London’s Skeletons #BriFri
Welcome to British Isles Friday! British Isles Friday is a weekly event for sharing all things British and Irish — reviews, photos, opinions, trip reports, guides, links, resources, personal stories, interviews, and research posts. Join us each Friday to link your British and Irish themed content and to see what others have to share. The link list is at the bottom of this post. Pour a cup of tea or lift a pint and join our link party!
Last week, I reviewed Ken Follett’s A Dangerous Fortune. Jackie shared photos from a 2005 trip to Ireland. Sim shared her whole list of posts recounting her fantasy walk through London using the Tube Map as her guide — she’s completed 29! Becky reviewed a play (A Midsummer Night’s Dream) and two books (The Fellowship of the Ring and Cain His Brother).
I’m traveling in Britain this week, vicariously, via a Facebook friend. She’s been visiting some of the places I wanted to go in London but didn’t make it to on my first trip, including the British Library and a play at The Globe. They’re on my list for the next trip!
I did visit the Museum of London, as she did, very early in our stay because it offers such a helpful overview of the city. What I didn’t see was the new exhibit about recent scientific discoveries from old bones in the Museum’s collection. The analysis of four partial skeletons generated surprising results — London was a diverse city, in all kinds of ways, from the very beginning. The BBC covered the story just before the exhibit opened last fall.
A piece of the London Wall outside the Museum of London.
For all that I love about the English, I despair about their sense of superiority over everyone else — largely because of how that attitude has determined what it means to be white in America. But, I’m also sad for the white English. They lament the loss of the British Empire, but seem unable to appreciate the great gift they have now — the entire British Empire resides on their island. The white driver of a car we hired for a day actually said to me, “It doesn’t feel like England anymore.” Perhaps this discovery will help re-wire the English psyche, providing evidence that their pre-history was also diverse.
A lot of things have come into my thought process here, but the most complete version on my blog is the book review of Sugar in the Blood by Andrea Stuart, a book I searched for in vain at every bookstore I visited in England. There were always at least two books about William Wilberforce on the shelf — apparently, the British would prefer to think about their role in ending slavery rather than their role in starting it.
What have you encountered from the British Isles this week?
I would love to visit the Globe and the museum of London one day. Still waiting to travel again but we have dreams about where we want to go.
I’ll have to disagree about the white superiority feelings transferring to the US. I don’t see that in actual life situations but I know the media makes big of it, stirring people up with the selective news they report. As for slavery, I think we shouldn’t judge historical figures as you must consider the cultural content of that time.
Slavery, to sharecropping and a penal system that re-enslaved the freed, to Jim Crow in the South and red-lining + block-busting in the North, to unequally funded schools and the continued onslaught of media messages that feed our unconscious biases to this day. The cultural context of slavery didn’t end with slavery — it just keeps morphing. Currently we see it in everything from the statistics of who uses illegal drugs (more whites) versus who gets arrested for illegal drugs (more blacks) to none of us being able to get the results we would like to see on the Implicit Bias Test (not even black people, because they’re fed the same messages that all of us are in this society): https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest.html
I am watching on TV ‘The Night Manager’. Enjoying it!
My niece lives in the UK and married a Brit. When her first baby was born the hospital thought the baby a bit jaundice and needed to go under the lights. My niece assured them she was not jaundice but Semitic. A bit of Whiteness there!
You’re a brave soul treading into those waters! My British blood is boiling a bit, but I know you don’t mean to cast all Brits in the same mold, just as we know all Americans are not racists but we certainly have our share.
I think England def has its share of ugly feelings — and sadly I remember my own British uncle saying not very nice things about what he called Wogs, as well as Jews. And he had a few things to say to another uncle, his brother who married a Malaysian girl. That was in the 70’s and he’s been dead for years. I would hope that young Brits like young Americans are more and more color and culture-blind and welcoming to a more diverse country, as our young people seem to be.
I will say from watching British television, there seem to be more integrated relationships taken for granted in England. But perhaps that’s not real life, that’s just Luther:)
What a fascinating story! I am actually taking my kids to the UK soon–I wonder if we’ll have time to hit the Museum of London. We have a LOT planned. When we get back, I’ll post day-by-day recaps on my blog.
Cool! I’m looking forward to your re-caps. I planned twice as much for our London trip as we were actually able to implement!
I must buy ‘Sugar in the Blood’, Joy, as I enjoy looking at the lost areas of history, and this certainly seems to be one. I was amazed on holiday a few years ago when I made friends with a woman of Indian descent, and she told me her family came from Trinidad! She said that after slavery was abolished, few ex-slaves wished to work on the plantations, and in desperation the plantation owners recruited thousands of people from India, as white people could not cope with working outdoors in that heat. I don’t know if that is covered in the book, but it was something of which I was totally unaware, and shows how much lost history there still is.
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