News — the signs of racism

A Ghanaian worker on the goat farm owned by Ethiopian immigrant Agitu Ideo Gudeta in the northern Italian region of Trentino has been arrested after confessing to raping and killing his 42-year-old employer, according to reports from Italy.

Gudeta was reportedly killed by hammer blows to her head. The name of the employee from Ghana has also not been publicized.

She had made her home in that part of the country on an abandoned piece of land where she reared goats on the La Capra Felice (The Happy Goat) farm. From the produce of the animals, Gudeta made cheese and beauty products.

Gudeta fled her native Ethiopia in 2010 after her protests against land grab incited the wrath of authorities. The protesters had accused the local government in Addis Ababa of divesting large swathes of land to foreign investors and to the detriment of locals.

By 2018, she had become a well-known commercial farmer in Trentino. She told Reuters in 2018 that she had started with goats shortly after arriving in the country and then had 180 goats. The products she made were popular with the locals and her business was successful, even allowing her to employ farmhands.

She often became a reference point for international news coverage in light of anti-immigrant clamoring by far-right parties and activists. Gudeta’s success was supposed to challenge public opinion of immigrants from Africa in the midst of growing hostilities against that group.

Trentino police say investigations into her death are ongoing.

In a move to leave its colonial past behind, the Barbados government is now all set to remove the statue of Vice Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson from the National Heroes Square in the heart of the capital, Bridgetown.

The statue, which has stood in the city for over 200 years, will be removed on November 16, 2020, on International Day of Tolerance, a year before dropping Queen Elizabeth II as Head of State. 

Announcing the decision which he described as “a step towards the healing of the Nation”, John King, Minister in the Prime Minister’s Office with responsibility for Culture, said, “This is indeed an ultimate statement of confidence in who we are as a people and what we are capable of achieving.”

“As we amend the Constitution to have a Barbadian Head of State, and as a symbol of the maturity of our democracy, it is imperative that we reexamine notable elements of our colonial past. Cabinet’s decision to remove the statue is part of this process as we seek to promote national identity as part of a modern Barbados.”

The recent wave of black consciousness that swept over the western world attracted calls for lingering symbols of slavery and colonialism to be removed across the world. An online petition calling for the removal of the statue led by former journalist Alex Downes garnered thousands of signatures in Barbados.

“In a country where approx. 95 percent of the population is also black, why do we continue to proudly force ourselves to relive the traumas our people have faced by having this statue stand in Heroes Square?” Downes questioned.

The 30-year old Barbadian further called on the Government of Barbados to replace the statue with a symbol of unity which acknowledges the true work of the country’s heroes.

The statue of Nelson – a British Navy officer — was erected over two centuries ago in honor of his victory against French forces in the Valley of Trafalgar. However, Nelson’s staunch support for the Transatlantic Slave Trade has attracted tremendous criticism in recent times.

According to a letter penned by Nelson to his friend, Simon Taylor — a British plantation owner  in Jamaica — in regard to slavery, he remarked: “I have ever been and shall die a firm friend to our present colonial system…neither in the field or in the Senate shall their interest be infringed whilst I have an arm to fight in their defense, or a tongue to launch my voice against the damnable and cursed doctrine of Wilberforce and his hypocritical allies.”

Apart from Barbados, many people across the globe support the symbolic act of reclaiming dignity and exposing long-celebrated racists. Bahamas and Trinidad and Tobago have strongly called for the removal of statues of Christopher Columbus.

A black man who recently defended the police and boasted about his love for white women was fatally shot on Saturday.

Jonathan Price of Wolfe City, Texas, was trying to break up a fight when he was shot and killed by Shaun Lucas, a white police officer.

Authorities have released few details on the incident but have informed the public that an investigation has been launched, Fox4News reports. The Texas Rangers will lead the investigation, and for now, Officer Lucas has been placed on administrative leave.

