Strangest part about this whole Windrush ting is people acting *shocked* about a British govt treating its Black citizens with such contempt
angry, yes. Outraged, yes. But *shocked* really? Like, really? Stop it.
However I do think this issue *a govt secretly destroying its citizens records and then retroactively deporting them based on ethnicity*
Has great lessons for people still peddling a bullshit respectability politics in 2018:
No one more embodies the *respectable* *immigrant* than that generation: War Vets, Skilled Workers, Paid their own way, bought homes...
Stayed married - even when they should not have - until their dying days, put up with unbelievable abuse, and this is their payback.
Went church on sundays. Shit they even mostly had pictures of the Queen on the wall as you will know if you have been to a Windrush house.
But no amount of being respectable can make people that hate you for what you are *not what you do* respect you, so don't waste time trying.
But there is another side of my grandparents generation that I feel embarrassed to talk about but here we are now so may as well..
More than Igbo's and Yorubas, Gujaratis and Punjabis British Caribbeans were particularly vulnerable because....
They *really* believed they were British. It seems sadly naive in hindsight but they really did and therefore...
When they met what they met they mostly pretended to people *back home* that everything was ok, that life in the mother country was swell
And they broke themselves to send barrels and money *back home* that they did not really have, because nobody would believe them anyway...
If they told them what was really going on. Therefore *like all families* the anger they felt was often taken out on their children..
Which was my dads generation. Who were simply not willing to accept what their parents had. See: The entire history of the 1980's
But we have often lost ourselves now. We ain't *really* British, obviously but we also are mostly not Caribbean anymore...
Many of these kids out here being referred to as *Caribbean* in public language have never even visited the region...
Don't nyam no hard food, would't recognise a picture of Garvey. They are quintessentially and culturally English, but for their blackness.
But in these days of empire 2.0 shit is about to get even peaker. It is what it is.
I will post this thread once more so you can understand the mentality/history this moment stems from threadreaderapp.com/thread/9804896…
