I was reminded of this when reading of quite the most ridiculous piece of rubbish I have found anywhere in the media this past week. One Lowri Turner, another of the endless number of Z list celebrities (another word now berefit of its original meaning) described her feelings about her new daughter. Ms Turner is blonde. Her (now ex-) husband is of Indian ethnicity. Hence their baby daughter is not blonde. Ms Turner says this:
"When I registered my daughter at the local GP, I had to put a tick in a quite unfamiliar box - the one marked "mixed race, white/Asian" - on the "racial monitoring" form. It felt weird and oddly public. She was being labelled at seven weeks old."
Yes but since everyone ticks the same "racial monitoring" form she was not being labelled any more or less than the rest of us. Whether that is a good thing, or whether modern Britain is too obsessed with 'ethnic' classifications, is for another post.
It gets worse:
"In my head, I knew that my daughter was unlikely to have the milky complexion and blond hair of my sons. And I don't love her less because she's darker. However, I wasn't prepared for the confusion of emotions I would feel when I look at her.
(...) I am ashamed to admit that in a reversal of what happens on holiday when you study your skin in the mirror every day hoping for a deepening tan, I too now find myself examining my daughter for signs that her skin is becoming a deeper shade of brown and being perturbed if I find them.
As I read that, I am horrified. But, then, having a mixed race baby forces you to face uncomfortable truths about yourself and the outside world that it is possible to be entirely unaware of if you stay within an easy, uncontroversial all-white sphere.
(...) I had to get over my grief at the loss of the pink, girly fantasy first.Part of the grief I am going through with my daughter is the loss of the possibility that she will look like me.
(...) I look at my baby and wonder if people will look at her and assume I am not her mother?I realise that this is a deeply shallow and vain thing to say"
Not just deeply shallow and vain, Lowry, idiotic too. And if you really mean "grief" then you are beyond help. "Grief" is something people suffer when their child is born desperately and permanently ill, or when they have miscarriages, or when they try for years to conceive a child and fail. It is not something you are entitled to claim because you marry a person of different ethnicity and have a perfectly healthy child.
I don't need to go on. Ms NMJ has said it all for me on her entertaining blog, where I first came across the story.
16 comments:
Quite right too Pumpie. Lowri Turner should be prevented from ever taking up media space, or any space for that matter, ever again.
NMJ's piece on it is brilliant.
xxx
Pants
Good one, Ump. The 'labelling' her little girl is getting now, from an ethnic monitoring form will be nothing compared to the knowledge that, in her mother's eyes, her skin colour is a source of 'grief'. And she probably won't look like her mother - having heard Lowri's opinion on her own looks, you'd have thought she'd be pleased!
Methinks a visit from Dr H. Bitchslap is in order for Ms Turner.
Thanks to you both. CB I said to NMJ that if my dog looked like Lowri Turner, I'd shave its arse and teach it to walk backwards. Now I think I was too kind.
You have hit the nail on the head there - if anyone's entitled to claim 'grief' it's Lowri's daughter, whose mother has insulted her in print.
I suspect what Lowri really means is that she is upset because her marriage has failed and her daughter looks like her father. Of course, that isn't any better than what she did say, but might have had some truth to it.
Wow there're you guys and then there's this...
http://www.amren.com/mtnews/archives/2007/07/i_love_my_mixed.php
I don't know who's living in a delusional world. But everyone deserves a fair opportunity at voicing their opinions.
Miscegenation may not be seen the same way by everyone. Since the numbers of white people are dwindling worldwide, some are justifiably entitled to feel this way. If I ever ended up in a situation where the girl with whom I was to have a child was white, I'd make sure she reads this.
Staggered!!
Awful, ignorant woman.
Am mixed race myself and it NEVER occurred to me that my mum (or dad)might have felt anything like the crap coming out of That Turner Things pen.
If she feels like this she should save it for the therapist's couch NOT somewhere where her daughter will someday see it.
Shame, shame , shame
Well, there's this thing where they like doing controversial "my most personal feelings" pieces. A while ago it was some woman with a long article - even featuring a big pic of the family, if I recall - all about how she "doesn't love her stepchildren"! I mean, she likes them; she respects the fact that her husband loves them; but, you know, her kid is her kid and they're his.
