"How I would escape London..." - Dillon Smallwood
- Dillon Smallwood
- Mar 8, 2021
- 2 min read
Abstraction of road maps of east London painted on silk/satin. Credit: Dillon Smallwood
"Although I’m ‘white’ British I am still a child of empire, like we all are here."
"I thought about the discrimination of the whites that didn’t fit in to the world view of dominant empirical residues, for example the treatment of the Irish (remember the famous rental poster) 'no blacks, no dogs and def no Irish’. That led me on to think about the white underclass.(https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9781403992161)
The authenticity of this particular sign has been called into question, but Lorraine Fannin saw many signs saying ‘No Irish, no coloureds’ in the mid-1960s.
Which in turn led me to think about the fact that our democracy is farcical and always has been, even before the British Empire was functionally established. We live in a plutocracy and always will. The concept of them and us and divide and rule are just tools for the collective elite to use to secure position. Colour, tribe and religion are irrelevant when no matter what category you fall in to we are all cogs in the process of building something for 'them'. They are the elite, the 1%, the multi generational land owners that create and dictate government policy through lobbying.
I must say now that I'm not a conspiracy theory nut but our version of democracy that we are using at present is fractured, incomplete and not representative and thus not fit for purpose and hence why I used the term Plutocracy. We live in a homogenised version of democracy. It just happens to be white!
I love the exploration of Britishness, I have many frequent debates with my Nigerian friend about 'Britishness' and what it means and its value and how it's quantified. I do like to show any white racists this lovely piece of info whenever I hear "Get out of my country". The remains of one of the first British people to be found, and he was Black - although he did have blue eyes. https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/cheddar-man-mesolithic-britain-blue-eyed-boy.html
I have done some work about ‘escape’. The works were conceived when the EDL was gaining power and it reminded me of how the German National Socialist party slid in to popularity playing upon and exploiting people’s fears. I thought about where I would go and how I would escape London if the equivalent on ‘the night of broken glass’ happened to Muslims.
Abstraction of road maps of east London painted on silk/satin. Credit: Dillon Smallwood
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