Price’s family says the incident occurred at a Kwik Check gas station, where he saw a domestic dispute taking place between a man and a woman. Price reportedly tried to intervene, and that is when an officer arrived on the scene, KTXS News reports.

Although it has yet to be confirmed, the family believes the officer may have thought the two men were fighting.

Sometime during the altercation, a taser was deployed, and then the officer fired shots. Price was shot multiple times and died. He was later identified by his family, but police have yet released that information on their end.

Price was known as a mentor who worked for the city, and witnesses at the scene said he was doing the right thing.

“Didn’t think that was the last time I would see him, he was walking out the truck, going with his friends with a smile on his face…he always smile…now he’s gone,” Price’s mother, Marcella Louis, said.

“Everybody loves Jonathan, everybody, Black, white, Mexicans, everybody. It don’t matter, he loved everybody, and they loved him,” Price’s sister, April Louis, said.

“He had a good heart. He always tried to help others,” Marcella added. “They took my son from me. They took my baby.”

In June, Price posted a Facebook post saying he had never had a negative encounter with police; in fact, he spoke highly of the police in Texas.

“There were times I should have been detained for speeding, outstanding citations, outdated registration, dozing off at a red light before making it to my garage downtown Dallas after a lonnng night out,” Price said. “I’ve passed a sobriety test after leaving a bar in Wylie, Texas by 2 white cops and still let me drive to where I was headed, and by the way they consider Wylie, Texas to be VERY racist. I’ve never got that kind of ENERGY from the po-po.”

“Not saying black lives don’t matter but don’t forget about your own, or your experiences through growth / ‘waking up,’” said Price.

A week before the death of George Floyd in the US city of Minneapolis in May, Brazilians were mourning one of their own.

Fourteen-year-old João Pedro Mattos Pinto was killed while playing with friends during a botched police operation in a favela in Rio de Janeiro.

The two deaths happened thousands of kilometres apart, yet millions of people were united in grief and anger. "Black lives matter here, too," Brazilians chanted in the weeks following the deaths.

But history keeps repeating itself.

Only last week, a police officer in São Paulo stepped on the neck of a black woman in her fifties. The video that surfaced showing the incident caused outrage. She survived, but so many do not.

There is much that connects Brazil to the US - guns, violence and these days their politics, too. But in the São Paulo favela of Americanópolis, people are hardly living the American dream.

Joyce da Silva dos Santos shows me a video of her son Guilherme celebrating his birthday with a big cake and candles. He was a 15-year-old with his whole life ahead of him. He had dreams of following his grandfather into the bricklaying business, of one day buying a motorcycle, too. But his dreams were cut short.

A few weeks ago, he disappeared outside his family's house. His body was found dumped on the outskirts of the city. One policeman has since been arrested. Another, an ex-policeman, is still on the run.

"Guilherme was so loving, he cared for everyone," Ms dos Santos tells me, hardly able to speak through her tears. She fears for her other children now. "We don't know if when we leave home, we will come back - I don't have the will to live anymore."

In the street, the neighbours are enjoying a sunny Saturday afternoon, swigging beer and chatting. People here have come together since Guilherme's death, but so much has changed.

"The police should be protecting us," says a neighbour, also called Joyce, whose daughter was friends with Guilherme. "They don't though, because of the colour of our skin."

Last year police here killed nearly six times as many people as in the US and most of them were black.

"Police violence goes back to this complex way of accepting that some lives matter less than others," says Ilona Szabo, executive director of the Igarapé Institute, a security think tank based in Rio.

Kandi Burruss was growing restless. She’d already scored a platinum album, won a Grammy, and starred on The Real Housewives of Atlanta. But no matter her accomplishments, in 2011, nobody wanted her to be the face of an ad campaign.

“There were only very few Black women who were being chosen to represent brands, and there were maybe three [women] constantly being used over and over again for all the major brands,” Burruss tells Marie Claire. “One day I just said to my team, ‘I don't even care. I'm tired of even asking how to be the face of somebody else's brand. I'm gonna build my own brand.’”

