Skin deep zine issue 1 by Skin Deep

ISSUE I

JUNE 2014

Our aim is to create a current publication in Oxford which provides an opportunity to discuss issues of race, racial representation, and racial identity.Â We seek to cultivate a space where different experiences of race can be shared, retold and examined. Skin Deep zine recognises the value of heritage, tastes, styles, stories, traditions, imaginations and cultures that are not often given room in mainstream white spaces. Throughout this zine we have attempted to weave together the personal, emotional and critical experiences of those who have been kind enough to offer their ideas, and we invite you to share in these narratives.

CONTENTS I

Race: Moving beyond its construction, and iteration – Ashleigh Ainsley

X-Men Immigrants – Zena Agha

III

Four Days After Maya Angelou – Tadiwa Madenga

The Anatomy Of A Genocide – Vishnu Strangeways

Colourblind – Josh Ng

Motta Seffam – Nasim Asl

VII

Brownness: The Experience of a Privileged Non-Resident Alien – Shoumik Bhattacharya

VIII

An Inconvenient Truth – Anirudh Mandagere

Collages - Tunji Adeniyi Jones

Calculating the Difference

Mindfulness and Violence – Alexander Beecham

XII

Reimagining Wholeness: Lessons from Uncle Stuart – Anuradha Henriques

XIII

I, Too, Am Oxford

XIV

Race for Equality: Brazilian University Quotas – Adam Smith

An Abridged Excerpt from A Series of Lives – Josh Oware

XVI

Race Weighs Heavy as Centuries – Brian Kwoba

XVII

Gabo: Life in Translation – Sasha Kosminsky

XVIII

Post Coloniality: Post-it Reflections – Bethany Lamont

XIX

Scandal, Post-racism and the Rhetoric of Black Progress – Roseanne Chantiluke

A Conversation About My Clitoris – Lina Abushouk

XXI

Cultural Differences: What they didn’t tell me about Colombia – Mala Henriques

XXII

Alternative Reading List Project: An Experiment – Anne Meeker

XXIII

The Cotton Will Blush – L. Dickson-Tetteh

XXIV

Credits

R A C E : M O V I N G BEYON D ITS CONSTRUCTION, A N D I T E R AT I O N

The rhetoric around race is highly controversial: the term is often put into inverted commas, conflated with seemingly less contentious terms such as ethnicity and culture, or omitted totally from general discussion. Race has been used to refer to an African identity, however it has elided the heterogeneity of particular populations. Africa may exist as a geographical space, but there is little evidence to support the idea of any unifying racial characteristics: disparate populations exist from Morocco, to Benin, to Namibia and beyond; they are all read as homosapiens. Minor genetic differences can be traced within parts of national populations as consequences of environmental factors, regional diets, health and intermarriage. Our understanding of what constitutes an “Asian” or “Black” race is often based upon a shared cultural heritage which is an assemblage of different materials, practices and lived experiences. These all differ and are constructed by our social lives. These conceptions do not operate in a fixed, static vacuum; they are not free from perturbation and reconceptualization. One of the common ways people have seen race is through the pigmentation of one’s skin. Differences in skin colour have led people to conceive of race as natural. The application of race signs through skin colour is in fact an arbitrary act occupied with

the attempt to halt and fix a mobile and transmuting idea. In this way, the seemingly permanent signs of racial authenticity (inscribed most potently by skin colour) need to be understood as socially constructed and relational in means. Race is not a biological fact but a device used to order and subordinate. Race becomes a dangerous construct when particular ideas and values become racialized: when a specific form of behaviour becomes attributable to social groups. Harmful typologies occur, and these reinforce the manifestation of such representations in culture and society via imaginative and affective processes. These typologies and representations interfere significantly with policy and are pervasive throughout society. Race in this instance is a fallacy but remains divisive. It acts as the grammar through which territorialization, removal of indigenous people and racism are iterated and justified. Racism, here, is understood as discrimination based on the identity attributed to individuals by the process of race. Racism, as an ideology inflected with power, has given way to the elucidation of an imaginary hierarchy of human types upon which particular binary ideas have persisted; civilized/primitive superior/inferior developed/undeveloped. Biological forms of racism have been

a recurring motif in deterministic thought, imperialist expansion and genocides (i.e. Rwanda). Here phenotypes and somatic markers such as hair texture or skin tone become burdened with the weight of race and come to stand for who we “really are”; an identity. Race, therefore, presents a theoretical conundrum: whilst race may not be “real” it is processual and enacted as a meaningful category which is implicated in effects that are very real. Race as a Cultural Process It is through language, images, tropes and representational signs that the fallacy of race is made to appear reality. Through an amassing of words, film, images, music, and other registers, race is able to masquerade as an intelligible regime of truth. These cultural ideologies inform the work of racialization, sustaining the idea through constant iteration. Discursive ideas about race are frequently carried in language where causal references to black muggers or muslim fundamentalists are embedded in contexts that make race appear to be an inescapable truth or at least a normalized category. Cultural racisms centre on the idea of immutable cultural differences. Ethnicity, here, refers to the everyday practices associated with a nationality or culture such as our choice of food,

music, dress, kinship, relations, and symbolic rituals. There is a danger of ascribing culture or ethnicity in impossible ways onto national populations. The British diet is a great example of the changes in ethnicity, and thus evidence of it not as a bounded category but something constantly in the making. As Stuart Hall has noted, race - when related to ethnicity - can act as a floating signifier. However, cultural racisms not only treat ethnicity as a timeless, closed set of practices tied to particular populations, but also assert that some cultures are superior to others, being modern, progressive and civilised as opposed to traditional backward or primitive. In such instances, the idea of race is displaced from the biological to the cultural sphere. Recognizing this suggests that race does not precede discourse but is the consequence of it. Race is a modern intervention, an arbitrary sign, that has become imbued with particular meaning in late modernity. Reflections On Whiteness Whiteness as a social norm and hegemonic form of power has been omitted in particular accounts in academic literature. Many social accounts have sought to expose the social construction of race by focusing on visible minorities in a manner in which their bodies and the spaces they inhabit become marked. Absenting whiteness in this way is rarely held to scrutiny, but comes to operate as the blank canvas of experience upon which other ethnicities are so vividly painted. A loss of whiteness for many seems inconsequential. In contrast, for minority ethnic groups the erasure of race may equate to the obliteration of an identity and shared way of life, and thus silencing a range of racially marked historical experiences.

Given the impact of this, in most areas of social life many minority ethnic people choose to identify as black, more as a political marker of resistance than an accurate descriptor of skin colour. This whiteness works as an epistemology that is a particular way of knowing and valuing social life. This privileging of white racial norms effectively means that a collective knowledge is a product of the west, constituted through the white [male] eye of power. Insights Towards a Post Racial Ontology Social constructionists assert that race is a discursive construct, but what does this really mean? It might appear somewhat paradoxical to use the term race if it does not exist (as established earlier). If we take the ontology constructed by discourses of race to be the foundations from which we proceed, then we have to question the very language of race writings and representations. Race has been used for its ontological security with reference to biological dimensions which allow orientation around a stable and knowable identity. Race is used as a category for the foundation of what â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;isâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; and thus provides the basis for questions of equality and difference. In contrast, a post race writing subverts this position by adopting an anti-foundational perspective which claims that race is a fiction, which is only ever given substance via the illusion of performance, action, and utterance where repetition makes it appear real. One should not see this as a theoretical abstraction loose from political practice. A post race idea envisages new spaces and forms of cultural identification that cross the colour line and can engender

other ways of being. The radical potential in this perspective lies in the understanding that our cultural identities are produced in encounters rather than coming to precede events. One way we might challenge cultural racisms and the hegemony of whiteness is by becoming aware of it as a racial norm that privileges a few at the expense of others. Recognizing this position and how it shapes our lives and ideas is a starting point for effecting change. The recognition that race does not exist has failed to lessen the impact of racialization as a mode of social organization and production of human society. We need to question why we implicitly deploy a concept that we explicitly recognize is lacking validity. Often used for the expression of control and power, the discursive and embodied significance of race is forever incoherent and can only approximate identity through socially recognizable signs, symbols, and motifs. Consequently, race can be thought of as something we do rather than who we are. It is a performance that can only ever give illusion to the reality it purports. It features in banal modes of being in everyday life, seen in contemporary literature such as Brick Lane, television as The Ali G Show, and films like Bend It Like Beckham. Post race, as an idea, challenges the very accounts which conceive of race as immutable and innate, delineating the context and means through which such accounts are produced.

