Sunday 8 July 2007

Find Something Else to Worry About, Lowri

I just read this from Saturday's Guardian: Lowri Turner confronts her own prejudices about having a mixed race child. She secretly hopes that her dark-skinned baby daughter won't get any darker. She admits she that she is horrified at herself for being hijacked by such emotions.

Still I can't help feeling very angry (and sad) that she is wasting her energy on something like this.

Can she not just be delighted that she has a healthy baby girl?

She says she is grieving - yes, grieving - because of the possibility that her child won't look like her - but her child could be blonde and still not look like her! Or she could be dark and look very like her.

I get so bloody tired of all this mixed race angst - please, Lowri, find something else to worry about.

*My very blonde sister-in-law was slightly 'disappointed' that one of her boys (half German, quarter Pakistani, quarter Scottish) wasn't more dark.

8 comments:

Pants said...

Hi NMJ

I couldn't believe this either. Almost everything that comes out of Lowri Turner could be described as ill-advised but this is something else, even for her. Where did she think she was, 1957? The ridiculous irony of it is that she is lamenting the anonymous 'labelling' of her baby daughter by health workers whilst publicly proclaiming her 'otherness'. Which is going to hurt her child more in the future - being categorised by ethnicity as we all are by officialdom or being emotionally rejected by her mother in print?

xxx

Pants

nmj said...

Hey Pants, Lovely to see you, I barely know who Lowri Turner is, I had to google her - and as I said below in a comment to Anna MR, my granny showed more sense in the 1960s. The whole thing is quite bizarre.

x

Janejill said...

This is bitchy I suppose but let's hope the poor wee thing doesn't inherit her mother's puddingy face as well as her bumptious know-all attitude. And this from a woman who was contemplating buying a property in Africa ..

Pepette said...

To be honest, if I was her daughter, I'd be relieved I don't look like her.

And I bet her husband loved reading this article.

Can you tell I can't stand the woman? :)

nmj said...

Janejill, Pepette, you may have a point, hopefully the wee girl will take after her dad (in looks and brains)...

I just can't imagine women responding to this article: Thanks so much, Lowri, for saying what needed to be said, I too worry that might child is too dark.

She talks about how common mixed race coupledom is now, but then goes to great lengths to tell us what a problem it could be.

And there is a photo of the dark baby's feet beside her white brother's feet - Jesus! That really made me mad - sensationalising something which is simply not sensational.

Political Umpire said...

The woman should be shot. The article to which you linked contained the following:

" 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"

Grief!!! For a perfectly healty child!!!! Go look at the endless stream of pregnancy/birth channels on Sky (that, to my chagrin, 7 months' pregnant Mrs Ump likes to watch) and see the countless desperate tales of couples failing to conceive, coughing up vast sums on IVF, then having six miscarriages in a row and a cot death. "£$£""$^ woman.

Well Junior Ump (whose picture now adorns my blog) looks much more like his mother than he does me, though clearly his hair is mine and he is of a lighter complexion (mother is of Indian ethnicity). Does that bother me? No. He's better off looking like her because she's better looking. Since if my dog looked like Lowri Turner I'd shave its arse and teach it to walk backwards, she should be pleased her daughter doesn't look like her.

Pants, of course, says things much more eloquently and concisely than me, so I'll endorse her comment and leave it at that.

nmj said...

P.U, You are naughty with the shaved dog comment...

Just peeped at your blog, your boy looks adorable, though the photo is sideways and not that easy to see!

Political Umpire said...

Hello NMJ,

You are too kind. It took me forever to upload the photo in the first place (something to do with the file size, or whatever, I don't know about these things) so that's about as good as it's going to get, I'm afraid.

I have always found your posts on dual-ethnicity v. interesting, this one being no exception. Turner whines about filling in boxes on ethnic monitoring forms, but I don't see how which box you tick makes it less or more annoying.