England Has Black History Month Too

I thought Black History Month was strictly a US deal, but apparently since the 1980s, England has had such a month too. Not all blacks in England came from Africa, some came from Jamaica, etc, so I'm not sure if they hyphenate themselves as they do in the US...but I heard the tail-end of some program on BBC Radio 7 while waiting for another program to start, and the woman, British accent, impossible to tell her race since blacks in England don't have an African-American accent, they have a British accent, but I think she was white, was talking about blacks as being "forgotten people," or ignored people, because someone on some show hadn't been able to remember if a certain individual had come from Africa or Jamaica. And she thought that was just horrible.

I'm going to have to re-listen to that and take down a transcript of it and share it here, because it was pretty interesting. This is the 21st century, since the early 1970s racism has been taken out of the institutionalized equation (in the US, anyway), for all that there are individual racists (of every color) out there, blacks should no longer need an extra helping hand. But apparently even in the UK, they do.

Not that I object to black history month per se, or Mexican history month, or Germany history month, or Irish history month, or what have you. But I do think it's time they just got over it, just as Jews should get over the Holocaust.

I'll expand on these complex issues in depth in later entries in this blog.