Tuesday 20 February 2007

Uncomfortable Truths 2

V&A Uncomfortable Truths logoUncomfortable Truths: the shadow of slave trading on art & design opened at London's V&A Museum today. Since my post of 3 February (CLICK) the V&A has uploaded an Uncomfortable Truths webpage with a list of related events (title link). It boasts this evocative logo of an African profile formed by a splash of dried blood. Brilliant! Here's the V&A blurb: "2007 marks the bi-centenary of the parliamentary abolition of the slave trade. It is a landmark year, not just in British history but in human history, signalling the end of 400 years of slavery." A mere 400 years? The V&A's hand-wringing on this subject seems more in line with political correctness than with either genuine remorse or celebration. It needed to commission 11 artists to invent "the shadow of slave trading on art & design"! And for whom? Answer: white middle-class Brits who don't have to live in London's black ghettos, where gun crime and "black-on-black" crime are rampant and 15-year-old schoolboys are shot dead in their bedrooms. Slavery ended two centuries ago? It's estimated that half of London's prostitutes are pimped by the Baltic Mafia, who smuggle teenaged girls into Britain and keep them imprisoned as white slaves for London's sex trade. Then there are the black children smuggled into the UK as housebound slaves for African immigrants! The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade may have been abolished 200 years ago, but slavery is alive and well and living in Britain today.

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