Read on Twitter
Years ago on brown Twitter, this clip from & #39;Bend it Like Beckham& #39; circulated. It was the scene where Jess is upset about being called a paki and her Irish coach Joe comforts her by saying he knows how she feels, and the girl who was recording this starts laughing at this point.
I don& #39;t remember who she was, but I wanna say she was American? But this scene became a big joke and everyone on Twitter laughed at the white boy saying he& #39;d experienced racism - but if those people knew how England had treated the Irish, would this still have been as funny?
Irish people have historically been treated like scum in this country - might not be because they have a different skin colour, but it was there. "No Blacks, no Irish" signs were commonplace postwar, and more anti-Irish sentiment was high during the Troubles that ended as
recently as 1998. And India isn& #39;t the only former British colony to have experienced a famine as a result of British rule.
I think that & #39;Bend it Like Beckham& #39; is a great film that anyone can watch, but you& #39;re going to get the most value out of it if you understand the
I think that & #39;Bend it Like Beckham& #39; is a great film that anyone can watch, but you& #39;re going to get the most value out of it if you understand the
cultural context behind it. Yes, that means north Indian/Punjabi/Sikh culture, but it also means Britain and understanding this aspect of it. If you aren& #39;t familiar with British history then yeah, this scene is just a stupid white boy trying to get sympathy for a non-existent
problem. But he *also* carries ancestral pain. I think some people will take issue with me defending him, but I think that brown Twitter did him dirty and he didn& #39;t deserve to be treated that way. It& #39;s *not* unimaginable for him to have experienced racism, this film came out in
2002 and the Good Friday Agreement ending the Troubles was in 1998, and he& #39;s a 20-something in the film. His line probably carried more weight in 2002 than it does now, and people around my age either weren& #39;t born or don& #39;t remember the conflict, so of course it won& #39;t hold the
same meaning for us.
If you look at the history, there& #39;s a lot of similarities between Indian and Irish indepedence struggles - India took inspiration from Ireland, such as boycotting. We& #39;re not that different, and I think it adds a nice layer to the scene. Let& #39;s not forget the
If you look at the history, there& #39;s a lot of similarities between Indian and Irish indepedence struggles - India took inspiration from Ireland, such as boycotting. We& #39;re not that different, and I think it adds a nice layer to the scene. Let& #39;s not forget the
fact that Ireland was ALSO partitioned on religious lines!! But it does piss me off when ignorant people laugh at him just because he& #39;s white, and they don& #39;t know better. I didn& #39;t know better either, so I probably retweeted it at the time because I really feel peer pressure on
this site and I hate it, but now that I& #39;ve done a History degree and educated myself, I want to address this because it& #39;s not okay. We& #39;re all colonial legacies, and yes a white Irish person might benefit from white privilege in 2020 Britain, but the ancestral pain is there and
it& #39;s real! The discrimation existed for CENTURIES, and POC know it doesn& #39;t go away overnight. And I haven& #39;t even touched on Irish people being used as indentured servants across the British Empire, so please know: this shit really runs deep, and this is me claiming
Twitter justice for Joe.
Thanks for making it to the end, I didn& #39;t mean to go off this much lol. Here& #39;s some links to wider reading, if you& #39;re interested:
- https://bit.ly/3f74zDa
-">https://bit.ly/3f74zDa&q... https://bit.ly/2P0aKOQ
-https://bit.ly/2P0aKOQ&q... href=" https://bit.ly/3g3nNee ">https://bit.ly/3g3nNee&q...
Thanks for making it to the end, I didn& #39;t mean to go off this much lol. Here& #39;s some links to wider reading, if you& #39;re interested:
- https://bit.ly/3f74zDa
-">https://bit.ly/3f74zDa&q... https://bit.ly/2P0aKOQ
-
In case you can& #39;t see the last link, it& #39;s here: https://bit.ly/3g3nNee ">https://bit.ly/3g3nNee&q...