I read about half of this article, thought yep I can see what she's saying, and didn;t read the next half. What a fool anyway, as Caroline says, to do this in print instead of in therapy.
For what it's worth, I always thought I'd have small, curly-headed children. I had to come to terms, as a young mum, with the fact that they didn't look like what I'd always expected! Oh my God! Half their genes came from a guy I didn't evn know when I was a kid, having those daydreams! (Oh, and then the marriage didn;t work out, and they still look like him, the ingrates.
It used to be so un-English to be emotional in the first place, never mind to vent one's emotions in public. How did we get from that to this?
(Of course, it also used to be the case that mixed-marriages were utterly taboo, and divorce as well, so it's not as though all change is bad. But that doesn't mean we can't bemoan change with which we disagree ...).
There's a good bit on p 7 of the current edition of the Eye about Turner. It has this quote:
"I have split with my husband. There is no other way to write this and, if I didn't have this column I wouldn't be writing it at all"
As the Eye infers, that wouldn't be such a bad thing ...
She is a stupid, thick headed slag and everything that she produces only disgraces her even further. If i saw her on the street I would spit in her face even it she was with her kids. SLAG
Lowri must have thought she'd found a soulmate when Cherie's unpleasant little memoir came along.
Now I've followed the links through I find Ms Turner's sensitive little piece came from the Guardian's 'Life & Style' section. Says it all.
Indeed. At least Cherie didn't slag off her own children. As we discussed, she just told us graphic details of the circumstances of their conception: namely that they were born of 'embarrassment', not a word ever to be associated with her again. And all this was after ten years of her slagging off Fleet St's invasions of her family's 'privacy', funny how a serialisation fee changes all that.
I am a Canadian woman who bumped into Lowri's article on the Mail Online. I was horrified at the article and tried (unsuccessful due to tech glitch) to leave the following message:
_______________
The comment:"'I love my mixed race baby - but why does she feel so alien?'" is answered by the fact that she has brought an emerging awareness of the depth of white supremacist ideology.
The comment: "But when I turn to the mirror in my bedroom to admire us together, I am shocked. She seems so alien. With her long, dark eyelashes and shiny, dark brown hair, she doesn't look anything like me." Not 'looking like you' is a way masking the presence of white supremacist thinking as there is no inherent desire to dislike or fear people who look different from oneself. Before European colonialism, many groups of people intermingled and co-existed without the intense racialization of the current period. Having a 'dual heritage' child has triggered a reaction that was manufactured some 500 hundred years ago by Europeans wanting a rationale for colonizing others.
I am a child of 'dual heritage'. you can best protect your child by continuing to monitor your racism and CHALLENGING it.
__________
But now that I have read all of your comments, I realize that her silliness is well-known stupid. Great, but why is she being allowed to publish such drivel???
She's allowed to publish it because, sad to say, it sells newspapers and magazines. Z list celebrities spouting emotional piffle always does, sadly.
I do think, however, that you are a bit overboard with the white supremacy conspiracy. After all, Lowri did marry (albeit briefly) someone of a different race ...
The way she says "hang on" while closing her eyes, as a way of interrupting anyone who disagrees with her, is hilarious.
My husband and I have bets on when she will do this when she is on the Matthew Wright show on morning television.
Her opinions are never based on researched fact/s (check it out) so much as the first thing that comes into her head. So it's hardly surprising that work on Matthew Wright's show is all she can get.
Hang on!
Why is it that this week on Matthew Wright, her photo appeared just after host Matthew's? And not just any old photo, either, but one of her in an off the shoulder black number with a ruby necklace the sparkle and width of a chandelier covering her upper chest of bare skin. This for daytime TV! And no other panel member was given the same photo opportunity.
Is she sleeping with Matthew? Is he hoping to catch an editor's eye to get some work? Or both?
Loudmouth Turner may yet have some explaining to do. Look at journos such as Anne Leslie, Kate Adie or Suzanne Moore and many many others to see women in journalism working ethically, and not offering starters, like that.
Maybe she won't need to explain though, because as an ex-fashion journalist, dressing like that, nobody will hire her anyway.
Or is she secretly cheap labour? Or secretly hard to get rid of?
I nearly puked when I read that. I feel for the poor daughter of this grossly ignorant and racist woman.
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