Extensive credit goes to the work of Nayak (2006) and Nayak and Jeffrey (2013) from which this work was heavily synthesised

Ashleigh Ainsley

X-MEN IMMIGRANTS

We don’t know it yet, but our streets are being lined with mutants That’s right, Cyclops, iceman, angel and storm Are reborn, unworn and not yet torn, And they walk between you and me, They sit beside you on the bus and the tube, They man CCTV and fight adversity They guard gas stations, sell us commodities They help us when our dishwashers break And save us when lives are at stake We never thank them – barely acknowledge them Sometimes we even try and fight them And you know, some of us don’t even know they exist Yet they persist, assist and insist On anonymity, secrecy and public decency They don’t inform us that they have different DNA Chromosomes creating new characteristics Flaunting evolution’s logistics Statistics mutating in the face of the future race Imbued with gifts and talents unknown Powers not yet shown They’ve grown into hybrids They all have stomachs made of diamonds Caught in the liminal, still experimental Only first, second or third generation Still nestling into a new location Not yet credited with integration Struggling to lay some sort of foundation I’m not talking x men I’m talking immigration You see our immigrants are superhuman They uprooted, traded their lives and stepped into the shoes of ghosts All for security, for safety, and the myth of no more poverty They sold their soul to Beelzebub for a British passport Now they’re cutting teeth on keys with locks in faraway lands Like spores they were strewn across the world The diaspora And they are mutants Because they are an amalgam of here and there Enacting a marriage of mannerism They keep cellophane on TV remotes And won’t take the plastic off new phones They bear the pain of leaving brothers behind Events that time cannot rewind They watch tackier soap operas And collect call cards like stamps Some of them build empires Some build pyramids Some dwell in wastelands Some lose their grip on it They struggle to say where they’re from on their Facebook profiles And they circle ‘other’ on the NHS race forms

They introduced Divali, Hanukah and Eid to Christmas They sat Yom Kipur and Ramadam next to Lent And they gave thanks to God knows who They work twice as hard to be considered half as good And they are the brave ones Where we speak one language they speak two three four Mother-father-brother tongues, Where we only know the sun to set in summer They’ve felt the monsoon’s wrath and the sun’s strength Where we only know skin white as moonshine They know men with eyes the colour of rainbows And lands were women with hips are considered beauties And where we only have one identity They have a plethora, each laid onto the sediment of the last And they’re not called wolverine, Shadowcat or dazzler But Patel, Mohammed and Muller But in this version, there’s no professor Xavier to unite them To nurture and support them He’s not there to prove that these mutants can be superheroes Westchester Mansion is hidden in Bromley, Bradford and Brixton Now ladies and gentlemen we’ve arrived at our trouble Magneto’s brotherhood of Mutants appear out of the rubble They now control our newspapers, Our radio and our publishers They lurk in Parliament’s committee rooms and the City’s Boardrooms They have BBQs with our neighbors and sort out our taxes They think evil thoughts, speak poniards and every word stabs They insult our intelligence with their falsities And upset our children with their dualities And I hate myself for saying it but I reckon not even Mr. Cameron can save us now We got into this rut and we don’t know how So fight, though the mutants’ genes are not our own Throw them a bone Let them call this Marvel Universe home And for heaven’s sake, just leave ‘em alone! Cos we are born, we live we die The years keep on flying by And the thought of hating seems so silly when the remedy is educating We created passports, borders and ethnicity We invented race and dichotomy So sit on the tube with your head held high, Realise that that guy by your side Like you looks to the sky Realise that though what he says may be unknown by discriminating You’re alienating one more superhero from the throne

Zena Agha

FOUR

D AY S

AFTER

MAYA ANGELOU

efore Maya Angelou’s death, Toni Morrison once commented:

She launched African-American women writing in the United States. She was generous to a fault. Upon Maya Angelou’s death, Alice Walker wrote: She was special, she was rare, she was more beautiful than perhaps even she realized, because she was, among other things, such an artist, that she could not only create worlds on paper, or in a listener’s imagination, but she also managed, over and over again in her long life, to create and recreate herself. And if I were to speak to Maya’s spirit, I would say: Thank you for your loud literary voice, your vulnerable work, your powerful lines, and your gentle tone.

I grew up in Zimbabwe doing things the proper way, I was expected to speak proper English, sit up straight, and never talk back to my parents. Years later, I arrived in New York for boarding school where everyone spoke recklessly without the proper verb and noun agreement, where some children went to school with jeans that were too tight, and others with t-shirts that had only been put in the dryer but not ironed. Though this new life seemed easy, it did not take me long to realise that there was a proper way to live in America. For a little black girl there were boundaries. There was a right kind of grammatically incorrect sentence, an acceptable type of sneaker to wear with your tight jeans, and the

right amount of underground music to listen to. There was a calculated way to be messy. Years later, I found myself quieter, careful not to sound out of place. I quoted Dostoevsky and Faulkner, and argued that Evelyn Waugh was underrated. I did not want to exist loudly, or differently. I wanted to be invisible. In tenth grade, I accidentally took the book, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, from the library shelves. I had not been looking for anything in particular, but the title was familiar; I was curious. A few pages in to the autobiography I knew Maya was different. She took risks, unlike the acceptable and calculated chaos of Faulkner. She had a disregard for convention and a type of frankness with a true sense of wisdom. I read the pages of her books like a child seeing too much, not sure if I understood it all, at times embarrassed to be interested, yet all the while knowing that there was something too important to miss. She was not afraid to be too Black, or too blunt, or too sexy, characteristics that I had thought were incompatible with great literature. She wrote books that did not look over their shoulders to see if someone was watching. For a voice such as hers to be included in the American canon, to be so revered in the public space, meant that there was space for me to be visible in my own way. I decided to borrow her confidence until it became my own. They say that it is really her life, not just her work that has moved people. I find this to be true, though the two cannot be separated. Reading about Maya’s life, her trials as a child, and her empathy for the man who had hurt her, a man whom she

thought her voice had killed when she spoke out against him, left me in awe of the capacity of human compassion. Her life as a dancer, singer, poet, and activist showed her generosity and the multiplicity of her talent. Maya writes “I try to live what I consider a ‘poetic existence.’ That means I take responsibility for the air I breathe and the space I take up. I try to be immediate, to be totally present for all my work.” Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Audre Lorde are just a few examples of influential writers who are in constant conversation with Maya’s work. The notion of the black woman as an artist, a notion that is emphasized through black feminist tradition in America, is one that Maya not only embodied but influenced. Her autobiographies showed that the personal was creative, the creative was personal, and speaking from experiences did not reflect a lack of imaginative rigour. Her work was not what Audre would describe as “sterile wordplay”, but rather a revelation of experience. She taught us that we do not always have to wait for new ideas, or continuously summon old ones, but that our immediate actions, if explored, can be the means to our freedom. That is political. It was in New York that I discovered her, but she continues to follow me, even now in Oxford. That is the beauty and relevance of her work: it has influenced the way I experience my life. And on days when it is raining too hard and my eyes are growing tired, I know I can open up one of her poetry collections. I can read through her lines, chuckling out loud in the quiet library, letting my body enjoy her playful words.

Tadiwa Madenga 13

THE ANATOMY

Vishnu Strangeways

I – Appapa There is no imminence to unrest, its origins can be plotted like old genealogy maps. When unrest arrives it bears down in the same way the heaviness of thunderclouds breaks, there is almost a sense of satisfaction when the anticipation finds physical release. The transition of Sri Lanka from colonised to liberated was made with the same false vows of those upon which Empire was built. The act of granting independence was made with laziness, as if resentfully aware that the process of granting a nation the right to determine itself is something that no one should be in a position to provide. This laziness made itself manifest in the machinations of liberation. Under the British the Tamil minority were raised up to wield a disproportionate level of bureaucratic power, acting as the puppet leaders in ministry offices and the civil service industries. The colonised mind is one that cannot conceive of an existence outside of deference. The Tamil minority became the ideal lapdogs of the British to rule over the Sinhalese majority. When societies are organized into grand hierarchies those that bear the weight inherit this injustice that wraps into them like gnarled roots. The British packed their bags and left, claiming in some roundabout way the moral high ground for bestowing upon Sri Lanka’s inhabitants the debris and scars of Empire. A new flag was fashioned burning in wondrous red and gold, adorned with a snarling lion bearing a sword, an emblem rich with the threat of aggression. The Free, Sovereign and Independent Republic of Sri Lanka.

II – Appa The redressing of power commenced almost immediately, in a form that has been replicated through the many cycles of civil war. The violence of marginalisation made its voice heard in infinite variety. At first Sinhalese vigilante groups formed and would vandalise Tamil-owned shops. These were the logical precursors to the pogroms where Tamils were kidnapped and beaten, their houses burnt down and occupants forced to march down the street in displays of public humiliation. The southern cities and towns were home to Sinhalese and Tamil side by side, thus, the bitterness of resentment and privilege was readily apparent, and in turn the violence was easily initiated and propagated in these hot-houses of resentment. In government Sinhalese was made the “formal” language of Sri Lankan parliament, vaguely under the guise of promoting cohesion with the intended consequence of excluding Tamil speaking parliament members from discourse. To ban the language was a grave symbol, instructing a ban on participation. However the greatest act of iconoclasm came in the burning of the Jaffna Public Library, the greatest collection of Tamil literature. Asserting the existence of an identity requires you to be recognised by markers of that identity. The process of genocide is one of eradication of these tokens. People can be killed but the enduring legacy of identity lives on in books and language, art, oral history and stories. To enact a perfect genocide is to disassemble that which makes you, and render them ghosts. The reassertion of a race’s right to exist can take place in many forms. Historicising culture leads one to the conclusion that all things have come into place via their antecedents, such that nothing has the right to continually exist. The leisurely armchair discussion of this has no place in the very real experience of one’s destruction. In the specter of erasure grew resistance, and under the lions with the groaning weight of their swords, an army of tigers were born.

