Not From Round Here
Boon, H. 2020. Not From Round Here. London
| Title | Not From Round Here |
|---|---|
| Creators | Boon, H. |
| Description | My song ‘Not From Round here’ is an autoethnographic documentary account of incidents that have taken place in my life, as recently as 2020. I argue that my skin acts as agent and used to facilitate the racial framing of my life where interactions with my skin are separate from me and forms part of the fascinated subtext of white people and their preoccupation with where I am from. When one considers agency and participation, my skin colour, even if functioning passively, will be an active agent in constructed arguments, used to appease ‘white’ concern. My skin colour was the meeting of a white ‘daddy sperm’ mixing with a black ‘mummy egg’. Yet this biologically determined event has skewed and distorted my life, with my skin perceived by whites as a ‘useful’ precursor to discussions about belonging. It’s difficult for me to intuit where white people hail from based on skin colour as a single determining factor. I can’t tell whether a white person is from Leeds or Bristol; Sydney or New York. There are no distinguishing characteristics but in my case this operates differently. My skin is visible every day and is party to discussion with or without my permission; whether I am present or not. But this will still not tell you where I am from. I recognise that I challenge racial constructs and the dividing lines between the binary, white and black, discourse (DiAngelo, 2019) favoured by whites. Whilst you want me to choose, I can’t. Either I deny the mother or deny the father. Either way I am expected to make a choice that is false, collapses all of the nuances and leaves me impoverished at the expense of assuaging white guilt and concern. The included lyrics below illustrate a number of the areas identified by Ogbu (2004) which include a variety of discriminations both social and expressive, and intellectual denigration. Lipsitz (2018) also identifies a form of 'aesthetic pleasure' for White people in the transforming of suffering and pain of others for their entertainment. My argument is that the 'aesthetic pleasure' can also be extracted in the moment by creating tense, aggressive situations even within the casual application of the question 'where are you from?' and variants. Bibliography DiAngelo, R.J. (2019). White fragility: why it’s so hard for white people to talk about racism. London: Penguin Books. Lipsitz, G. (2018). The possessive investment in whiteness: how white people profit from identity politics Twentieth anniversary edition. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Ogbu, J. (2004). Collective Identity and the Burden of "Acting White” in Black History, Community, and Education. The Urban Review, 36 (1), . New York: Springer Science+Business Media B.V. Lyrics: Title: Not From Round Here ‘Ere mate, where you from? Oi! ‘cos you’re not from round ‘ere, are ya ‘Cos you’re not from round ‘ere are ya. ‘cos you’re not from round here, are ya What else have you got in ya? Do not buy into their ideology ‘cos you’re not from round ‘ere, are ya Because you think it, ‘Cos you’re not from round ‘ere, are ya ‘Cos you’re not from round ‘ere, are ya You know I’ve heard that word, before |
| Keywords | Race |
| Binary | |
| Whiteness | |
| Mixed Race | |
| Everyday Racism | |
| Workplace | |
| Reification | |
| Otherness | |
| Agency | |
| Autoethnography | |
| White privilege | |
| Year | 02 Aug 2020 |
| Files | Rights Hussein Boon Media type Audio License All rights reserved File Access Level Open (open metadata and files) |
| Place of publication | London |
| Web address (URL) | https://soundcloud.com/hussein-boon/round-here |