So Burruss started Bedroom Kandi, a line of sex toys that grew into a home-party plan company (also known as a direct sales company, like Avon). Her goal was to “help make sex a more comfortable conversation for Black women to have,” she says. “I was one of the very first well-known Black women who was very unapologetically open in speaking about sex and relationships to sell products.”

Burruss has to deal not only with the hardships of being a female entrepreneur in a male-dominated industry, but also with being a Black business owner in a white-led world. While statistics on the racial make-up of sex-toy company executives and customers are not currently available, Scott Watkins, the vice president of sales for the Doc Johnson company, confirms that most major sex-toy companies were founded by white people. Additionally, a 2012 study of home sex toy party attendees found that less than 4 percent of attendees were Black.

“There is a very strong tokenism in the industry,” says Tracy Felder, a brand ambassador for sex-toy company Children of the Revolution. “It just makes it feel like at times you have to work twice as hard.” She says while the company she works for is great, when she attends trade shows, white men assume she is a model—even though she wears a badge explaining her role. “As Black women, we’re fetishized,” she adds.

The racial biases that Felder and Burruss have felt has deep roots in the sex toy business. The modern industry was founded in the 1960s and 1970s by white men who packaged and sold their devices at "adult bookstores" to appeal to other white men, the predominant shoppers at the time. Historically, “flesh” dildos and vibrators were the color of Caucasian skin, while African-American sex toys were intentionally oversized and stark, crayon black. It wasn’t until Grenadian immigrant Gosnell Duncan came onto the scene in the 1970s and created the first silicone dildo, in a wide variety of Black and Brown skin tones, that things slowly began to change.

While women like Hart have been trying to change the sex toy industry for years, the recent resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement has more people-in-charge finally starting to take notice of the systemic racism within their own companies.

In June, industry publication Xbiz held a roundtable discussion on race, out of which participants created an action plan for pleasure products companies. The plan included such initiatives as hiring more Black people and people of color in management positions and adding more images of Black people to packaging. Other companies, like Unbound Babes and Dame Products, made sure to double down on their public statements in support of Black Lives Matter. Unbound Babes made Juneteenth an official company holiday and vowed to match donations to the Mutual Aid Fund for Sex Workers of Color, while Dame Products made donations to a number of organizations, including the Marsha P. Johnson Institute.

Yet one of the companies that released a similar statement, Pipedream Products, still has a male masturbation sleeve for sale on Amazon that uses racist language: The packaging reads “Flip a Sista Over” and “Jizzle in My Nizzle for Shizzle.” Hart called out Pipedream’s hypocrisy on social media, and after seeing her post, an executive for Pipedream reached out to her. In the conversation, Hart says she encouraged the exec to hire more Black employees and to change its packaging in consultation with Black consumers.

For Tamara P. Bell, founder of the Home Party Plan Association, an organization that helps home party companies select sex toys directly from the manufacturers, the strides forward are welcome, though a long time coming. She recalls seeing more products directed to the Black community at sex toy trade shows about a decade ago, but “they were doing it in a very derogatory way, [featuring outdated stereotypes], and so I had to call a couple of manufacturers out.” In April 2010, she formed a group of industry CEOs which has met every six months to talk about race “behind closed doors.” (They plan to resume the forums in the fall, or as soon as COVID-19 restrictions allow.)

While hiring more Black people, specifically in decision-making roles, will help create noticeable change in the industry, it’s become clear that simply being a Black female sex toy entrepreneur is helping pave the path forward and make room for others. For instance, Burruss says that almost 90 percent of her company’s consultants are Black and the majority of her customers are too. And one of her Black female contemporaries, Nenna Joiner, founder of Feelmore in Oakland, says she made sure to keep her sex-toy store open during Oakland’s BLM protests, providing goggles and band-aids for the protestors.

