Pity politics
This is going to upset a lot of people, so live with your L please. This is my opinion.
Why, please tell me why, do British people travel to other people’s countries to go and study their shit? Are the native and local people of that nation not able to take a sufficient interest in their own history/culture to satisfy you? Why do you have to swoop in and “save the day???” Or worse still, blatantly steal their shit?
The reason I ask this is because there is yet another case of a “British Professor being tried for theft in A.N. Other Foreign country. The specifics of the case seem to be the same as every other time a white supremacist (benign) goes into someone’s country and goes around prodding at their stuff, don’t do it.
When I was growing up in the 90’s my parents taught me “protectionism” i.e. as a young black woman when entering a shop;
1. please keep your hands where CCTV can see them at all times.
2. Do not pick up items to observe them, only to purchase them.
3. Always keep your receipts.
This means no one can accuse you of stealing.
As a young lady I was taught not to wear short skirts and go out at night, not because rapists are all vampires that can’t stand sunlight, but to remove classic stereotypical excuse to remove any “victim shaming” from my name.
I have spoken in my post “but for the grace of God go I” about a horrendous rape that occurred in a woman’s home when she’d requested a non sexual favour from an ex boyfriend. What I may not have made abundantly clear was the horrific victim shaming that occurred when the rapists mother heard that the victim was going to press charges.
A pillar of the ex-pat community, this woman used her influence to character assassinate the victim, “she’s jealous because my son is going to marry another woman and not her” (factually correct the day after the rape the rapist was meant to fly to Freetown to have an arranged marriage.)
“She’d had sex with him before, when they were together, its just break-up sex.” At knifepoint????? Years after a breakup??? Make it make sense.
If you remember that post you will know that the only thing that saved the victim was God, in the form of what can best be described as divine intervention, the rapist wrote a detailed letter to the victim (breaching his bail and potentially saving me from rape) in which he confessed and gloried in his crimes. This convinced the jury beyond reasonable doubt to convict him because he detailed things not in evidence, like where he’d dropped the knife. Everyone in the UK knows that rape convictions are low in the UK. Last year it went down to 2% of all reported rapes down from almost 4% previously, I have no idea how low it was at the time of the conviction, but it would have been around the 4%-7% max. And we all know the problems black woman have with being believed by institutions (institutional racism presenting itself as a bias telling the woman she either “deserved or provoked it” or she “should man up and deal with it” because black women are seen as having higher pain thresholds, a stupidity that traced back from slavery when slaves would be mutilated in ways such as having breasts cut off.
This massive digression is to say that when bad things happen to people, people automatically go for victim shaming. Did you encourage the rapist by the way you looked at him? Why did you invite your ex to put up curtains for you (he was literally a handyman???) and did you take proper precautions to stop the bad thing from happening to you. All these things as a woman and as a black person you are taught.
Yet white people aren’t and this seems to be the problem. There are a dime a dozen ex-pats rotting in foreign jail cells because they believe that they are empowered to go to other people’s countries and study their history/culture/language. And they are. Where the problem lies is when you touch their national artefacts and magically think that British law will apply in Iran for example. It won’t and we’re not here to save you from your arrogance and stupidity. Nazim Radcliffe who legitimately committed no crime spent 5 years in prison, essentially for visiting her parents. And that was only captured by the media because she was very fair skinned and married to a white man.
You need to learn to be above reproach, when touring dangerous countries, stick to the tourist areas make eye contact with no one and be about your business. DO NOT TOUCH THEIR GODDAMNED ARTEFACTS! I don’t know how many times people have to tell you that the colonial era is over and people are very sensitive against you stealing MORE of their stuff.
What I find particularly offensive in the British Museum these days is in the African exhibit. It has items from across the continent, and some (not all) of the captions read something like this.
“It is very wrong to steal, during the colonial era British troops stole XYZ here is a picture of British troops with the stolen items, midway through the act of stealing them and killing their owners and erasing their history.”
I find it even more wrong when people admit it is stollen goods and yet display them anyway.
I don’t know about you, but I have not ever displayed stollen items in my house. Everything I have in my home I paid for with money and consent. I don’t hate Britain, or British people. I do not hold the sins of the fathers against the sons. So if you know its stollen, you know who you stole it from because you have pictures of you stealing, why not give it back? Show some good will and some humility? I know why, because they are worried that it opens the door for trillions in reparations. Is it better to hold stollen items in your house? I think not. Have shame.
I find it so hard to pity these men (they’re almost always men) because they had no business there. It was an act of supreme white privilege that sent them to someone else’s’ country and compelled them to go touching that which didn’t belong to them as if 1808 never died. Why don’t you hear of people of other nations (not western nations) doing this? I’ll tell you why, if a Sierra Leone national went to Iran and touched their stuff they’d be locked up in a cell for the next 20 years of their life in accordance with that country’s laws. There is no privilege going to save them. No campaigns to spring them free of prison. So as a result, they act accordingly.
I want British people to take the same common-sense attitude as is given to young black men in America. “don’t carry a gun then the police won’t stop you. And even if they do, they won’t find a gun on you.” We teach protectionism because we know the world is something to be fearful of. Yet we don’t teach it to the “empowered classes” and as a result every couple of months there is a petition on Change.org to spring X free from Iran or Y free from Pakistan because they didn’t follow local laws and customs.
Maybe that’s one for PSHSE?
Grace and courage.
Annetta Mother Smith.