The extract below is taken from 'Outside Class', an interactive blog  currently being written by myself and Dr. Shawn Sobers of the University of the West of England. Shawn was one of the first pupils I ever taught in my first job as an english teacher . We met again twenty five years later to find we had many common threads in our lives. Shawn is of Barbadian origin and was a lone black face amongst the boys I taught in the boy's school that was later to become the inspiration for my e-book on masculinity ( also on this site ) called 'Dangerous Children'. We thus have a common commitment to exploring and countering 'isms'....racism, sexism, classism etc. To read the full article and the  blog please go to..........

http://outsideclass.wordpress.com/http://outsideclass.wordpress.com/

' I am about 8 or 9 years old and my mother, father,  younger brother,  younger sister and I are sitting around the family dinner table. I was born in East London but grew up on the west side in Hayes, right next to Southall, which became the mecca for Asian immigrants during my childhood. By the time this incident happens many Asians had started to run  very successful small businesses and were buying property in our surrounding area. My father blazed with contempt for this process over Sunday lunch.

                                      ‘We’ll have Pakis next door soon!’

I didn’t understand his problem. I went to school with Indian and Pakistani children and loved them. I liked their exoticness, their difference and I liked their dusky hands because they were like mine.

My father was of Middle Eastern heritage (although I did not know this until much later, another part of my story). All I knew then was that I was  the only one of three children to inherit his colouring...olive in winter, mahogany in a good summer, which earned me the  school nickname of ‘Woggy’. I don’t remember it bothering me and didn’t give a damn for what anyone else thought. I loved being ‘dusky’, as Shawn described me in his introduction to this blog. It has always been a fundamental part of my identity because it has a kind of strength that seemed to match my personality even when very young.

The other reason I didn’t understand my father’s ill-disposition to Asians was because, being a very intellectually precocious child, I knew about their history. In knowledge of which I committed the cardinal sin of QUESTIONING HIM!

I said that if we were poor and lived in India and had British passports would he not bring us here and work hard to buy us a house?

He hit me, a resounding thwack around the head. And my mother, being a Fifties woman and knowing her place, did nothing. I was told to know my place too. I  seethed as I knew full well this would not have happened to my brother who, if posing a similar question, would have been praised for his awareness.  

As I grew older and London grew more cosmopolitan I came into contact with girls of many nationalities and I realised that this sort of thing happened to them too, no matter whether they were white, black, brown, dusky or any other racial possibility or permutation.

The conclusion I drew then was that the disempowerment of gender is the ultimate ‘ism’, lying at the very heart of the personal lives of girls and women, dispensed by those who we love and who say they love us.

For the majority of contemporary women all over the world it remains an inescapable assault on the self.

It was many years before I realised that I was dancing on the cliff edge of my father’s masculine self on that day and many others. My repeated refusal to compliantly occupy my allotted gender ‘place’ threatened the tenuous Fifties-man ground that his entire sense of self was built on. As I danced on, the void of Himself came ever closer. It was easier to try and destroy me than it was to face this. He was afraid that if he looked closely he would find there was absolutely nothing there and that he would plummet into oblivion. He died, aged 82, having, at some point or another, psychologically decimated everyone else in my family, only I survived him.

The quest to understand this inescapable assault became my life’s work.

My passion for gender issues is not only fuelled by a desire for worldwide justice for women. I believe that gender is the first place that we learn to associate ‘Otherness’ with ‘less-than’. It is then but a small step to every other permutation of persecution and oppression................'

                                                                                                   G.C.2010.