OF A GENOCIDE III – Thambi A charge brought against the Tamil Tigers, the Tamil freedom fighting guerilla network, is that they carved out the genre of the modern day terrorist. To pioneer modern day terrorism is a dubious accolade in a framework that posits these terrorists in the same moral space as that which is bad. With Tigers came the bombs, the pop-up warfare and the ideology that your death can be turned into a weapon. The birth of the Tamil Tiger insurrectionist movement cast a wide net over Sri Lanka, such that the assumption of peace became a false ideal. When combating state armies, the Tigers resisted through a catalogue of unpredictability, hiding in cells deep within Sri Lanka’s jungles and enacting their chaos in the most unsuspecting ways. The strength of their method ultimately handed the Sri Lankan government the greatest prize: that of the moral high ground. Portraying the Tamil Tigers as threats to Sri Lankan civilians, the Sri Lankan State army under Mahinda Rajapaksa began their final march on Tamil Eelam. They say Sri Lanka has the worst media transparency of any country in the world, a prize from which President Rajapaksa reaped the spoils. The army marched on the North, with airplanes dropping shells into “no fire” zones. Indiscriminate shelling of Tamil civilians commenced, justified by claims that the Tamil Tigers were using said civilians as human shields. At the peak of the assault thousands of civilians were forced on a small scrap of beach in the North, no greater than a few miles, their condensed bodies unable to cohere a desire to survive with the impossibility of their situation.

VI – Eelam The sand and bones bear witness to the atrocities that took place during the final days. As their blood lapped the shores of the northeastern coastline, the war was declared over, with a triumphant Sri Lankan government claiming a moral victory for all that is good and right. The white van terrorism began, and young Tamil men would begin disappearing in the night. Their mothers would stand in Colombo with pictures of their sons’ faces, pressing them to any Western journalist begging for their return. As with all genocide, the revisionism is an ongoing process. For Sri Lanka’s North, the army rapidly formed internment camps for displaced Tamil civilians under the guise of weeding out the remaining Tigers. Whilst the displaced were held captive in internment camps subject to an array of monstrosities at the hands of the army, the government made further moves into the North, seizing previously Tamil-owned private property and rechristening it as state owned. The anatomy of genocide had almost reached its fullest dissection, with all parts laid entirely bare and ensconced with the protective layer of moral high ground that binds and strengthens the jagged bones. As Sri Lanka’s history draws a crimson sunset over this chapter, the relics of its bloody history are consigned to asphalt and grenade shells. There is no justice in a world where notions of nationhood, selfdetermination and retribution exist only as dictionary terms.

Joel Ng is a Singaporean DPhil student at St Antonyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s College.

Here my daughter meets her grand aunt, great-grand aunt and grand uncle during her first visit to Uganda.Â

Imagine if the first person you ever met from another continent was your own great-grandniece. My wife and I never anticipated these things when we married, but the coming together of people who would never otherwise meet creates an indescribable magic.Â

MOTTA SEFFAM* Nasim Asl

I weave words as you weave threads in a mountain shadowed village of dust and dance, farm and faith, in a land far away. We spin ink and silk, though our creations Never mix. My tongue always trips, Stumbles Over the sounds that separate us and my guilt Splatters across ‘exotic’ memories, my sweeping arms and garbled attempts at another language and way of life. We converse through song. Unfamiliar scales are forged from my fingers, A foreign instrument, As I take refuge in my silence and you revel In the brash, mythical music. Away, my skin reveals you and my name Tattoos itself into the minds of those I meet as ‘other’ (not ‘mixed – British and Asian’).

You gave me your Persian carpet so I could try to fly – But my blended blood and the currents woven together within my veins take me too close to the sun.

*I’m sorry

B ROW N N E S S : THE EXPERIENCE OF A PRIVILEGED NON-RESIDENT ALIEN

SHOUMIK BHATTACHARYA

was at a club when a friend of a friend came up to me and said “I’ve been to India, and I am SO glad you got out of there! Aren’t you?” As a student of postcolonial theory, I reacted viscerally to what I perceived was an attempt to claim that the “west” had saved me from the “rest.” No, I am not glad that I got out of India. No, I love it! All of it! I went

from being queer critical theory kid to jingoistic India lover. But as I calmed down and thought about how I had reacted, I realised that this was a question I asked myself on many occasions. Three years ago, when I left India for college in America, I was interested in thinking about, and

through, identity, representation and other such wonderfully theoretical things. I believed, and to some extent still believe, that I would experience things differently because I was always outside my “home” context. I am a brown skinned man who grew up in a place where almost everyone was some shade of brown. In America, I thought I would be a non-resident

alien. I thought this would give me the ability to detachedly analyse metropolitan identity creation - I was an outsider and wouldn’t be part of this new context. I don’t have the problem with answering the inevitable “Where are you from?” questions, because I say Hyderabad, India and it is always an answer that works. I do look like I could “really” be from Hyderabad, India. I had no claims to Americanness or British-ness that could be questioned. But supposedly how I behave is enough to allow some people to think that I couldn’t possibly be comfortable in India. And this is where it gets tricky. While I question the reductionist assumptions that otherise India, I know that the life I lead there must be seen within its own context. I am a cis-gender Brahmin man. All four of my grandparents, including my 90-year-old grandmother, earned college degrees. I survive in India because I experience enormous privilege. While these were very much facts before college, I took them for granted and never really considered my positionality. It is leaving “home”, being asked how I know English, being told to go back

where I came from and having old ladies cross the street when they see me approaching them, that has made me realise the privileged position I enjoy in India. Being exposed to my very different positionality in the “west” has helped me realise how complicit I am in the structures of oppression that need dismantling in the Indian context, at home. But home itself has become a contested term and notion for me. Is home in Hyderabad? Can I be the “queer critical thinking liberal arts kid” that I hope I am here, in Oxford and at Sarah Lawrence, in my Indian context? I don’t know, but it would be harder to do so outside the comfortable bubbles I have experienced at Sarah Lawrence and Wadham. Am I ready to plunge into the awkward and uncomfortable position of being queer in a place that just re-criminalised homosexuality? What will the new Hindu nationalist prime minister, who believes homosexuality is against Indian culture, mean for my Indian-ness? How will his avowedly neo-liberal policies and the widespread support they have in urban upper-middle class India change the social landscape of

India? These are not fun questions to ask or attempt to answer, especially for a privileged Indian boy whose life will only made more messy and annoying if they are answered. It is leaving India that has made me realise that I cannot take “home” for granted. I often feel a connection to utterances of the diasporic angst of homelessness and of hopelessness that comes from the realisation that I am most comfortable in the liminal space between the many contexts that I inhabit. But this connection is often for me based in the horror of discovering my own privilege, my own complicity in oppressive power structures. It is this feeling of homelessness and hopelessness though that truly gives me hope; hope that I, in my liminal space, was creating the home that I wanted to inhabit. My life in America and England is not a rejection of India, not a rejection of where I come from, but a discovery of what it means for me to be Indian. It is in this “alien”, and oftentimes oppressive, space that I have become more comfortable in questioning myself and the institutions that created that self.

n March of last year, English film director Ken Loach released the film, ‘Spirit of ’45’ detailing the prevailing leftist narrative of the welfare state as the victory of the working-class; a system which promoted political stability with social justice. It was a viewpoint summed up in Peter Hennessy’s Never Again in which he proclaimed that ‘those brave collectivist years…witnessed the emergence of a new combination of hope and purpose’. In the eyes of the contemporary left, the welfare state was the apotheosis of working-class fortunes. But Loach’s film, and the attitude of the Left betray a disturbing tendency: the white-washing of history. In the whole ninety-four minutes of Loach’s film, the only working-class faces that were shown were white. Only white people were spoken to about their experience of state welfare, and thus only their voices were heard.

As award-winning blogger Anna Chen wrote in The Guardian, people of colour have been ‘painted out of working-class history’.1 The story of the British workingclass has always included immigrants and ethnic minorities in its ranks. From Chinese dock-workers arriving in Cardiff in 1906 to West Indian immigrants sailing in on the Empire Windrush in 1948, immigrants have shaped the nation. Above all, it was immigrant labour that was responsible for the survival and sustenance of the British welfare. Immigrants from across the world came to Britain to clean the hospitals, care for sick patients and keep the National Health Service alive. Indeed no less an authority than Dr. Peter Carter, head of the Royal College of Nursing, argued that without the nurses and the workers recruited from overseas the NHS simply wouldn’t have been able to function.2

But here is the sad inconvenient truth about immigrants and the postwar welfare state. Ethnic minorities built the welfare state and sustained it, but the state failed to return the favour. The state pursued policies that actively discriminated against ethnic minorities and failed into account their needs. The Labour Party’s Manifesto of 1945 called for ‘every family in this island [to have] a good standard of accommodation’, and yet this promise was not extended to ethnic minorities.3 Trevor Hagger, the vicechairman of Mildenhall Council in London told journalists that ‘[ethnic minorities] do not have the same standards as we have…they buy all the property and sleep ten to a room’ to justify discriminatory policies.4 Instead, the immigrants who had built the British welfare state were forced into substandard housing, and charged exorbitant

Anirudh Mandagere rents for overcrowded and insanitary conditions. Furthermore, the system of social security that was so lauded by Loach was denied to immigrant workers. A social study in Bristol in the later 1960s found that the welfare state was ‘inadequate’ in dealing with the specific needs of working-class immigrant families. It was a striking indictment of the welfare state that when asked who would they turn to in an emergency, only 8% of BME workers in Bristol would turn to a social welfare agency.5 The ‘New Jerusalem’ and ‘Never have it so good’ society that was promised to immigrants was yanked away by the continuing racial discrimination that pervaded the welfare state. Yet the story of the post-war immigrants was not subservience and victimisation, but solidarity. In response to the inefficiencies of state welfare, immigrant families

banded together in communities, providing mutual support to each at a time when ‘spend, spend, spend’ seemed to be the mantra of the time. Across Bristol, kinship networks of different families proliferated, providing financial and moral support to individuals in times of sickness or unemployment; indeed the same social study found that 49% of BME workers would turn to a neighbour in an emergency.6 Memoirs of the postwar immigrant life provide striking testimony to the ‘support networks’ that were created by BME workers to facilitate new arrivals. The untold story of immigrant families working together against a racist, unhuman, faceless bureaucracy is one wiped off from the celebratory story in The Spirit of 45. The welfare state that was established in 1945 was essential in providing a solid safety net for working-class families. They gained much from

universal provision of social security, education and healthcare as well as a significant degree of economic power through full employment. But these gains came at an unacceptable price: the reinforcement of racism.

