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London’s Skeletons #BriFri — 8 Comments

  1. I would love to visit the Globe and the museum of London one day. Still waiting to travel again but we have dreams about where we want to go.

    I’ll have to disagree about the white superiority feelings transferring to the US. I don’t see that in actual life situations but I know the media makes big of it, stirring people up with the selective news they report. As for slavery, I think we shouldn’t judge historical figures as you must consider the cultural content of that time.

    • Slavery, to sharecropping and a penal system that re-enslaved the freed, to Jim Crow in the South and red-lining + block-busting in the North, to unequally funded schools and the continued onslaught of media messages that feed our unconscious biases to this day. The cultural context of slavery didn’t end with slavery — it just keeps morphing. Currently we see it in everything from the statistics of who uses illegal drugs (more whites) versus who gets arrested for illegal drugs (more blacks) to none of us being able to get the results we would like to see on the Implicit Bias Test (not even black people, because they’re fed the same messages that all of us are in this society): https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest.html

  2. I am watching on TV ‘The Night Manager’. Enjoying it!
    My niece lives in the UK and married a Brit. When her first baby was born the hospital thought the baby a bit jaundice and needed to go under the lights. My niece assured them she was not jaundice but Semitic. A bit of Whiteness there!

  3. You’re a brave soul treading into those waters! My British blood is boiling a bit, but I know you don’t mean to cast all Brits in the same mold, just as we know all Americans are not racists but we certainly have our share.
    I think England def has its share of ugly feelings — and sadly I remember my own British uncle saying not very nice things about what he called Wogs, as well as Jews. And he had a few things to say to another uncle, his brother who married a Malaysian girl. That was in the 70’s and he’s been dead for years. I would hope that young Brits like young Americans are more and more color and culture-blind and welcoming to a more diverse country, as our young people seem to be.
    I will say from watching British television, there seem to be more integrated relationships taken for granted in England. But perhaps that’s not real life, that’s just Luther:)

  4. What a fascinating story! I am actually taking my kids to the UK soon–I wonder if we’ll have time to hit the Museum of London. We have a LOT planned. When we get back, I’ll post day-by-day recaps on my blog. 🙂

    • Cool! I’m looking forward to your re-caps. I planned twice as much for our London trip as we were actually able to implement!

  5. I must buy ‘Sugar in the Blood’, Joy, as I enjoy looking at the lost areas of history, and this certainly seems to be one. I was amazed on holiday a few years ago when I made friends with a woman of Indian descent, and she told me her family came from Trinidad! She said that after slavery was abolished, few ex-slaves wished to work on the plantations, and in desperation the plantation owners recruited thousands of people from India, as white people could not cope with working outdoors in that heat. I don’t know if that is covered in the book, but it was something of which I was totally unaware, and shows how much lost history there still is.

  6. Pingback:Theeb #FilmReview #BriFri | Joy's Book Blog

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