Black Brown And White

After last weeks conflicts in Dallas and elsewhere – listen to my https://soundcloud.com/fingerstyle_guitar/dallas-police-shooting-blues – I remembered Big Bill Broonzy and his protest song “Black, brown and white” P.S.: my friend BP wisely commented on my wordpress blog: “Black lives matter. Of course, they do. Blue lives matter. Of course, they do. Not one more than the other, but equally. What we need to protest, however, and march in the streets for, is the fact that Honorable Lives Matter. We are not teaching our children to be honorable. We are not teaching our children to be responsible. We are not teaching our children to value life…” On Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bill_Broonzy I found: “… he portrayed the discrimination against black Americans in the 1930s with the song “Black, Brown and White”. The song has been used globally in education about racism, but in the late 1990s its inclusion in antiracism education at a school in Greater Manchester, England, led to pupils taunting the school’s only black pupil with the song’s chorus, “If you’re white, that’s all right, if you’re brown, stick around, but if you’re black, oh brother get back, get back, get back”. The national media reported that the problem became so bad that the nine-year-old boy was withdrawn from the school by his mother; the boy had even tried to scrub the black off his skin and made threats to kill himself. The song had already been adopted by the National Front, a far-right British political party which peaked in popularity in the 1970s and opposed nonwhite immigration to Britain …” P.S.: Photo from Baton Rouge by Jonathan Bachman of Reuters, screenshot

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writer, photographer, guitarist

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