Black People, Adventure Sports, Dark Side, Personal Challenge, Black Sidekicks, Black Family, Black Man

More black people should take up adventure sports

Category: sport Dated: 04/09/2005

A Nigerian man who will be attempting to hang glide from Lands End to John O' Groats is urging people in black communities to get over their fears and take part in adventure challenges.

“Personally I don’t know why there aren’t a lot of black people doing things like this,” said 41 year old Shola Ogunlokun who is a computer analyst at a legal firm in London and husband and father of three.

“But one thing that I have noticed is that when it comes to adventure challenges like climbing the top of Everest or walking from [Lands End to John O' Groats]…we don’t seem to see a lot of black people.

“I don’t know whether its fear or whatever it is but I think we should be a bit more involved because there’s no reason [not to], I mean the people that do it they’re not more able bodied than we are.”

When Shola has shared his passion for adventure activities with friends and family the response has often been that anyone who takes part in these things is tempting fate because of the perceived dangers.

His response to this opinion is, “in life there are all kinds of risks that you have to take; you just have to manage the risks.”

Personal challenge

After taking up hang gliding in January this year Shola decided that the simple pleasure of learning how to do it was not enough and he set himself the task of training to fly from one end of the UK to the other.

During the five to seven days he plans to spend completing this he also wants to fulfil two other aims; getting to see more of the British countryside and meeting the local people wherever he touches down.

In fact he hopes that they may even be kind enough to put him up for the night.

“Wherever I land I would like to get to know the people there and if possible, if they’re hospitable enough to spend the night with them, otherwise I’ll camp out,” he said.

Training for this has so far has mostly been done in Spain where conditions are warmer than in this country.

In August a week’s worth of exercises in Norfolk had to be cancelled because of bad weather, but this has not put Shola off at all. He plans to return to Spain to complete his training and be ready for take off in his powered glider next summer – a normal hang glider would not allow him to meet the task.

While most people who undertake such an ambitious feat usually do so to raise money for charity, Shola is contented to keep this as a personal challenge, although he has not completely discounted the idea of fundraising.

“I’ve not thought about charity yet, one of the reasons why I’m trying to keep it as a personal challenge is because you don’t see a lot of black people doing this and I don’t want the main drive to be the charity thing, I want it to be more of something you decide to do in life and [then] you pursue it.”

News of Shola’s plans received mixed reviews from his family, while his two older children aged 11 and 7 think it is a fun thing to do, his mother and wife have taken a lot more convincing.

Aside from the progress of this challenge being recorded on his website, Shola is hoping someone will like his story enough to make a documentary about it.

When Black Britain contacted the British Hang Gliding and Paragliding Association to find out how many other black hang gliders there are in this country we were told that they didn’t know as they do not record this information about their members.

So it may well be that Shola Ogunlokun is indeed the only black man in the country brave enough to go up in a hang glider.

More info about black people, please visit Black Britain.

Black People as Scenery

Hollywood got the message more than two decades ago that it should feature more roles for black people and other minorities, but still hasn't figured out exactly how to do this.

The two possible approaches were: to cast blacks in roles written for whites; or to create roles especially for them and to tell stories about them or which at least take them into account. Obviously, it is easier to do the first than the second, and Hollywood has done much more of it.

In the 1940's and 1950's, black actors had to play dumb for roles as nannies and servants. In the 1960's and 1970's, they were featured mainly as gangsters, pimps and prostitutes in gritty police movies that wanted to establish realism by showing white cops in a Harlem setting.

When Hollywood got the message that this was racist and humiliating, certain roles written for white actors became reserved for blacks. One cop movie after another protrayed a black police chief; there were more black police chiefs in the movies than in all the major cities of America. There were more black mayors and FBI agents than there were in the real world. There was the black friend, the black next door neighbor, the black sidekick (the most recent example is the role played by Samuel Jackson in the third Diehard). These movies give the pleasant impression that there is little or no racism in the world; most notable are the ones set in violent, jingoistic surroundings from the American past, revised to create equal opportunity. In Westerns of recent years, black cowboys walk into the saloon, mingle, and enter gunfighting contests with no-one treating them any differently than anyone else. Now, we know there were more than a few black cowboys in the West, but do these movies teach us anything about the actual circumstances of their lives? It is hard to believe the West was enlightened, that whites welcomed blacks, perhaps, as their partners in wiping out the Indians. Of course, the Indians themselves are equal partners in the general enterprise in some of these movies.

