I delivered five sessions a day to groups with this equipment, and whilst I taught touch rugby to an audience who didn’t have much of a clue about rugby, or much else when it came to the tiny lake-sized country I’m from… As Sports Coordinator during the first two week ‘trip’ of 90+ kids, I had a few flat basketballs and American footballs, cones, some baseball bats and whatever else I could find in the dusty and underfunded attic that was the storeroom. Without bursting into a 300-page memoir of my tumultuous but no less terrific time during that summer of 2013, I must say that I learned so fucking much about the black experience.
But so too were they poor, underrepresented, underappreciated and dismissed for their dire socio-economic backgrounds – and, I learned, for being black. Naturally (and inversely to my childhood experience), over 95% of these young people were black. The former is a sister camp specializing in the hardest to reach, most severely deprived and at-risk young people from the Bronx, Harlem, Queens, etc. With my background of rising from deprivation, and then feeding back into those in the same shitty boat through an array of roles as Youth Worker, Teaching Assistant and Support Worker, I was cherry-picked for Camp Top of the Pines/ Camp Vacamas. The true beginnings of my physical allyship started in 2013 when I partook in Camp America. Whilst I’ve always been mentally strong, physically able (yes, I’m talking about fighting unfortunately as that was the lingua franca of my childhood) and vehemently outspoken, I know that has led to me outwardly defending oppressed, bullied, profiled people in the past with either a Black belt in Kung-Fu or a tongue nearly as violently expressive as the spiritually loquacious lovechild of Cupcakke, RZA and Killer Mike, I now claim my allyship to the world. And with saying that, and having been one my entire life, perhaps my white privilege is that I can utilize that white guilt to declare that I am an Ally. This is the predicament which I’ve wrestled with for years: what right do I have to speak for anyone else? In spite of being raised by the strongest person I know who happens to be a fiercely, independent warrior woman, it still took me too long to outwardly declare that I’m a feminist – because I didn’t feel I had the right. There’ll be many black people who have my disadvantages but can’t just save up, get lost, find themselves and pursue their passion because the white world does not allow them.
#Plutocracy band free
Not being black meant that despite what possible disadvantages I suffered, I was still free and able to reinvent myself and actually smith those things into swords which I wield with Bride-ian fervour. But as a white man who literally looks like Clark fucking Kent, grew up in Wales (our dragon may be red but over 93% of our population is white) a country within the CUNTRY of Brexit Britain, and, in spite of hitting a line in Label Bingo with being severely working-class, neurodiverse and battling depression and anxiety, I was able to leave the joyrider’s haven of Townhill, and have always masked much of my neurological diversity to others.
police policy – this isn’t a pun, but a puerile punchline to America’s founding and enforcement of White Right – and the subsequent resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement (founded in 2013, sickeningly needed since 1619), a pandemic within a pandemic, I’ve wanted to curate an article that shares my rage, empathy, heartache and hunger for systemic change this bleached world over. But my month-long hiatus from writing directly into the vein of our pain is because of this article, and the fascistic flames of the dumpster fire world that inspires it. I’ve been co-editing Cape Magazine, mine and a fellow friend/writer/campfire soul’s project of passion that will showcase voices too long buried beneath academic assimilation and banal literary expectations. I’ve begun my second novel: a Sci-Fi opus of cyberpunks, hyper hippies, oppressed Mandroid’s and a phantasmagoria of other cultural/social/artistic squeezings from a vicarious soul and motley mind that only I could write – it might be finished by the time I could actually attend a forbidden jazz club for droids, borgs and allies.
I’ve been on a break from my ‘professional’ writing of late for a few reasons.
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