Birmingham. As usual, they found some really striking women and narrowed them down to the three who would be put forward for the job, my favourite of whom was Cara, the biracial daughter of a Black, Jamaican man and White, Belgian woman. I was drawn to her serenity: I felt that if she were on a Superdrug billboard, she would probably catch my eye.

So after all the show's preamble about embracing your own height, size, unique features and personality, Coleen's casting expert Camilla then promptly spends the entire episode registering her discomfort with Cara's wide nose, and agonizing over the ways in which they might make her nose appear more narrow. (She's also concerned, but considerably less so, that Alana looks too old and Liz seems to lack confidence.) She consults the photographer about the angles he'll use to diminish her gargantuan nose, and at one point has what resembles a nose intervention with Cara, confronting her about the 'problem' and reassuring her that they'll do whatever they can to hide her big, fat, black nose. At one point during Cara's shoot, Camilla, smiling and relieved, tells her, "Your nose looks beautiful!" which, given the woman's ethnic heritage, can only mean "Don't worry...it hardly looks black at all!" Way to help women embrace their features. Cara, meanwhile, seems a little nonplussed by the nose debate. When pressed about what abuse she suffers because of her clearly inadequate nose, she confesses that her husband says she has a 'pig snout'. (Yeah...you might want to trade him in for a less asswipey model.) Just for your own reference, here's Cara:




















I guess it's ok to be fat, but not too fat, short but not too short, and black but not too black. If you can have dark enough skin to make their campaign seem edgy and inclusive, but white enough features to not scare off the consumers with your big, black nose, then you're a real woman.

Institutionalized sexism in the Metropolitan Police Service gave rapists freedom to terrorize women

Two very high-profile, recent sexual assault cases have uncovered the immense failings of the Metropolitan Police in investigating and prosecuting rape. Two weeks ago, John Worboys was found guilty of 19 charges of drugging and sexually assaulting 12 female passengers, including one case of rape, and is thought to have attacked more than 500 women during his 13-year career as a licensed taxi driver.Worboys "was arrested by police in the summer of 2007 but was freed to attack scores more women, at least 30 while he was on bail." The case triggered an internal review by Scotland Yard, which found that the Metropolitan police failed to investigate dozens of rape allegations because officers did not record them as criminal offences. In the Worboys case, one of the victims was told by a police officer to "fuck off, black-cab drivers don't do that sort of thing".

In a more recent case, Kirk Reid was convicted yesterday of 2 counts of rape, 3 of assault by penetration and 21 indecent assaults. It emerged during his trial that

He had been identified as a suspect for a series of sex attacks in 2004 and crossed the police radar at least 12 times, but no one pursued inquiries into him. He went on to attack at least 20 women.

While most of these newspaper accounts treat the issue as one of bureaucratic failing from the perspective of the Metropolitan police, who sound duly apologetic but hardly outraged, another story in the Guardian follows the experience of Rebecca, a victim of rape who at the time was 15 years old. After her mother noticed her constantly crying, taking several baths a day, not sleeping and having nightmares, she told her mother that she had been raped and the two filed a complaint.

But as time went on mother and daughter became increasingly concerned that no arrest had been made. This was despite the fact that officers had been given a mobile phone number, address and car registration details for the alleged attacker.

Unknown to them, this was not the only failure. No attempt was made to obtain forensic evidence from the flat where Rebecca claimed she had been raped. No one went to the local shop where she had gone in a distressed state afterwards, and although both her mobile phone and the man's were sent away for examination, the wrong tests were carried out. By the time this mistake was recognised it was too late to obtain the correct information.

The defendant was found not guilty. [Following emphasis mine]:

Earlier this month it became clear just why the case had floundered. Having made a complaint about the police handling of the investigation, a damning internal inquiry revealed a string of mistakes that had been made by the inadequately supervised, overburdened and untrained police constable who was left - in breach of the Metropolitan police's own rules - to handle it. This showed that there weren't enough detectives in the elite Sapphire sex crimes unit; in fact, the unit's then manager was pleading with her superiors for more staff, pointing out that the car crime, burglary and robbery teams all had more detectives. Another senior officer in the Sapphire unit told the inquiry that it was "not at all" a priority for management, claiming the motor vehicle crime team had greater priority.

There can be no clearer statement on the way women are valued than the fact that the safety of cars is prioritized above the safety of women.

The [rape] conviction rate remains at a dismal 6.5%, compared with a figure of 34% for criminal cases in general. The government estimates that between 75% and 95% of rapes are never reported to the police, but of those that are, only a quarter end up in court, and complaints persist that women are not being taken seriously, witnesses are not being interviewed and potential evidence is going uncollected.

Representatives of Women Against Rape, which worked alongside Rebecca and her mother on their complaint against the police...believe that one way to change this is for heads to roll when specific failures are identified. "They won't solve anything until people are held to account," says the group's Ruth Hall. "It's not enough to say lessons have been learned - they've been telling us that for 30 years."

The group also suggests that there needs to be a distinct change in police priorities. "The problem really starts at the top and this report proves that," says Lisa Longstaff. "The priorities for downgrading rape and under-resourcing rape in relation to other crimes are set by the very highest in the police. It's about orders from the top that make it clear this is a priority crime to be investigated ... In many cases the police just aren't doing the job once someone reports a rape to them. They're not interviewing witnesses, they're not taking forensic samples, they're not visiting the crime scenes. They're dismissing a lot of reports because of who the woman is and the circumstances in which the rape took place - if she's been drinking, or she's young, or has a history of mental health problems, or is an immigrant."

More on Institutionalized sexism in the Metropolitan Police Service...:
Police took four years to arrest serial sex attacker
Metropolitan police accused of institutional sexism over serial sex attacker cases