If we truly want an end to racism, we need to understand the past

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Superior book coverSuperior: the Return of Race Science
by Angela Saini

Saini, an engineer-turned-journalist, looks at how science was and is used to create, justify and perpetuate racism. She begins with the so-called science that defined race in the first place – using long-since discredited methods such as phrenology and skin-colour charts. The more you read about how people have been grouped differently over time, and the political reasons for the changing delineations between “races”, the more clear it becomes that race is an entirely social construct, not a scientific one.

But of course race became a social reality, one that has been used to justify a lot of very dodgy science. From European explorer scientists publishing ignorant untruths about native people they encountered to justify colonialism and slavery, to the ugly history of eugenics, there have now been centuries of racist lies masquerading as science. And worse, the lies still need to be countered because they are still part of public discourse.

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K-drama review: Reply 1988

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Reply 1988 poster

This is the third and, in my opinion, best instalment in the Reply series that began with 1994. In Reply 1988 (tvN 2015–2016) comedy and romance are still present, but take a back seat to the character establishment. The period setting is once again excellent.

Some of the Reply set-up remains the same every time. The main character, Sung Duk-seon, is a young woman with four close male friends – one of whom (we learn from flashforwards to the present day) she will end up marrying. Her parents are played by Sung Dong-il and Lee Il-hwa and, like in the previous series, these two characters share the actors’ names. The mother, Il-hwa, always cooks too much food.

Other than that, this series is rather different. The five families all live in one alley in the Seoul neighbourhood Ssangmun-dong. It’s working class, but even this tiny sample has its hierarchy of financial stability. 18-year-old Duk-seon (played by Lee Hye-ri) and her family are the worst off, thanks to her father making a series of poor financial decisions. They live in a half-basement flat (now a familiar term outside Korea thanks to Parasite) underneath the much larger and knick-knack-filled home of her schoolmate Kim Jung-hwan (Ryu Jun-yeol) and his family.

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June 2020 reading round-up

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Glastonbury

June sped by, didn’t it? And it’s been eventful. I made a good start on my anti-racism reading list, but I’m determined for this not to be a temporary detour from my usual reads. I’ve bought a fair few titles and added a lot more to my future reads list, so you should see them dotted into my reviews here. And more fool me that I haven’t previously covered these books.

I also watched the documentary I Am Not Your Negro, based on James Baldwin’s proposal for a book looking at his own life through the lens of the deaths of three of his friends: Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. Samuel L Jackson reads Baldwin’s unpublished words, cut together with footage of Baldwin speaking at universities, events and on TV. It’s a really impressive – though of course upsetting – piece that draws a clear line to today’s Black Lives Matter movement.

The last weekend of June would have been Glastonbury. This year rather than listening to new live sets from Worthy Farm on the radio, I watched many hours of old Glastonbury footage that the BBC made available on iPlayer. Inevitably, my favourites so far are Janelle Monáe’s 2011 set and the 2019 performance of Christine and the Queens. But I was also surprised to find myself spellbound by Dolly Parton. Who knew?

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We need to describe the invisible monolith

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Reni Eddo-Lodge coverWhy I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race
by Reni Eddo-Lodge

My favourite of the anti-racist books I have read so far (though they’re all good), this is an extension of Eddo-Lodge’s 2014 essay of the same title that pushed her to the forefront of British journalists asked to comment on issues around race and racism. Which isn’t quite as ironic as it sounds; the essay was after all a public statement about racism. She was (justifiably) tired of having the same conversations with white people who refuse to acknowledge racism; tired of racism being deemed a problem for black and brown people to solve; tired of racism and talking about it taking up so much of her time and emotions. She was giving herself permission to take a break, walk away, self-preserve.

This book expands on that essay by detailing the many ways in which racism exists in the UK that white people tend not to notice. From police bigotry to the language people use; from the largely erased history of black people in the UK to the systems and processes throughout our society that are racist, Eddo-Lodge lays it bare. She devotes a chapter to untangling arguments that confound race and class in Britain (“It’s really a class problem” is a common defence against the existence of racism here).

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We that believe we are better than all others

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We that are youngWe That Are Young
by Preti Taneja

I figured that while we were in lockdown, and I was back to a respectable reading speed, it was time to tackle one of the doorstop books on my TBR. There are a few of them. Generally I enjoy a big book as they have the room to really delve deep into characters and weave expansive plot. This novel ticked those boxes and much more. That said, it is now a month since I finished it, so I’m afraid this review will be far briefer than this epic saga deserves.

This is a retelling of King Lear set in modern-day Delhi. Devraj is the head of a megacompany and at the start of this tale he announces his retirement and intention to split the company between his three daughters. They all, in different ways, defy him. And he is growing senile, which makes him increasingly anti-women. It’s a brilliant, darkly fascinating interpretation of Shakespeare’s tragedy.