“Being open as a Black business is a form of activism,” Joiner says. “You’ve got to be out there protesting, but my protest is also a pleasure activism and making sure that my business, a Black business, stays open, stays available to the community.”

Since the death of George Floyd and the uprising of the Black Lives Matter movement, it has become even more evident that racism definitely still exists in the UK. At the time of writing this, two police officers have been arrested for taking selfies, yes selfies, with the dead bodies of two black women, Nicole Smallman and Bibaa Henry and sharing them in a WhatsApp group chat. 

It’s unfortunate to say that this isn’t in the least bit surprising due to the current climate we live in where racism is still very much alive and exists within the systematic structures in this country and elsewhere. Where did it start though? What’s the history of racism in the UK and the fundamental grounds on which it has stood on for so many years and still does until this day? We’ll start with Britain’s involvement in The Triangular Trade.

THE TRIANGULAR TRADE AND BRITAIN’S INTRODUCTION INTO SLAVERY

The Triangular Trade is the term for the 3-way trading system that existed in the 16^th century up until the 19^th century. It involved three different regions: Africa, America and Europe. It is estimated that as well as other things such as manufactured goods and cash crops, the triangular trade took at least 12 million Africans as slaves to different destinations across America and Europe and this system had great involvement from Great Britain. Their involvement increased when the Treaty of Utretch (1713) gave the British slave traders right to sell slaves in the Spanish Empire. This was very profitable for the British even though it meant worse than poor treatment for any human being whilst they took slaves through the Atlantic to sell them in North America. This passage was called ‘The Middle Passage’ and it is estimated that 2 million slaves died whilst on this passage in the hands of British slave traders from diseases such as smallpox, scurvy and measles.  

This continued all the way until the early 19^th century when public opinion finally decided to hold weight and people began to realise that what was happening was wrong. Resistances began to form and British slave ships were getting attacked and slaves were set free and eventually, the slave trade was abolished in Britain in 1833. This did not mean, however, that racism ended.

RACIAL TENSIONS

As many Africans and Caribbean people began to move to Britain upon invite from the British Government themselves, our people were still subject to racial injustice in the form of violent crimes and systematic oppression. There was a belief that those who were white were far more supreme than those who were black and this was evident in the laws that were passed such as the ‘Colour Alien Seamen’s Order’ (1925) which stated that any coloured men that did not have the documentation to prove that they were British were to be listed as ‘aliens.’ This belief became ingrained in the minds of a lot of British people and unfortunately, today still exists within the minds of a lot of other people. There were a lot of high profile cases in which a black person was killed with no grounds for doing so other than the colour of their skin, including Kelso Cochrane in 1959 and Stephen Lawrence in 1993.

In an effort to relieve the racial tension that existed in Britain, more organisations such as the Black People’s Alliance (1970) were formed, big strikes such as the Grumwick Strike (1976) took place and events such as the Notting Hill Carnival which was started by a woman name Rhaune Lasset-O’Brien who was born to a Native American mother and a Russian father, were created in an attempt to bring many people together. This was all after laws were put in place in 1965 which wasn’t THAT long ago, to prevent racist practices from taking place.

AND SINCE THEN….

It would be a lie to say that things are exactly the same as they were during the early days in Britain, where black people couldn’t even go into certain restaurants or other public places. However, there is still a lot of progress that needs to be made.

The mindset that exists in Britain that was built upon The Triangular Trade and laws such as the Colour Alien Seamen’s Order still exists and that can’t be disputed. From the death of Mark Duggan to what has happened to Nicole Smallman and Bibaa Henry, many examples of the racist ideals that existed and were legally allowed all those years back are still alive today.

With that being said, it is ESSENTIAL that the Black Lives Matter movement continues not just in America but also here in the UK to prevent racial injustices from occurring and to get to the period in time where eventually, people are no longer judged by their skin but by the content of their character (Martin Luther King Jr, 1929-1968).

Written by Lore Adekeye. Social media handles: @loreadekeye (twitter) / @shemz_nl (IG).