1 ‘People like me have been painted out of working-class history’, Guardian, (16 Jul 2013), http://www.theguardian.com/ commentisfree/2013/jul/16/people-ofcolour-working-class-history. 2 ‘NHS: Has Immigration Saved the Health Service?’ [http://news.sky.com/ story/1155532/nhs-has-immigrationsaved-the-health-service], 29 May 2014. 3 Labour Party, Let us Face the Future. 4 S. Todd The People, (Oxford, 2014), p. 189. 5 A. Richmond, Migration and Race Relations in an English City: A Study of Bristol (London, 1973), p. 130. 6 Ibid. p. 130.

C a l c u l at i n g Number of Oxford colleges who describe themselves or their student body as being “diverse” or encouraging “diversity” on their own website – 37/38 Percentage of white Oxford University students who believe that the student body is not adequately diverse – 80.5%

Percentage of white Oxford University students who report having felt unwelcome or uncomfortable at Oxford because of their race or ethnicity – 5.4%

Unemployment rate among 16-24 year olds from ethnic minority backgrounds in the UK in January 2014 – 37%

Percentage of Oxford University’s professors who are from a BME background (2011) – 3.9%

According to the 2011 census, percentage of Oxford residents from a BME background – 22% Number of complaints to the BBC after Jeremy Clarkson’s racist slur in Top Gear’s Burma Special – 30

Percentage of BME Oxford University students who believe that the student body is not adequately diverse – 74.1%

Percentage of BME Oxford University students who report having felt unwelcome or uncomfortable at Oxford because of their race or ethnicity – 59.3%

Percentage of Oxford University applicants who do not declare their ethnicity – 6%

Unemployment rate among 16-24 year olds in the UK as a whole in January 2014 – 21%

Percentage of University of Bedfordshire’s professors who are from a BME background (2013) – 26.9%

According to the 2011 census, percentage of English residents from a BME background – 13%

Number of complaints to the BBC after The Daily Mirror released clip of Jeremy Clarkson using a racist slur as part of the nursery rhyme Eeny Meeny Miny Mo while filming an episode of Top Gear - 300

THE DIFFERENCE Number of complaints to the BBC citing the channel’s bias in favour of Nigel Farage’s party, Ukip – 1,190

Number of Ukip members at the time of the European Election in 2014 – 35, 081

Percentage increase in the media coverage of migrant workers from Romania and Bulgaria in the UK between 2005 and 2006 – 325%

Percentage of white British people who agree with the statement that media coverage of ethnic minority Britons promotes racism – 76%

Percentage of stop and searches which result in no arrest - < 90%

Times by which black people in the UK are more likely to be stopped and searched by the police than white people – 7

Number of complaints to the BBC about the poor sound quality on drama Jamaica Inn – 2,182

Number of Ukip members at the time of the European Election in 2009 – 16, 252

Percentage increase in the number of migrant workers from Romania and Bulgaria in the UK between 2005 and 2006 – 35%

Portion of British people who agree with the statement that media coverage of ethnic minority Britons promotes racism – 4/5

Percentage of UK journalists who were white in 2013 – 94% Number of stop and searches in the UK in 2010-2011 – 1, 205, 495

Times by which Asian people in the UK are more likely to be stopped and searched by the police than white people – 2

Percentage of senior police officers in England and Wales from a BME community in 2011 – 3%

Mindfulness and Violence O ver the past few years, interest in mindfulness meditation has exploded in the West: there is now a ‘Mindful Magazine’, the NHS recommends mindfulness as a treatment for depression and anxiety, and courses in mindfulness are popping up all over the country, including here at Oxford University, where much of the rapidly growing body of scientific research on the topic has been done. So what is ‘mindfulness’ anyway? One of the controversies in the scientific research literature is precisely the vagueness of this term, but what is clear is that it originates out of practices taught by the Buddha as recorded in the literature of early Buddhism. Mindfulness meditation in Buddhism is taught as a tool for the attainment of liberation from suffering and as a means of ethical development, goals which are not distinct from one another. One of the most important

early Buddhist texts is precisely the Discourse on the Establishment of Mindfulness, in which the Buddha teaches particular techniques which produce a non-judgemental awareness of the mind and body (or rather, the mind-body complex, as Buddhism rejects Cartesian dualism), free from desire and aversion. I won’t go into the exact details of the practice for the sake of brevity but suffice to say that mindfulness in its original context is not a politically neutral practice: it is a tool taught and practised by Buddhists in order that all sentient beings might liberate themselves and others from suffering.

It is all the more remarkable then — although perhaps not surprising — that mindfulness in the West has been forced into an unholy relationship with worker exploitation, racism and state violence. An article on Psychology Today tells me to ‘Meditate Just Like The U.S. Marines’,

the writer presenting, shockingly oblivious to the irony, the image of a group of Marines meditating, ‘M16 rifles […] slung across their backs’. There is now a ‘Mind Fitness Training Institute’ that teaches the somewhat grotesquely named ‘Mindfulnessbased Mind Fitness Training’ or ‘MMFT®’ to its clients, who include ‘Military service-members’, ‘Law enforcement officers’ and ‘Corporate executives’. Let me make myself clear: these jobs often involve experiencing incredible trauma and suffering and by no means would I oppose, say, soldiers being taught mindfulness practices to alleviate the symptoms of PTSD, or police officers who want to find a way to remain calm and present in dangerous situations. But if you are trying to use mindfulness practice to help you become more effective at the killing of foreign Others, or to rack up yet higher numbers in the continuing mass incarceration of black and brown people (which is indeed what

mindfulness is often used for, as is shown by testimonials from members of the military and police), then, yes, I reserve the right to accuse you and the institutions to which you belong of the most abject and disgraceful cultural appropriation. Apparently, now you can be racist, but mindfully. I am not concerned with whether or not people who practise mindfulness decide to call themselves Buddhists, or how extensive their knowledge of Buddhism is. It is, simply, a question of suffering: how you choose to act in relation to that suffering; and your collaboration with, or resistance to, the systems that produce it. Many Westerners have had profoundly positive experiences with mindfulness meditation, and my point is certainly not to accuse them all of racism and cultural appropriation. I think the growth of Buddhist practices of mental training in the West are a wonderful development in the history of Buddhism, regardless of whether or not they are practised by people who agree with the finer points of Buddhist philosophy. What I simply want to draw attention to is, rather, the hypocrisy involved in trying to use mindfulness to oil the wheels of large-scale systemic racism and economic exploitation. It is also worth asking why mindfulness is being so keenly offered to the agents of state and economic violence while hardly any interest is shown to providing ‘Mind Fitness Training’ to those on the receiving end: prisoners, survivors of sexual violence, queer and trans people, undocumented immigrants, etc. Moreover, upon Googling ‘mindfulness’, I find that within the last week, an article has been published in the Guardian with the headline ‘Mindfulness, purpose and the quest for productive employees’. Modern capitalism has distorted

a practice aimed at compassionate action and joyful living into a stressreduction tool to squeeze more labour out of employees. What a surprise. Western Buddhists, overwhelmingly white, middleclass and politically complacent, have in general been content to sit back as Western discourse around mindfulness is used to prop up worker exploitation, state violence and imperialism (with some notable exceptions, such as the Buddhist Peace Fellowship and the Speculative NonBuddhists); and Western books on mindfulness, including those written by academics and professionals in psychiatry and psychology, are full of the kind of exploitative rhetoric that individualizes all stress, anxiety and depression to the laziness or weakness of the worker, rather than situating suffering subjects within the unjust socioeconomic conditions that produce them. Mindfulness practice in the modern West is, then, a site of enormous contradictions, and we are already seeing the cracks of these contradictions open up as more research is done into the actual effects it has on people. It is not uncommon to read of people having unwanted and unexpected experiences as a result of mindfulness meditation: people who just want to reduce stress end up also experiencing depersonalizations (the dissolution of a sense of self ); those who want to become more successful earners may end up developing a profoundly active sense of compassion, deflecting them from their original goals. Within the Buddhist tradition, these are not only expected but also marks of spiritual development, but they quickly come to seem like problems if we have decided to instrumentalize mindfulness as a capitalist productivity tool. There is a fundamental tension between the narrow directedness of

mindfulness as a tool for increasing workers’ productivity and efficiency; and the expansive nature of the Buddha’s teachings: insight into the fundamental nature of reality, the transformation of one’s sense of being in the world, perfect selflessness as a result of the destruction of the illusion of the essential self, or anatta. While I welcome and celebrate the growth of Buddhism in the global North, the phenomenon of Western Buddhism needs to be situated within the context of histories of imperialism, class oppression and epistemic violence. Some Western Buddhist teachers are still liable to spout Orientalist nonsense, such as that their thinking is a wholesome marriage of ‘Eastern mysticism’ and ‘Western rationality’, and Buddhism in the West remains largely inaccessible to those without the privileges of disposable incomes and a considerable degree of formal education. Mindfulness practices have been brazenly manipulated for the sake of violent ends, but, as the Western academic establishment is beginning to realize, the calm, compassionate mind is ultimately uncontainable and unpredictable in the paths that it follows. As anti-racists of all stripes, Buddhists and non-Buddhists, we must voice our opposition to the commodification and appropriation of Asian cultural traditions towards ends fundamentally opposed to the impulse they embody, that of love. In continuing with the decolonization of knowledge, we can liberate ourselves and others, which is, after all, the ultimate end of the Buddhist project.

