MY parents have always been very proud of who they are and where they come from.
I grew up in a household in Bolton that had a typical British-West Indian front room.
Mastermind host Clive Myrie has revealed the vile racist hate mail he received at the BBC[/caption]
Coasters on the table with “Jamaica” emblazoned across them.
Decorative plates on the wall featuring some of the beauty spots my mum and dad left behind in the Caribbean, to settle in cold and snowy Britain, the sandy beaches of Montego Bay, the epic Dunn’s River Falls, the resorts of Ocho Rios and Negril in the parish of Westmoreland, where my family are from and where Ursula Andress emerged from the clear blue water in that famous scene from Bond movie Dr No.
There was always a bottle of Captain Morgan dark rum or Wray & Nephew white overproof rum in the drinks cabinet.
Of course, we ate fish and chips and meat pies and sticky toffee pudding.
But staple food on our dinner table was Caribbean. Ackee and salted fish, rice and peas and chicken, oxtail soup, yams, curried goat.
At a young age I understood what my parents left behind for this new life in Britain and I quickly came to believe the UK, in colonising the West Indies, was simply giving back a tiny fraction of what it had taken from Jamaicans by allowing my parents, and the Windrush Generation before them, to settle in the UK. “We’re over here because you were over there.” That seemed logical to me, eminently sensible and fair.
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Yet I grew up in the 1970s, as a rampant far-right movement frothed at the mouth. The National Front made headlines with their racism and anti-Semitism.
They marched on the streets of Northern towns such as Bolton, snarling and cursing and demanding people like me “were sent back home”. (I was born and bred in Bolton, by the way, so I didn’t have far to travel.)
The illogicality of their protests, I felt, mirrored the illogicality of what underpinned their aggression — racism.
These skinheads and bully boys knew nothing about me or my family yet they hated us.
Why? Because we happened to have more melanin in our skin, giving us a darker com- plexion than theirs. THAT’S IT.
The violence, intimidation and aggression is based on THAT!
How pathetic and sad do you have to be to hold those racist views based on simple pigmentation?
I quickly grew to understand that racism isn’t a black problem but a problem for those who happen to hold those views. They are the inadequates, the sad and the lonely.
They are the deficient, the feeble and woeful, engaged not in celebrating life but in killing it. Racists are miserably feeble, lamentable and deplorable human beings.
Growing up understanding all this took away some of the anger I would feel seeing the fascist marches on British streets and prepared me for the racism I would experience myself when I got older.
BULLY BOYS
I walked into the BBC’s headquarters in London one morning a couple of years ago to prepare to read the television news that night. I decided to check the pigeonholes for mail.
There was an envelope addressed to me, so I opened it. Inside was a card with a gorilla on the front and a message that said: “People like you shouldn’t be allowed on the telly.”
A wave of anger came over me — which then subsided in a few seconds, turning to pity for the loser who took the trouble to buy the card, get a stamp, write the note and post it.
The card was designed to make me feel bad about myself and who I am.
Black History Month serves the opposite function.
It is designed to celebrate black people and where they come from, informing the rest of society of their many achievements. It is a necessary corrective to the losers who froth at the mouth over pigmentation.
I grew up with pride in who I am and where I come from. Showing that pride does not mean having to denigrate others.
It should simply be an expression of the good men and women can do, whatever their complexion happens to be.
Clive was born to Jamaican parents and grew up in Bolton, describing his house as a typical British-West Indian home[/caption]
Clive and his wife Catherine on their wedding day in 1998[/caption]
Clive took over as host of Mastermind in August, taking over from John Humphrys[/caption]
