The Sellout

You know how everything is supposed to get worse, at least worse than it was back when we were in our prime? Well, very often it doesn't. Take racism in the UK. When I was a lad in the 1960s, people here were expected to be mildly racist. The football club I blindly followed (and still do) was one of the first in England to hire a black player, Gerry Francis, a man from South Africa. He was a very skillful player who soon earned enough respect and affection from the fans for them to refer to him by his name rather than as “the darkie”. Fast forward a few decades and the whole town is in the streets to welcome home a black sportswoman, Kelly Holmes, and her two Olympic gold medals. There is still far too much racism in the country, and it is still exploited by unscrupulous politicians, but its focus has shifted. The grandchildren of immigrants with “black” skin are now generally accepted as bone fide Brits, and something similar is happening with the children of immigrants from South Asia, if they opt for integration. The Other now comes dressed in “white” skin and hails from Eastern Europe. For the pleasure of being nasty to them, we have just given our European partners the V-sign and are preparing to chop those two fingers off. Silly really. Which brings me to Paul Beatty's comic masterpiece of anti-racism and anti-idiocy, “The Sellout”
[to be continued]