Indigo Jo Blogs

Joni Mitchell famously sung that you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone, and this is surely the case with quite a few places along the US Gulf Coast which are suddenly world famous now that they've been torn up by Katrina. A couple of the blogs I've been reading, written by people from Mississippi and Louisiana, have noticed that news reporters have mispronounced the name of the city Biloxi. It's apparently pronounced Biluxi, and they think we should know this.

I'm a map geek, and I know where a lot of places are that others don't because I like to gaze at maps and read travel guides. I'm one of those people who buy Rough Guides and Lonely Planet books and never go to most of the places they are about. I'd heard of Biloxi before last week's hurricane. I first heard it being pronounced Biluxi last Saturday morning, and I thought it was the reporter putting on an American accent. My guess is that most people from outside the region, and certainly outside the USA, have never heard of Biloxi at all. Nor would they know, for example, that Lafayette is pronounced two different ways depending on which Lafayette you mean, or that the last syllable of "New Orleans" is actually short, or any of the other examples DP gave us last Saturday.

Is it reasonable to expect people from outside an area to instinctively know its unusual ways of pronouncing things? New Orleans is a famous city, but most people do not know that locals pronounce it with the last syllable short. Over here, we have a few weird pronunciations as well, although they are usually small towns. Wymondham in Norfolk is Wyndham; Launceston in Cornwall is Lawnston; Teignmouth in Devon is Tinmouth (remember, the ou in mouth is short) - and these are things I didn't find out until I was in my teens. And there's a way of pronouncing the name "Cirencester" when you're in Cirencester which does not make you sound like a tourist. To say nothing of all the other funny features in English place names: ham is "um" unless it's a name in itself (Birmingum, Beckenum, Twickenum), "cester" is just "ster" (Gloster, Lester, Wooster, and Towcester becomes Toaster) but "chester" is pronounced as it looks.

We have a few stereotypes of Americans here, among the most common being that they are ignorant about countries other than their own. As I read in one popular newspaper, to most Americans, England is a place where it's always foggy, where they make that whisky (brewed in the village of Scotland, England) and where Shakespeare wrote Oliver Twist. It can probably be fairly said about the average Brit that he doesn't know much about the geography of the US either.

For one thing, asked to name a single southern state, he might well pick California. Or Florida, which is a southern state, but he wouldn't know why Florida is and California isn't. He would probably not be able to name a single city in Mississippi - or Massachusetts for that matter, even though he would have heard of Boston. Perhaps he might not know what state New York is in (New York, New York is something Frank Sinatra sung to fill out the syllables, innit?) or that Washington (the city) is nowhere near Washington state. And of course, most Brits don't know what a Yank or a Yankee is. They probably think that because they're more American out west and down south (New England is, after all, New England), they're bigger Yanks than they are in Connecticut.

And I didn't even learn about Yankees in history - I learned about that by chance in an English class where we did a bit of comprehension on a short piece on the Texas Rangers when I was 14. Most of what kids are taught in history here is about British history - the Romans, a bit about the Vikings and other invaders, the Tudors and Stuarts, and the Second World War. We learned a bit about the Civil Rights movement, but that's pretty much all we learned about American history. You don't learn much about other countries' history in British schools, except where it relates to this country.

I guess if there's a silver lining in any of this, it's that it draws people together and allows people to learn about their different communities. One thing many people might have learned is that poor whites and poor blacks in that part of the world are often in the same boat rather than being enemies, as is the usual stereotype. But we can't learn anything if we pounce on each other for making innocent mistakes. After all, I can't think of a single other example in the whole English language of an "o" being pronounced like that in front of an "x".

Posted by Indigo Jo at 10:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)

While in no position of great authority on US race relations, I find it sad, but by no means surprising, to hear people already rushing to make a race issue out of the looting and other disorder in New Orleans. As the sister who writes Dictator Princess wrote, people accuse black people of looting, but when they see a white couple with "groceries" in the French quarter, they ignore the fact that they had probably stolen the groceries themselves. But there's also the old chestnut of black people being "prone" to this sort of behaviour, which may or not have been expressed openly in the USA in the past few days, but it's certainly coming out here.

Yesterday morning, Vanessa Feltz was doing the 9am-midday phone-in, sitting in the vacant seat left at BBC London when Jon Gaunt was sent (back) to Coventry. "Could it happen here?" was the topic of conversation: in the event of a disaster striking London and people being desperate, would Londoners run riot, loot and rape? Would you just help yourself to the DVD recorder you wanted if you thought you could get away with it? Would you (she really offered this example) rape your neighbour's Scandinavian nanny if you were all going to die soon anyway? People really thought that the British "stiff upper lip" would put paid to any such lawlessness, which I think is nonsense, but someone wrote in and said that rioting was not something working-class white people did. It was something you get from black people (as in Brixton, LA and elsewhere) and Asians (as in the riots in Yorkshire and Lancashire a couple of years ago).

Feltz is Jewish, and no doubt was told about pogroms when she was a child, so I'm surprised she allowed this arrant load of rubbish to go unchallenged. Pogroms, for anyone who doesn't know how this term originated, were mob attacks on Jewish villages in the former Russian empire. The perpetrators were Russians and Ukrainians, particularly Cossacks. And guess what colour Russians and Ukrainians are.

You don't have to be Jewish to know that white people are as prone to lawlessness as anyone else, however. Did anyone see the rioting on TV which followed the decision to allow Protestant marchers through Catholic areas in Northern Ireland in the late 1990s? Not many black people there. Not to mention the "no-Popery" rioting which periodically affected the UK during the 18th and 19th centuries. Some of this was kicked up by people who actually went around giving anti-Catholic presentations - among other things, by staging spoof Catholic masses, and taking their shows to places with large Irish populations. And then, of course, one must ask what colour the people who used to gather to lynch black people in the places now affected by Katrina. Did they come all the way from Mexico for the purpose? As for looting, you might look at the British Museum in London for plenty of evidence of looting by civilised white Brits with their stiff upper lips, to say nothing of the vast quantities of loot moved around the world by both Nazis and communists during the 20th century. We're not talking of TVs and washing machines here, but artwork and other heritage items which sell for millions.

To hear these people talk, you'd think black people rioted just for fun. The causes of all such incidents of rioting are well-known; usually they are related to the police attacking and harrassing black people (particularly men) in the streets. Anyone who doesn't know this can easily find out before offering their opinions. On the other hand, when whites have rioted in Europe in recent years, it has usually had something to do with a setback for the football (soccer) team they support, such as when Millwall fans rioted in London in May 2002, following their team's failure to win promotion to the Premiership. The New Orleans situation is being used by those who relate everything to race as simply another excuse to carry on doing so. There are some people who resist any attempt to connect black underachievement in both Britain and the USA to anything other than their genes, be it crime, low academic achievement, or whatever.

Rioting generally takes place when powerless people are oppressed; the white people in Zimbabwe did not riot when Mugabe turned on them because they, unlike Afro-Americans, had an escape route. America is simply the only home most blacks (unlike a lot of whites) have. None of this matters to a racist; to them, blacks are simply less human, and just one step away from behaving like animals. It's all baloney, of course. I'm white and have lived among whites all my life, and I can assure anyone who is in doubt that they are as capable as blacks of acting like uncivilised rabble.

Posted by Indigo Jo at 3:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (20) | TrackBacks (0)

I've just finished a posting to the group blog, The Sharpener, in response to the idiotic speculation from certain Christian groups about the "real cause" of the devastation of New Orleans:

Much Vain Speculation

Posted by Indigo Jo at 11:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (28) | TrackBacks (0)