In The Unforgiven, Morgan Freeman, as Clint Eastwood's sidekick, was whipped to death by evil sheriff Gene Hackman--a scene of very strange resonance, as he was murdered in a scene eerily suggestive of a lynching without the whisper of a suggestion that his race had anything to do with it. "Listen," Clint Eastwood, who directed, seemed to be telling us, "the role was written for a white guy, and he was whipped in the original script. What was I supposed to do, change it when I hired Morgan Freeman?"

Of course, there was significant carnage among black sidekicks in the police movies as well, and for the same reasons: the peripheral character intended to be sacrificed to the plot was the role most often given to black actors, so that the kindly black sergeant or next door neighbor always seemed to be the one to take a bullet in the gut. The black scientist in Terminator II was a memorable recent example of this trend.

Since black people were frequently portrayed as victims of violence in the 1970's gangster/pimp/prostitute movies, assigning them to peripheral roles in other stories ironically confirmed their iconic association with violence in the movies. Nevertheless, movie producers have tried to capitalize on such casting choices by proudly announcing that they have hired a black person for a role written for a white (I seem to remember such an announcement about the casting of Morgan Freeman in The Unforgiven). Black actors have sometimes also announced that they are pleased to play race-neutral roles, rather than being pigeonholed. However, the vast majority of these roles have been in action-adventure movies such as Passenger 57, roles which themselves are pigeonholes of a sort.

We are being collectively sold a bill of goods, blacks and whites together. The message at the movies is that there is no racism in America. At first blush, this may seem like a good, rather decent thing for movie makers to show us; if the movies are such powerful influences on our lives, the argument goes, won't we be more tolerant, more likely to make friends with people unlike ourselves, if the movies show us the possibility? Well, movies are powerful, and to the extent they really show us interracial friendship, we may learn something. The problem is, they don't. The black actors and actresses playing mayors, police chiefs and sidekicks in the movies are the victims, not beneficiaries, of the type of affirmative action that gives affirmative action a bad name. White audiences know that the character is not black. The actor is a place-marker, a stand in for the liberal conscience which wants to show progress without doing the work necessary to create progress.

Even more problematic, movies like the Lethal Weapon series which portray a real friendship between a white character and a black character who really is black--family, neighborhood, community concerns--serve as a sort of placebo. Just as Schindler's List falsely reassured us that the Holocaust had been handled, because a rescuer had arisen, many contemporary movies falsely tell us that racism, too, has been handled. Most whites who walked out of the theater after any of the Lethal Weapon series glad that Mel Gibson and Danny Glover are friends, probably still do not have any black friends of their own. Spike Lee called attention to a related phenomenon in a savagely funny scene in Do the Right Thing, when a white racist, played by John Turturro, acknowledged being a fan of Eddie Murphy, Whitney Houston and Michael Jordan. We are in a strange phase in America in which many whites can enjoy watching Eddie Murphy--or for that matter, Spike Lee-- make fun of them, precisely because they are not in the same room and therefore, the anxieties of personal contact can be avoided. Dick Gregory said thirty years ago that "in the South, they don't care how close I get, as long as I don't get too big; in the North, they don't care how big I get, as long as I don't get too close." Nothing much has changed since then, except more of the country has become like the North.