Alexander Beecham

REIMAGINING WHOLENESS: LESSONS FROM UNCLE STUART To me, Professor Stuart Hall, a founding figure of cultural studies in Britain, has always been Uncle Stuart. His conversations with my father have shaped both my own and my father’s perceptions of identity. His views allow me to understand myself, and the spaces I inhabit. I believe his ideas to be espoused in this quote:

As against any such idea of fractional or partial identity, we brought up our daughters on the premise that identity is always whole, thus they are wholly Jamaican, wholly English and wholly Indian – all at the same time.1

From the moment I had the ability to question where the fractions of my identity came from and how all these fragmented, different, disconnected pieces could possibly fit together, my father would tell me: you are different, but you are not a piece or a fraction of anything. The fact that you are from all these supposedly separate parts of the world does not make you less than a whole. You cannot be half Indian, quarter Jamaican, quarter English. There is not a place where one ends and the other begins. You are a whole. This will be the only way to situate yourself in and understand your identity. I don’t know if this was a defense mechanism or not – his way of protecting me from an outsider’s

limited understanding of where people come from and the experiences I would encounter. By his logic, if you consider all your different parts as a whole part of you, you won’t question what bits of you came from where, what right they have to exist here, in this space, or why you act or speak the way you do. In my father’s eyes, culture and identity are inextricably linked. During a talk I attended, Dr. Patricia Daley explained that western ways of thinking pervade our understanding of nature and our influence on the environment. We are taught man is superior to nature. In some parts of Africa and India though, the belief is that we are fundamentally inferior and that it, nature, governs life. She

used this as a way to explain possible reasons for our failings in relation to the environment, specifically global warming. In this way, our culture is the meaning of our actions, our behavior, the way in which we conduct ourselves every day. Therefore, the moment you consider yourself ‘half ’ anything you weaken the link between your culture and your self. Perhaps it is a western way of thinking – this idea of halves and quarters. The ancient Indians believed that every being, every thing, is a manifestation of the whole, and there is something exactly the same within each individual that cannot be cut, divided, severed, or changed – like a fractal shape where each part has the same statistical character as the whole.

It (i.e. the supreme self or whatever you understand that to mean) is not born, nor does it ever die. Nor having been, will it cease to be again. Birthless, eternal, perpetual, most ancient of days: it is not slain when the body is being slain.

It cannot be cut, nor burnt, nor wetted, nor dried up. It is eternal, pervading everywhere, stable, unwavering and permanent.2

I think this ancient Indian ideology, although it may be a little outside of my current scope of understanding, supports this same idea of the whole, and has given me a way of navigating myself. In this way I could be different, but simultaneously part of the whole.

This sense of multiplicity, a value shared and mutually cultivated by my father and the late Stuart Hall, has not been reflected in the views of my peers at university today. Oxford is a place that privileges a very particular direction of thought that is unfamiliar to me. When Stuart Hall came to Merton College, Oxford on the Rhodes scholarship in 1951 he said, ‘Three months at Oxford persuaded me that it was not my home. I’m not English and I never will be. The life I have lived is one of partial displacement. I came to England as a means of escape, and it was a failure.’ This ‘displacement’ did not necessarily detract from his experience, but rather reflects the fact that there is a fundamental failing at this institution, in that it reduces the perspective and acknowledgement of the whole. There cannot be only one kind of literary or cultural value; there are many kinds, both complex and refined. But the way in which we are exposed to these values needs to be reimagined. My histories – English, Jamaican, Indian – are shared and intimately woven together, creating a much more truthful understanding of English history. ‘It’s an inside part of being English, not an outside part which you have the choice of knowing about.’3 Being true to myself, and my history, is not about divide and rule. Decolonising the Oxford mind and the challenging of the internal and external definition of whole is what I have learnt from both my father and Stuart Hall.

So in memory of Uncle Stuart, let us not forget, Britain has much more diverse origins, much more plural strands in its

culture, much more mixes. I think it has got to learn to love mixture. At one point Salman Rushdie said: ‘mixture is how newness enters the world.’ Which is much different from the idea that it comes from a society that has been stable, from stable roots, that has been the same throughout time. Who wants to be the same throughout time? What you want to do is to be different throughout time. It’s a process of becoming, not of being, it’s of routes, R-O-U-T-E-S, it’s the various pathways that brought you to where you are that matter.4

Anuradha Henriques

1 pg 220 Henriques, Julian (214) ‘Fernando’s footsteps,’ in Jippi-Jappa Hat Merchant and his Family, editor Mark Holland, Oxford: Horsegate 2 Bhagavad Gita Chapter 2 verses 20 and 24 3 Stuart Hall speaking in Desert Island Discs BBC, Sunday 13th February 2000 4 Stuart Hall speaking in Desert Island Discs BBC, Sunday 13th February 2000

RACE FOR EQUALITY: BRAZILIAN UNIVERSITY Q U O TA S Recently, somebody close to me, a student of Civil Engineering at the University of SĂŁo Paulo in Brazil, was struck by a comment made by her lecturer. The white, middleclass, sixty-something professor was talking about racial quotas in Brazilian universities. He said he was against all kinds of university quota, and of the opinion that the students

with the best marks should get the places, regardless of the colour of their skin. This is a provocative topic of conversation at the moment in a country where quotas have recently become a defining feature of the higher education system. In 2012, the Lei de Cotas, or law of quotas, came into force in Brazil,

bringing with it a widespread and aggressive new system of quotas to tackle the under-representation of students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds in Brazilian universities, who are largely either of African or indigenous descent. The law guarantees 50% of spaces in Brazilâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s 59 federal universities, as well as in 38 further federal educational

institutions, to would-be students who have come through the public secondary education system. A minimum percentage of these, which varies by state, are required to be black, mulatto, or indigenous. It will be in place for 10 years. Despite the ease with which the law was passed, with only 1 of the 81 senators opposing it at the National Congress, it has been the source of much controversy. Much of the country is of the same opinion as the aforementioned professor. And indeed it doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t seem to be a well-regarded law outside Brazil: in an online survey conducted by The Economist in January 2012, 74% said that racial quotas at Brazilian universities were not a good idea. But the racial landscape of Brazil warrants a different approach from that which might be suitable in other countries, even those countries that were also home to large numbers of African slaves. When people think of slavery in the Americas, many will have images in their minds of the cotton fields of North America. However by the time of abolition, Brazil had received an estimated 40% of all of the slaves brought from Africa to the Americas, and in the early 19th century more than one third of the countryâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s population were African slaves. Today, Brazil has a very mixed population, with the 2010 census showing 42.3% to be pardos (brown or mulatto), and as a result lacks the racial dichotomy seen in the likes of the United States. This is a feature clung to by many Brazilians who see their country as being less racially divided than many other postslavery countries. And yet it does not preclude racial inequality in society. Afro-Brazilians constitute around 70% of those living below the poverty line. 2007 figures show white workers earn almost twice as much as black workers on average, and, more

pertinently, 24.2% of whites were enrolled at colleges and universities, compared with a figure of 8.4% of blacks and browns. Despite being the country with the highest population of people of African descent outside Africa, Brazil has strikingly few black doctors, lawyers, or even lecturers in Civil Engineering. Afro-Brazilians are under-represented in the universities and over-represented in the slums. And that is not to say that there are not white children growing up in favelas, nor to disparage their plight. Let us not forget that they can also benefit from these quotas, which are not only racial but also socioeconomic. A common argument against university quotas is that they are likely to adversely affect the quality of the universities in question, because it will be undercut by the admission of students with worse preparation. A question that should be addressed with regards to this is how far the best prepared candidates at entry level correspond to those who will be the best students, or those who will finish with the strongest degrees. What is the real reason for the under-representation of these overwhelmingly black, mixed or indigenous poorer candidates? Is it because they are inherently less academically gifted or less hardworking? Of course not. It is to do with the fact that poorer children do not have access to an education sufficient to prepare them to pass the Vestibular (university entrance exam). Brazilian public schools leave a lot to be desired, and so it is common for richer families to give their children a head start in the Vestibular by paying for private secondary education and even extra tuition, to the disadvantage of candidates from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, who in the case of Brazil are often students of African descent. The

difference this makes is much greater than in Europe or America, where the public education system is generally much stronger. Of course, the poorer students who gain places as a result of quotas will not necessarily turn out to be the ones that would have got away; there can be no guarantee that they would be the students that would have been successful had they had the same opportunities as the students who had been passing the Vestibular before the quotas came into action. Therefore it is far from a perfect solution, but it does address the disparity of opportunity and the under-representation of Afro-Brazilian students and others from poor backgrounds in Brazilian universities. It is not a complete cure so much as it is a plaster, and the Brazilian government would do well to look at improving public schools as well. In a country plagued by protests over the last year, and whose politicians have garnered frequent criticism recently for prioritising spending on international spectacles over areas in dire need of investment such as education, the bold Lei de Cotas represents a positive and refreshing change of momentum. In an ideal world, all schoolchildren would have access to equal opportunities and money, class or race would not be prerequisites for a good education. Results in university entrance exams would be determined by the individual strength of candidates and the amount of preparation they had done, and not by external factors out of the control of the individual. This would be a world devoid of the necessity to level the playing field. Until this becomes a reality, quotas must play a role.

