While Patrick makes many good points as usual, he barely touches on the most common use of racial slurs – by blacks against other blacks.
Patrick’s main story centers around the Sedgleys, a white British couple who received the surprise of their lives when they used foul racial slurs against some innocent Bajans.
Worth reading…
White Flight
The first time I heard the phrase “white flight” was as an AFS student in Denver back in the early 1970s. It referred, as far as I recall, to the shift of the white population in the U.S. from city to suburb as blacks moved into the urban areas on their migration from the southern states.
In my own mind I have also always applied the phrase to the curious departure of a large group of Bajan whites back in the early 1970s, who made their exodus on a ship presumably bound for England, from where they then travelled to Australia and New Zealand. Their reasons for leaving, as I understood back then, had to do with their discomfort with where the country was heading under the leadership of Errol Barrow. Apparently several of them did quite well in their adoptive homelands, although I really only knew one of them, Charlie Mackenzie. Their story is one that is crying out to be told, even if we may want to disagree with their motives.
The phrase came back to me again last week as I read about the recent judgment against a British couple, the Sedgleys, who were not in court to hear the verdict against them. They had flown the coop. And although they got off lightly (in my layman’s view) for what they were found guilty of doing, someone else is at the moment having to pay for this latest example of “white flight”: Ryan Burnett, who had signed a surety for $10,000 ($5,000 each) for former British footballer Stephen Sedgley and his wife Nicola…
… continue reading the article at the Broad Street Journal (link here).