Though there are a number of successful black directors telling stories about black people (Spike Lee, Mario van Peebles, Forest Whitaker, Carl Franklin) Hollywood still has a strong tendency to portray black oppression through the story of a white rescuer, mediator or witness--just the way Schindler's List told the story of the Holocaust through the eyes of a German. Sissy Spacek in The Long Walk Home, Barbara Hershey in A World Apart, Donald Sutherland in A Dry White Season (which was directed by a black woman), Gene Hackman in Mississippi Burning, all hogged the camera, reducing the black people behind them to scenery, even though the movies were supposedly about the plight of blacks in pre-Mandela South Africa and the 1960's American South. Movies dealing with other oppressed people have taken the same tack; Sam Waterston in The Killing Fields and Patricia Arquette in Beyond Rangoon worked out their own needs and destinies against an Asian backdrop, giving the impression that Third World uprisings are great locales for middle class white Americans to clear up their consciences and their complexions at the same time. Of course, these movies, similarly Schindler, stand for the principle that such stories are too alien to appeal to your sympathy if a more familiar rescuer is not placed in the foreground.

In reality, there is no substitute for stories about the lives of black people told through their own eye, and thanks to stars like Denzel Washington (who nonetheless alternates making white action adventure movies) and film-makers like Spike Lee, we are getting more of them. Most whites will avoid seeing a film in a theater where the audience is mainly black, but, if this anxiety can be overcome, seeing these movies with a black audience you will learn a lot more than you would from the movie itself. One thing you will realize, as you see black people realistically portrayed on the screen and, more important, really present in the theater, who are middle class and inherently familiar and who seem like they could be your friends, is that segregation is still universal in America at all levels. The black and white middle classes in this country have little to do with each other in most sectors of the workplace, and even less in private life. A black family buying a house in a white neighborhood in Brooklyn, Queens and Westchester is about as likely to see the house burned down as it was thirty years ago.

More info about black people, please visit Spectacle.

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The dark side of black people

LET ME START by saying that if I had my life to live over a thousand times, the one thing I would not change would be my race. I am proud to be a black man. There are times however, when I wish that certain people and I did not share that trait.

For the past few days, the whole world ... well, at least those who have access to satellite and cable television, have been seeing pictures of the virtually total devastation of the cities of the U.S. Gulf Coast by Hurricane Katrina. An estimated 90 per cent of homes in New Orleans have been destroyed by flood waters and more than 100 people have been confirmed dead.

We see people standing on the roofs of their submerged homes desperate to be rescued, others being airlifted to safety, and we have heard tear-jerking stories of families losing their loved ones. But in all of this, we have also seen the really dark side of black people.

The day after the hurricane passed, there were reports of looting but network reporters had been saying that people were looting out of desperation, in search of food and water. A lot they knew.

The pictures I have been seeing are of people - black people - stealing shoes, diapers, and television sets. Not food and definitely not water. Not unless the armfuls of clothing, shoes, and appliances I see people wading through the streets with count as food and water.

Now, if all the looters were looting out of desperation, how desperate were the guy and girls I saw toting several boxes of size 13 Nikes? How desperate was the fellow with the stack of diapers? What, is it that he has several babies at home suffering from loose bowels? What am I talking about, what home? Everything is under water and what isn't, has been totally destroyed.

Plasma TV?

And just what are those guys stealing the plasma television sets going to be watching when there is no power in the entire city?

Desperation? Yeah, right. I am beginning to believe that black people, no matter where in the world they are, are cursed with a genetic predisposition to steal, murder, and create mayhem.

The entire firearm department at a Wal-Mart department store, for example, was cleaned out and the looters used the stolen weapons to rob people. How low is that? Everybody is suffering and the black people would seek to rob people who are suffering just like themselves.

No white looters?

And it has nothing to do with poverty. Where are the white people in all this? I am sure there are poor white people living in New Orleans, Biloxi and the other towns affected by what has been going on. Is it that the media are not showing pictures of them looting and robbing? Or is it that they are too busy trying to stay alive, waiting to be rescued, and hiding from the blacks.

And you know what? Even if the poor whites were looting and robbing, wouldn't it be nice if the blacks could have made them the only ones doing it

Just once, I would like for us blacks to take the high road in situations like this, where instead of showing our darkest side, we put our best foot forward. But I guess that would be too much to ask, too much of a case of wishful thinking.

More info about black people, please visit Jamaica Star.