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This week - maybe last week, now - is or was international blog about racism week. I was thinking what I could write, but nothing came to life.
Then in yesterday's Independent, I read this article about the black boxer and the first black heavy-weight wordl champion, Jack Johnson.
It is a chilling story of racism in the first half of the last century. It is heartwarming that there is a move to grant him a pardon. The idea that the law should try to determine who should sleep with whom is abhorrent. (Although clearly not unique.)
Miles Davis wrote the soundtrack to a movie about Johnson's life, released as A Tribute to Jack Johnson, which includes a sample of an actor speaking Johnson's words, from which the quotation used as the title of this post comes.
A champion indeed.
The same edition of the Independent has an article by Johann Hari about Andrew Roberts. I have not neither read nor met Roberts, so I don't know if the article is a fair reflection of his views; but it does paint a disturbing picture - as if some parts of Britain have learned nothing in the last hundred years.
Then in yesterday's Independent, I read this article about the black boxer and the first black heavy-weight wordl champion, Jack Johnson.
It is a chilling story of racism in the first half of the last century. It is heartwarming that there is a move to grant him a pardon. The idea that the law should try to determine who should sleep with whom is abhorrent. (Although clearly not unique.)
Miles Davis wrote the soundtrack to a movie about Johnson's life, released as A Tribute to Jack Johnson, which includes a sample of an actor speaking Johnson's words, from which the quotation used as the title of this post comes.
A champion indeed.
The same edition of the Independent has an article by Johann Hari about Andrew Roberts. I have not neither read nor met Roberts, so I don't know if the article is a fair reflection of his views; but it does paint a disturbing picture - as if some parts of Britain have learned nothing in the last hundred years.