Adam Smith

An Abridged Excerpt from ‘A Series of Lives’ by Josh Oware

have gathered together subtle, sometimes barely perceptible moments that briefly open-out disadvantages and discriminations perpetuated by our education system. These moments express the experience of young people racialized as ‘different’ in a majority-white society. In what follows, the first person, “I”, is written as an expression of my presence throughout the text and how it is written. But this “I” is several stories, several influences, and several lives. It reflects many of my own personal experiences, and also those lives with which I have come into contact during my work in Middlesbrough, London, Bristol and at Rare, Cambridge and Oxford. It is, if you like, the voice of a series of young, black, British lives. * * * I am 22. Here is a story: Age 1: I am born. But I am born into something which will later define me. Who has agency over what you become? Age 2: Stephen Lawrence is murdered. My second year of life, racialized as black. I didn’t know then,

but a politics of becoming, a fresh politics of race, had just exploded and would begin to define how I’m seen, and who I consequently become in the decade that followed. Barney comes back on TV. Age 3: We’re reassured that “you can be anything you want to be” … but… age at three, I didn’t realise I couldn’t. Age 5: That bloody playground: the sort of Chameleon-like gravelled space in schools everywhere that could in a heartbeat switch between tennis court, netball ground and football pitch. We all fell over a lot. We all went to the on-duty teacher and received plasters for our cuts; ‘skin-coloured’ plasters. My cuts would stand out more, always, covered sticky pink against my skin. Age 6: I’ve just moved back to England, my first proper school. It’s 1997 in the leafy backwaters of Hertfordshire. Miss Johnson told my class to introduce ourselves, surnames, middle names and all. I did. “My name is Joshua Agyepong Oware - “ Laughter. Prods.

The redness, the heat, the bubbling of embarrassment, the attention when I just wanted to blend in, be a silence in a room of strangers. My next school, a similar exercise: the proclamations reach me, it’s my turn: “my name is -my name is - my name is... Joshua John O’ware…” Familiarity. Silence. The spotlight moves on without falter. Age 7: I win the 60m sprint again. Parents and peers shout my name, “The Black Bullet”. Meanwhile, my friend Andrew who came second is known as “naturally athletic Andrew”, “talented Andrew”. Expectations of what it means to be black were not limited to the sports field. As the only black child at three of my primary schools, even I could not outrun one thing… my blackness. Age 9: My hair’s uncontrollable, it doesn’t sit. Why can’t my hair look like Busted’s, everyone else’s does. I’m late for school, too busy trying to straighten it. I burn my scalp and fingers in the attempt. I can’t remember learning anything that day.

Age 10: A new year, our first English lesson of Year 5. We started to write stories. What I experienced was not uncommon. ‘1. Almost without exception, whenever children are asked to write a story in school, children of colour will write a story featuring white characters with ‘traditional’ English names who speak English as a first language. 2. Teachers do not discuss this phenomenon. Why are young children of colour and young white children writing exclusively about white characters? What would happen if for just one lesson our teacher insisted we write about a character from a similar ethnic, religious, linguistic background as ourselves? Age 11: I start secondary school. By now, my life and those of others like me have so many placed upon them. Age 14: Our class studies Othello. Suddenly my voice is authoritative. Suddenly I am the expert. Othello can sit alongside the other expectations.

Age 16: I’m popular, outgoing, and ‘loud’. I’m a presence at school and in lessons; a personality. Energy emerges from my being, I influence those around me and bring them into motion. Teaching doesn’t match my energy and intensity. I’m ‘aggressive’ and ‘disengaged’ - a ‘disruptive influence’. The co-produced, selfreinforcing cycle continues, I’m a ‘typical’ black Caribbean boy. I’m not invited to special UCAS evenings despite keeping in line with the top performers, I’m separated from the ‘academic elite’ that is encouraged to emerge at school. For all my energy, passion and human engagement, I am a silence in academic - school life conversations among the teachers. At the end of my GCSEs, in a year of 320 people, I came top, with 10 straight A*s and the highest percentage performance of all his peers. It’s now that I’m encouraged to ‘please stay for sixth form… what are your plans…? look at all the support we can offer?’ I say “no”, I leave, and upon leaving I explain why.

Age 18: What’s the point of the journey, if you’re not welcomed on arrival? Age 21: I Too Am Oxford. Speaking out, in any form: an expression. Enough. But people still demand more of it. People demand an explanation of your world and your feeling. They usurp your words, translate them into their own: “yah, thanks for your point on race, but wouldn’t you agree that this “issue” is about class?”. Another intellectual exercise. Maybe, but for me this is my life. Do you wear the weight of your skin and its place in the world once your brain grows tired of debate? Do you live the oppression you can speak about so eloquently when you leave the room or the conversation? Age 22 (today): What gathers us now? What purpose do we serve, really?

I realise how silenced race is. School life continues, uninterrogated. “Race”: shut down. We can’t talk about that, “daaad! you can’t call my friend black… that’s racist!”. Racial spaces are elided, but without them how can we begin to place ourselves, understand our inherited histories, understand lived inequalities, and unequal futures?

Race weighs heavy as centuries =====

===

i may not look like it

i am also black as you can tell from your eyes when they scratch my surface

but iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m a middle-class white boy i grew up in boulder colorado i like skiiing and snowboarding iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve been camping multiple times in utah i eat granola every day every day i went to a lily-white high school where on a green day we could be found smashing pumpkins in a black hole sun so if you want to destroy my sweater hold this thread as i walk away

in grade school i was a grain of pepper in a sea of salt so i took the coltrane to harlem joined a tribe called quest took a course in self-respect from brother malcolm x === i am also Kenyan from the land between mount kilimanjaro and the indian ocean on the east side of Africa where swahili is the first language the sun rises in within the Luhya people my tribe is called bukusu and we greet the day with Oriena

Oriena Ndimulamu so the ecosystem of the lion and the baobab tree is woven into my DNA here all these fertile centuries are reduced to black and white but I cannot run from here to white and black again in 3 minutes for america is a place where race weighs heavy as centuries upon our shoulders my zebra skin is stretched between divisions of humanity into color concentrations to fix positions by the insanity of skin pigmentation for a hierarchy of schisms (speaking candidly) in this apartheid nation === then someone will say “I’m beyond race” like racism is a mile wide but only an inch deep like obama’s america is “post-racial” hold up how can you be post-racial in a country born with a black holocaust an ocean deep on indian graveyards a continent wide? racism is the noise of skyscrapers carving dollars from the skin tones of drumheads stretched across oceans and colored continents and heavy centuries

FUCK an education system which doesn’t teach us that this four-letter f-bomb is only foul language ‘cause the normans who conquered the anglo-saxons in 1066 looked down upon them and their ‘shit’ and ‘piss’ and ‘fuck’ so they could defacate and urinate and copulate in the snobby aristocracy of contempt for those they conquered such that we the oppressed still cannot even use our own words to denounce our oppression? FUCK THAT SHIT you want to get beyond race? start with yourself take a telescope to the ancestral constellations of your celestial body try deep sea diving in your bloodlines take a trip from the racial box you last checked to to the tapestry lost in your greatgrandmothers last breath and when you get back i’ll be right here smiling and ready to uplift the weight of your centuries from our shoulders

so fuck that noise FUCK race FUCK racism FUCK the supremacy of whiteness which has even melted kaleidescopes of irish jewish and italian gemstones into elmer’s glue and by the way

Brian Kwoba Artwork: Tunji Adeniyi-Jones

EXTRACTS FROM GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ’S NOBEL LECTURE – THE SOLITUDE OF LATIN AMERICA

8TH DECEMBER, 1982

“I dare to think that it is this outsized reality, and not just its literary expression, that has deserved the attention of the Swedish Academy of Letters. A reality not of paper, but one that lives within us and determines each instant of our countless daily deaths, and that nourishes a source of insatiable creativity, full of sorrow and beauty, of which this roving and nostalgic Colombian is but one cipher more, singled out by fortune. Poets and beggars, musicians and prophets, warriors and scoundrels, all creatures of that unbridled reality, we have had to ask but little of imagination, for our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable. This, my friends, is the crux of our solitude. And if these difficulties, whose essence we share, hinder us, it is understandable that the rational talents on this side of the world, exalted in the contemplation of their own cultures, should have found themselves without valid means to interpret us. It is only natural that they insist on measuring us with the yardstick that they use for themselves, forgetting that the ravages of life are not the same for all, and that the quest of our own identity is just as arduous and bloody for us as it was for them. The interpretation of our reality through patterns not our own, serves only to make us ever more unknown, ever less free, ever more solitary. Venerable Europe would perhaps be more perceptive if it tried to see us in its own past. If only it recalled that London took three hundred years to build its first city wall, and three hundred years more to acquire a bishop; that Rome labored in a gloom of uncertainty for twenty centuries, until an Etruscan King anchored it in history; and that the peaceful Swiss of today, who feast us with their mild cheeses and apathetic watches, bloodied Europe as soldiers of fortune, as late as the Sixteenth Century. Even at the height of the Renaissance, twelve thousand lansquenets in the pay of the imperial armies sacked and devastated Rome and put eight thousand of its inhabitants to the sword.”