The story opens with Jivan, Devraj’s godson, returning to India after spending half his young life in America. He is attractive and well educated, and wants more than anything to reconnect with the family – especially his half-brother Jeet. But instead he is met by his estranged father Ranjit (Devraj’s right-hand man) and Devraj himself and swept away to the family estate, “the Farm”, where Jivan is told he now has a job in the company’s security department. This job comes with a creepy room from which he can monitor all the Farm’s CCTV and listen in on employee conversations – including the sisters’ lunchtime conversation.

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The heroin, that trickster, had made her feel actual love and then ripped it away

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black wave coverBlack Wave
by Michelle Tea

This is an apocalyptic feminist novel about queer culture in 1990s California. It is strange and dark and brilliant. Perhaps it’s because it gets very meta, which I tend to enjoy.

Michelle Tea has novelised a period in her own life, when her life in San Francisco sunk to such a bad place that she felt her only way out was to move to LA. But that move doesn’t happen until halfway through the book, so the first half depicts her falling apart. It’s not a pretty story but Tea’s prose is funny enough that it manages to avoid being depressing.

Fictional Michelle’s main (though not only) problem is drugs. In the opening chapter we learn that, since writing a memoir that “glamorised her recreational drug intake”, Michelle has continued to party in San Francisco’s Mission neighbourhood, almost every night moving from alcohol to cocaine to alcohol to cannabis. She has balanced this with a job at a bookstore and a steady girlfriend to whom she is frequently unfaithful. She is at the centre of a subculture that she herself epitomises.

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K-drama review: Let’s Eat

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Let's Eat series 1 poster
In series 1 Soo-kyung shares food with her neighbours Dae-young and Jin-yi, as well as her annoying boss.

I’m not entirely sure, but I have a hunch that this TV show was cooked up (boom boom) to promote Korean food to the rest of the world. Let’s Eat (tvN 2013-2014) hits all the beats of a typical K-drama, but with cheesily shoehorned-in glamour shots of food and descriptions thereof. It’s a little like Kantaro the Sweet Tooth Salaryman but less wacky. And it actually made me want to eat most of the foods depicted.

Our hero, happily divorced paralegal Lee Soo-kyung (played by Lee Soo-kyung), is very comfortable with living alone. Her only frustration is that she loves to eat at restaurants, but dining out in her neighbourhood of Seoul is not designed for groups of one. (Most restaurants serve big sharing platters designed for 3 or 4 people.) Her best friend Kyung-mi (Jung Soo-young) is busy with her young children and Soo-kyung doesn’t really like her colleagues at the small law firm.

However, she discovers that both her next-door neighbours are also in need of company at mealtimes. Handsome but mysterious Goo Dae-young (Yoon Doo-joon, or Doojoon, a Hallyu star who has sung with Beast and Highlight) is a gourmand with a habit of lecturing his companions on the proper way to eat certain items. He works in insurance and has a tendency to put off new acquaintances by constantly trying to sell them a policy. It says a lot for Yoon that he manages to make this character charming.

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May 2020 reading round-up

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Showcase cinema Avonmeads
“We are pressing pause for now” – the cinema nearest our house last week. That empty carpark felt really eerie.

Oh dear. I read a decent amount this month but only managed to write one review. And with all those bank holidays too! I really do want to write more about all of this month’s books, but I am in danger of forgetting any interesting critical thoughts I had about them. Ah well. There have been things on my mind.

Speaking of things on my mind, racism is – rightly – a major point of discussion right now. As a white woman, I need to educate myself as well as call it out when I see it. My school education was sorely lacking in this department. In history (which I studied up to A-level) the coverage of slavery was limited to the trade triangle and maybe one or two accounts of slave ships. Colonialism was an even briefer footnote, limited to a few maps of the world showing the extent of different empires, but no examination of how they came to be, how they operated, the long-lasting effect they had on all countries involved. Even when studying Othello at university, we didn’t really look at historical race issues, which I now see as a shocking omission.

So I have switched up my June reading plans from finishing my EU list to some titles that address race and racism head-on. I’m starting with Reni Eddo-Lodge’s Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race, and I plan to follow it up with Superior: the Return of Race Science by Angela Saini. After that, I’m thinking maybe The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead, perhaps Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination.

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Invisible boundaries kept me boxed in from the real life of other people going on all around

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Hons and Rebels
by Jessica Mitford

I am not the first person to be fascinated by the Mitfords. For a few years now, I have felt that I need to read something by Jessica to better understand the family. She was the outlier, the one who left. And y’know, not a Nazi.

This is Jessica, or Decca’s, memoir of the first portion of her life. She recounts her childhood, her political awakening and her relationship with Esmond Romilly. I laughed, I cried, I shook my head often in disbelief.

As she admits, her childhood was unconventional. They were old-fashioned upper-class toffs, distantly related to royalty and less distantly to Winston Churchill. Jessica and her five sisters received no formal education (though their brother was sent away to school). They instead enjoyed a series of private tutors whom they teased and tortured. This meant they reached adulthood in a state that was both worldly and hugely naive and sheltered. Perhaps this explains the extreme political allegiances of at least three Mitford sisters.

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