Touch your own mug, and other muddled thoughts on race

Maybe I'm saying something, but most likely it isn't anything. Proceed.


So my awesomely rad sister some years ago bought me a sloganed mug that has been a fave of mine ever since. It is now missing and I have decided to accept that it is now gone. RIP mug - you were loved and will be missed. And the slogan on the mug?

Touch your own hair.

I giggle just thinking about it, but it hasn't really been that well received. At one place I worked, a woman indignantly hissed, "What does that mean?" With that one question, it is clear that I was working in the UK when this question was asked, as I cannot imagine any American not understanding the meaning. The context is completely lost here.

Erm, how *do* I explain the often uneasy relationship in the US between Blacks and the predominant culture (i.e., white folks) that this mug satarises so succiently? Is it possible for me to express the audacity, radicalness, and sheer uppity-ness of the message? It's not that I'm unwilling or unable. I have no problem with making full use of audacity and I take particular advantage of my unique multi-cultural, multi-national personal make-up within this largely homogeneous society in which I currently live. And Scotland is a rare homogeneous society, cos there are large swathes of people here who actually like when others are a bit unusual and even provocative. In fact, it is to be expected of you. Maybe I'm exaggerating, but there is no worse insult than for someone to have bad craic. So yes, I have randomly and ironically accused people of being racist for doing unracist things.* So going back to the mug (and perhaps my weird craic), the problem is that context cannot be effectively established without a 9-hour PowerPoint presentation with diagrams and flow charts. Like Al Gore in An Inconvenient Truth, only going on about race.

So back to skewed context. It was 0330 on Sunday morning and I was in a pie shop in west end Edinburgh. To give you even more context, I was coming from a night out and was wearing a pair of red hotpants (over a pair of tights/stockings - get real thinking my thighs would have it any orher way). Not to be too up my own self, but my bodacious bum was on fine show. I have an ass that makes it clear to most Black people in America, even with my odd colouring, that I am in fact one of them.

One of the guys I knew and was with at the shop was winding up two random girls. "They're racist! They're saying you have a big black bum! Did you hear them?" The girls were dead offended and wanted to batter my pal for my sake, not realising I knew the dickhead.

Finally, I spoke. "Stop talking about my bum," I said. "I know you're all obsessed with my bum cos it's amazing. You all wanna get with it. You wanna get with it, then go back to your white women after having your black girl with a big bum!"

Some of the people in the pie shop looked back at me, dumbfounded. Most were too drunk to take notice of my tirade. I guess dropping a little bit of radical (and womanist) Alice Walker philosophy at half past three on a Sunday morning in Edinburgh, Scotland is a bit much.


* Well, I should clarify: it's ironic to me. It is probably distressing and not at all ironic to have some brown girl to go up to you and shout, "Racist!" when you're queuing in a Poundland.

End of season do

Last night was the end of season celebration for my volleyball club, Jets. This will be henceforth referred to as the "end of season do", do being the word that Scottish people use to refer to events of a celebratory (and of course, drunken) nature that do not occur regularly. So, what would be called a bachelor party in the US is here called a stag do. Someone at work moving? A leaving do. You get the picture. Now attempting to write the pluralisation of do is, for me, the trickiest bit. Dos? Do's? As much as I hate to see a superfluous apostrophe, I am inclined to write do's, as most Scottish are. Please don't judge me too harshly. When in Rome...

The club rented out the venue space at the Scottish Book Trust (hey, free publicity! I really should get a kick back), which we have done for the past two do's (Casino Night and Race Night). It's actually a lovely space, wasted on pissy dickheads like us. We never use the amazing mezzanine/balcony level and I have ceased trying to get people up there. You would think with the amount of fornicating/hooking up going on in the club (that will have to be another entry, my lovelies), someone would be up there, snogging.

I'm not sure who decided this - cos as I mentioned before, we are just a group of immature and drunken nobs - but we had a catered, sit down meal. It was nice enough, for a meal that had probably been cooked at 0430 and sitting in warmers all day: just only a touch dry. Prizes were given out. I didn't get one, so we will swiftly move on to what really matters: the dancing.

I decided rather early on that we would be dancing after dinner and I figured I would collate a playlist. This is not an easy job for your dear blogger. I have rather peculiar taste for the EDN, i.e., I need to hear bass in the music to dance. This eliminates all of my favourite DMX jams that I'd probably dance to. This meant also that I was moaned at about not have The Birdie Song. To be fair, I thought he was being ironic when it was suggested. Unfortunately, it was procured on someone else's MP3 player and when played, all was right in the Jets world. What can be said that I'm more reassured about a dancing situation that includes the misogynistic and homophobic 'Where da hood at?' over the flipping Birdie Song? We'll need years on that therapy bench for that.

After numerous shouts of "One more song!", we managed to get the wastoids oot the door of the SBT and on to our next destination. Now this always throws us for a loop. While we are united in our utter devotion to volleyball, we have disparate tastes, ranging to people who have to the Birdie Song on their fucking iPod to metalheads. Nothing satisfies the lot. In the past, we've gone to shitty places like Stereo where they only serve vaguely alcoholic Kool-Aid (those are alcopops to you UKers) to the masses of 12-year-olds they admit and shitty aeroplane hangars/tin cans/dead traps. Yes, I refer to the hell hole Drop Kick Murphys, where as God as my witness I will never step foot in again. Even if I could cure cancer, world poverty and get rid of my ham hock arms with one foot in the door of the place, I'd never go there. Slimming of the thighs would have to be thrown in on that deal, but God's not down, saying I'm being too greedy and all bets are off.

I've learned that if one person says "Let's go to ___!" the loudest and most fervently and walks quickly in that direction, the drunken herd follows. I know if confidently insisted on going to the bus station, a dozen Jets would herd over there, with me as their shepherd, looking for a Diet Coke and vodka and a place to sit and take their shoes off. Luckily for them, I led their sorry, gazeboed asses to Espionage.

Now the 'Naj is kinda like a date with a nice, but nerdy geography teacher your mother set you up with: it makes you wonder, "Is this the best I could do on a Saturday night?" But you're in, stuck, and there's nothing you can do and nowhere to go. When you're in the Tardis-y like maze of the 'Naj, all space and time cease to exist. We could have been there 10 minutes or 11 hours, I could not tell. There could be 4 floors or a million. It is our Matrix. Evil lurks in every corner to try to prevent us from our ultimate goal - getting out in one piece: harpy drunk girls; hen do's wanting loads of attention (yes, yes bitch - you're getting married. Get over yourself); dudes who can't dance, trying to lure your beautiful compatriots away.

May I digress from the Matrix analogy for one moment to address this very sad phenomenon of the boy that cannot dance? It is endemic here. I am not even going to entertain any arguments that it's cos I'm in Scotland, the whitest place in the world. And I'll tell you for why: 1) Some white boys can dance (I met a few in my time in NC, but only a few!) and 2) Even the brothers and other brown folks here cannot dance. Not even a shuffle. They do not even have the ability to look cool, let alone sexy, while they stand by the wall, instead just looking weirdly creepy and strung out.

I've lost some steam and there's plenty to read here. I'll get back to you about other stuff later.