“Latin America neither wants, nor has any reason, to be a pawn without a will of its own; nor is it merely wishful thinking that its quest for independence and originality should become a Western aspiration. However, the navigational advances that have narrowed such distances between our Americas and Europe seem, conversely, to have accentuated our cultural remoteness. Why is the originality so readily granted us in literature so mistrustfully denied us in our difficult attempts at social change? Why think that the social justice sought by progressive Europeans for their own countries cannot also be a goal for Latin America, with different methods for dissimilar conditions? No: the immeasurable violence and pain of our history are the result of age-old inequities and untold bitterness, and not a conspiracy plotted three thousand leagues from our home. But many European leaders and thinkers have thought so, with the childishness of old-timers who have forgotten the fruitful excess of their youth as if it were impossible to find another destiny than to live at the mercy of the two great masters of the world. This, my friends, is the very scale of our solitude. In spite of this, to oppression, plundering and abandonment, we respond with life. Neither floods nor plagues, famines nor cataclysms, nor even the eternal wars of century upon century, have been able to subdue the persistent advantage of life over death.”

“On a day like today, my master William Faulkner said, “I decline to accept the end of man”. I would fall unworthy of standing in this place that was his, if I were not fully aware that the colossal tragedy he refused to recognize thirty-two years ago is now, for the first time since the beginning of humanity, nothing more than a simple scientific possibility. Faced with this awesome reality that must have seemed a mere utopia through all of human time, we, the inventors of tales, who will believe anything, feel entitled to believe that it is not yet too late to engage in the creation of the opposite utopia. A new and sweeping utopia of life, where no one will be able to decide for others how they die, where love will prove true and happiness be possible, and where the races condemned to one hundred years of solitude will have, at last and forever, a second opportunity on earth.”

GABO: LIFE IN TRANSLATION – A TRIBUTE

“The first in line is tied to a tree and the last is being eaten by ants.” I have found few moments of realisation in literature as powerful as that which I experienced when reading Gabriel Gárcia Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude for the first time and I joined Aureliano Babilonia in deciphering Melquíades’s centuryold prediction of the demise of the Buendía dynasty and their symbolic town of Macondo. Past, present and future converged as I, too, was caught in that inexorable pull towards death and destruction that is all-pervading in the pages of the novel and the lives of its inhabitants.

On re-reading the Colombian’s novel, however, my original feeling of solemn satisfaction at this dénouement, morphed into a curiosity as to how to access the true, intended meaning of Melquíades’s prophecy and, by extension, García Márquez’s own message. As an English-speaking reader, I was already aware that Melquíades’s ciphered words only reached me through a series of filters: Aureliano Babilonia must first succeed in decrypting the coded Sanskrit before the crucial message could be relayed to me by García Márquez, but only when his words have been translated by Gregory Rabassa can I, the Western reader, eventually catch a glimpse of the truth. Yet, this will always be a translated, mitigated truth.

A naïve desire to understand and to truly know the distant, alien land of Macondo and all of its symbolic, far-reaching Latin American implications, led me to a formal study of García Márquez’s work. Yet, I have been struck by just how inadequate Western critical thinking has proved itself to be in seeking to translate and interpret One Hundred Years of Solitude, as well as much of the modern work emanating from that continent that has been neatly crampackaged for the Western reader into a singular canon and, within that, further forced to come under the blanket of ‘magical realism’.

García Márquez himself rejected this term, as well as the role of the critic that loomed behind. A journalist at heart, the Colombian saw fictionwriting as nothing more than a logical extension of his journalistic practices; no matter the profession, the subject matter was always life, and the writer’s job, to faithfully translate that reality for their reader. In One Hundred Years of Solitude, there is undoubtedly magic. However, first, there is reality. Just as García Márquez sought to throw off the burden of literary criticism, which had only begun to take an interest in the creative output of Latin America on the back of the Cuban Revolution, realism in his novel diverts away from its Western definition and absorbs some of those elements which are very real to the

Latin American experience: myth, folklore, story-telling, ritual.

You need look no further than the Buendías themselves for proof that García Márquez was preoccupied, perhaps above all else, with the reality of Latin America; every generation is informed by, engages with, and is inevitably destroyed by, the endlesslyperpetuating, tyrannical forces that preside over that continent. A brutal violence is present from the novel’s opening line, as Colonel Aureliano Buendía faces imminent death by firing squad, right up until the fulfilment of Melquiades’s prophecy, as Aureliano III’s corpse is left to the mercy of ants and Macondo is swept off the face of the earth.

As translation worked its magic and I grew to realise that Melquíades and García Márquez’s words were one and the same, I was reminded of José Arcadio’s early statement: “A person does not belong to a place until there is someone dead under the ground.” It is Melquíades and, by extension, Gabo himself, who are first buried in the symbolic, Latin American microcosm of Macondo; a land whose lived reality will forever be linked to the legacy of those buried underneath.

SASHA KOSMINSKY

SCANDAL, POST-RACISM AND THE In a Season 5 sketch of Chris Rock’s eponymous HBO show, the comedian unveils the Black Progress Report, a satirical exploration into the concept of the collective black fight for social acceptance. African Americans are embodied in the figure of ‘an ordinary black man’ whose position on the Black Progress Chart is constantly fluctuating between zero and the abstract promised land of ‘there’, depending on the accomplishments and shortcomings of prominent African American figures. For example, the airing of Roots in 1977 gives African Americans 7 steps forward, whereas Lil Kim’s VMA appearance in 1999 equates to 24 steps back. The sketch is not necessarily interested in a tabloid-esque naming and shaming/praising of African American celebrities, nor is its purpose to analyse the concept of an empirical mapping-out of Black Progress. What Chris Rock implicitly draws attention to is the language that surrounds the concept of Black Progress, the collec-

tivising, abstracting rhetoric of “we’re almost there” or “so and so let the side down” or “so and so sent us two steps back...”, suggesting that no actions committed by African Americans are isolated; they are either in favour of, or fully against, a collective endeavour. It is this concept and this rhetoric which gives songs such as McFadden & Whitehead’s Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now their potency amongst African Americans, the 70s disco hit since being labelled as ‘The Black National Anthem’. The launch of Scandal in 2012 was automatically considered as a step forward in the conquest of Black Progress. Written by Shonda Rhimes (an African American female), based on the life of Judy Smith (another African American female) with Kerry Washington (yet again, an African American female) as the main protagonist, Olivia Pope, the political thriller is the first American prime time network series with an African American, female lead actress since Teresa

Graves in 1974 Blaxploitation series Get Christie Love! The show’s diverse casting has prompted discussion amongst fans and academics as to whether Scandal represents an era of post-racial television, claiming that the race or ethnicity of the show’s actors does not define their role within the show, nor is it ever mentioned. According to the Guardian, ‘ethnicity is a non-issue’ in Scandal. It might be refreshing to watch a series void of racial typecasting, liberating to make that Thursday evening trip to a world where race does not impinge on one’s freedoms and privileges. Yet, there is scope to suggest that race--and particularly the implications of one’s race on social progress-- is indeed one of Scandal’s primary preoccupations, especially if you dissect the chilling, baritone monologues of veteran actor, Joe Morton, who plays Olivia’s father, Rowan ‘Eli’ Pope in the series. If Chris Rock were to place Eli Pope on his Black Progress Chart, Eli would

RHETORIC OF BLACK PROGRESS be ‘there’: the head of the fictitious CIA organisation, B613, he is technically more powerful than the President of the United States. However, there are many clues which suggest that Eli Pope’s race is not incidental in terms of his role in the show. As Rhimes reveals through his emphatic tirades, Eli Pope does not just happen to be the African American head of B613, he earned his post despite being an African American, as exposed in the sentiments of his speeches which open and close Scandal’s third season, which aired in 2014. Season three of Scandal begins with Eli’s ‘twice as good’ speech, where he speaks of the pressure on African Americans to work Harder Better Faster Stronger than their white peers in order to succeed (See: Marcus Mabry’s Biography of Condoleeza Rice entitled ‘Twice As Good’). In the speech, which he delivers to his soon-to-be-disgraced daughter, Olivia, white Americans are abstracted as ‘them’ and ‘they’ and are presented

as a single entity of competition, their social privileges are the apparent benchmark of what African Americans strive towards, according to Eli’s mantra: “You have to be twice as good as them to get half of what they have.” Eli also has the last word in the series, in the form of the ‘young, gifted and black’ monologue. The reference to the Nina Simone song acts as the base for Eli’s discussion with Harrison, (played by African American actor, Columbus Short) about the pressure placed on African Americans not to squander their talents, lest they ‘let the side down.’ These speeches, as well as Eli’s vitriolic lesson in #checkyourprivilege to President Fitz and the oblique references to the NAACP, prove that at the heart of the show’s script lies a racially and socially-aware writer who does not seek to whitewash the question of race in the series.

