After watching the film Jemima and Johnny which explores the racial tensions in the early 60's and some of the Small Axe episodes on BBC by Steve McQueen, I realised that despite the kitchen sink genre giving a voice for the working-class it was only the voices of white men. I don't know a lot about the windrush generation but I was surprised when reading this that children in the West Indies had been educated with the same education system as here. Although I think classic literature is important teaching Keats to children from Guiana seems inappropriate as they cannot relate to poetry of meadows to their country or landscape. In a section of the book it reads 'It seemed to me as a child that people who wrote books were as little interested in West Indians as they were generally in the working class, even so bizarrely the idea of the working class seemed separate from us so that we were even more marginalised than our white counterparts and not part of the wider discourse on class division and disparities in this country.' I think this sums up the discrimination and how much as white people we have let down black people in making them feel as not part of the working-class. I do want to make a lino inspired by these stories but I'm not sure what to do it on yet, perhaps I will do a scene from Jemima and Johnny. |
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