To consider Scandal and other supposedly ‘colour blind cast’ series, such as Fox’s Sleepy Hollow, as postracial reveals just how shallow are the public’s expectations of how race and ethnicity are dealt with in popular television: apparently, if races are not typecasted or explicitly referred to, they are as good as nonexistent, and if a television series has a racially diverse cast, it must be the epitome of diversity in broadcasting. It is undeniable that Scandal has broken records and pushed boundaries with regards to the way race is dealt with in popular television. However, it has not pushed race out of the picture completely: its very language is that of an African American writer sensitive to the ideas and language that surround the concept of Black Progress and the implications of race and ethnicity on one’s journey to ‘there’.

Roseanne Chantiluke

Psychiatrist: Please, tell me more. Girl: They cut off my genitals. Psychiatrist: Was this recent? Girl: It happened yesterday and it happened today. Psychiatrist: Why have you come here? You should be at a hospital! I can’t help you with this. I’ll call 9-9-9 (Picks up mobile phone, ready to dial). Girl: Stop. (He puts down the phone) It is not the sort of wound you think it is, it isn’t a bleeding wound. I was circumcised. Psychiatrist: Oh! Why didn’t you just tell me you had undergone FGM? You scared me for a moment. You need not be so simplistic in your explanation with me. I understand that practice. Now, how old were you when you underwent the procedure? Girl: Six. But it happens every day. Psychiatrist: Is this a new version? My understanding of the procedure is that it only occurs once in a young girl’s life. Was your case special? Girl: There is no way to feel special about having your genitals cut. Psychiatrist: I’m sorry. I did not mean to offend. I simply want understand why it is that you are being cut everyday. Girl: You’re a silly man. A cut like that doesn’t just go away. It stays with you. I had my emotions circumcised in that moment. Psychiatrist: Are you being metaphorical? Surely, you must know that sexual feeling is not the root of all feeling. Your clitoris may be gone, but at least you did not suffer any further complications. Now, did you say you were Sudanese? Girl: Yes, culturally. But what does that have do with this? Psychiatrist: It is just for my notes. Girl: My being cut had nothing to do with the environment or culture in which this occurred to me. It happened, and I don’t care about why. Psychiatrist: Ah, but you see, the why is just as important as the how, when, and where. Girl: “Why”, “how”, “when” and “where” are not thoughts that occur to me. These are not the questions that run through my head when I wake up in the morning and slip my hands in between my thighs. If these are the questions that matter to you, I will answer them. But they won’t make a difference to me. You ask “why”: because my mother had it done to her and society expected it of her. “How”: with a strong, thick piece of white thread stretched, pulled and dragged up and down my clitoris, my little labia and big labia and then stitched

A CONVERSATION ABOUT MY

Girl: They cut my genitals.

C L I T O R I S

shut. “When”: on the morning of my sixth birthday. My mother woke me up, put hina on my hands, braided my hair and put me in the prettiest white dress I ever wore. “Where”: on top of beautifully thatched Birish on the floor of the village nurse’s house, in a little village in the north of Sudan called Wadi Arees. Psychiatrist: You seem to have a good recollection of that day. Has the story been retold to you? Girl: The story was never retold and I was made to feel silly for asking about it. I witnessed many girls undergo the procedure, relived the trauma, a trauma that I could not remember, but one that my body took offence to. Every time I watched a girl get cut, my genitals hurt. My body relived the experience. Every cut I saw, I felt. Psychiatric: Yes. But what about your own experience? Girl: My experience is irrelevant, because it would not have been much different to how these girls experienced this wretched practice. I have seen it done enough times to know that they all react the same way. They squirm, they scream, they look into their mothers’ eyes and plead. They push back and the nurse pushes them down again. Their mothers hold them down, and plead for the nurse to hurry up. Sometimes they die and sometimes they suffer complications and die a few days later. But often, they have to live. They live, live with a wound that will be ripped and ravaged at every stage of womanhood. Their memories of the first time they made love will be memories of pain. They memory of being overwhelmed by the pain of having their lover’s penis press up against their stitches. Giving birth will destroy them. They will unstitch them so that the baby can be birthed, and restitch them after it has been born. And every time another child comes, that’s all they think about: the pain. They will ask themselves: is having my genitals ripped apart worth having this child? The very thing that makes them women is the thing that hurts them the most. And you know what the worst part is? It is ugly. It is a ghastly sight. My womanhood is ghastly sight and I can’t bear to look at it, touch it, or even think about having anybody else touch it. Psychiatrist: Ah, I see. Is there a lover in the picture? Girl: No. Psychiatrist: Any children? Girl: No. Psychiatrist: So these things haven’t happen to you then? Girl: I live it everyday.

(Girl gets up and leaves the office)

The End

Lina Abushouk 45

CULTURAL

DIFFERENCES

WHAT THEY DIDN’T TELL ME ABOUT

C O L O M B I A

ou will always be called by your most distinctive physical characteristic. No matter what this is. This may be something like ‘narison,’ which means big nose, or ‘china,’ if you’ve got curly hair or ‘moreno’ if you happen to have brown skin or perhaps ‘gordito’ if you are a little bit fat. Failing those, ‘chico,’ boy, usually works too. It is pretty safe to say that calling people in this way is meant with no malice, it is just stating facts. The bus: public transport can often be a mind-field in any new city. Medellin is no exception. There are several things to note here.

Number one: when you get on the bus it is likely that someone will come to the chair you’re sitting and give you what you might think is a present. It is not. The sweets, pens, incense, cards, DVDs or toys are for you to look at without ‘compromiso’1 and then buy if you feel so inclined. This is a reoccurring theme in Colombia, being an entrepreneur wherever possible. Number 2: if there are no more seats on the bus and you are carrying a bag, it is likely that the ‘compromiso’ understood in English as commitment 1

closest seated person will yank it from your arms and place it on their lap until one of you gets off the bus. Do not be shocked; they are not trying to steal your shopping. The way to get people’s attention: There is a certain way beckoning must be done. A downwards-flicking motion of the wrist with the back of your hand facing the person you’re beckoning. This must be accompanied by a swift nod of the head with pursed lips and perhaps a ‘tss’ sound. Anything else just won’t be understood.

MALA HENRIQUES

THE ALTERNATIVE READING LIST PROJECT: A

P E

ANNE

hat follows is not a definitive reading list on any topic. It is not a finished reading list on any topic. This is an example of the Alternative Reading List Project and its goals: to bring together the kind of research and writing that fascinates us and makes us question the scope of what we’re taught, and the voices that make us wonder who we aren’t hearing. I don’t need to make the argument here that the movement for inclusive curriculum is a step

MEEKER

toward social justice—I hold it to be self-evident. Whether the university changes its approach toward curriculum, whether it changes it at all or broadly enough or quickly enough or deeply enough, the power of our education has always fundamentally been in our own hands. We believe that Oxford as a community of teachers and learners is brilliant, insightful, curious, and generous enough to make learning from each other the best thing we can

do here. We invite you to join us in the Alternative Reading List Project. On a personal level, these are the books that have captured my attention over the past four months or so, and the ones that I obsessively badger other people to read—meaning that that they’re mostly anthropological and largely focused on questions of race, ethnicity, and globalization. This project stems from our belief that the artificial disciplinary boundaries within knowledge are often unhelpful.

Fields, B. and Fields, K. 2012. Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life. New York: Verso. Why are ‘race’ and ‘racism’ separated in discussion and in policy? Explores the issues at stake in the conceptualization behind our discussion. Wide-ranging, the kind of thing I want everyone to read. Graeber, D. 2013. The Democracy Project. London: Penguin Politics. Neatly raises the assumption that we know all possible iterations of politics and economics available to humanity—and that what can and cannot work in human society is pre-determined. Harrison, F. and Harrison, I. (eds). 1999. African-American Pioneers in Anthropology. Oxford: University of Illinois Press. How is our curriculum agreed upon—what perspectives are considered and whose stories are not told? Why have most of us in our discipline never heard of most of these anthropologists? Further—where are the scholars of colour in Oxford’s teaching staff ? Appadurai, A. 2013. The Future as Cultural Fact. London: Verso. Raises the question of why and how are we bounded by the present in our academic disciplines: we must understand and appreciate the power of aspirations—political, social, spiritual, and material—to change the world. Du Bois, W. E. B. 2004 [1903]. The Souls of Black Folk. London: Paradigm. We do not only chase the future, but contextualize it in the totality of our past—there are voices relevant today that have not been heard enough.

For more info or to get involved, check out our facebook group (The Alternative Reading List Project) or send an email to oxfordalternativereadinglists@gmail.com.

THE COTTON WILL BLUSH L. Dickson-Tetteh

The cotton will blush With the thrill of life To mark my passing. Cessation of strife, Release at long last From cold iron’s bite, The gifts death brings me For the coming night.

Where the saffron rays Touch the deepest fold, Life was not measured In ounces of gold, We could exist and Have children grow old Amidst the pulse of The culture we hold.

I’ll die smiling for Mine is victory. Peace not guaranteed by Their trinity three, They think they’ve won but They can’t know I see That distant land where I am walking free.

SKIN DEEP TEAM Editors Anuradha Henriques Lina Abushouk Graphic Designers Sylvia Hong Arieh Frosh Deputy Editors Hester Elliott Sasha Kosminsky Jahnavi Emmanuel Nasim Asl Logo Design Sylvia Hong Hannah Riley Tim Cannon Conceptual Contributers Tadiwa Madenga Shoumik Bhattacharya Constance Treves Anna Schroder With thanks to Tunji Adeniyi Jones Cover art by Arieh Frosh 51