Ginger Lives Matter Ginger Red Head Person T-Shirt

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On the day of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s wedding, the pair received a death threat. White powder has been sent to her, alongside a racist note, in an incident police treated as a racist hate crime. Sarah Ferguson, the Duchess of York, was loathed by the press, sure, but she never faced such threats because of her flaming red hair.

Anger, tension and outright abuse boiled over online as a counter-petition to support the event was organised. It got twice the number of signatures, leading Saunders to say that hers was more valid by claiming “90% of [signatories] are from Lydney, can you say yours was?” Later, she would make Eldridge-Tull gasp by posting: “He couldn’t breathe, now we can’t speak”, in a reference to Floyd’s murder by a police officer. And worse, it can lead to school refusal, health problems, self-injurious behaviour and even children wanting and trying to die by suicide,” added Meleady, who was awarded an MBE in 2000 for her services to children. Still, on 10 June, an online petition was set up to stop the event going ahead on the grounds that it was unsafe and high risk in the middle of a pandemic. Organiser Natasha Saunders wrote: “A mass gathering is a slap in the face to people who have been tirelessly shielding themselves, the elderly and loved ones from this virus.” Some anti-racist activists have spent the last year explaining that racism isn’t simply prejudice based on how one looks, but a system, much like capitalism, communism, and socialism, put in place by those in power around a specific set of ideas – in this case, racist ones. Being white does not mean one is more likely to be criminalised by the police, or that one is more likely to work in lower-paid frontline work or that one is more likely to be exposed to and die of Covid as a result.In 2013, genetic researchers believed they had “developed a powerful tool to combat the bullying of some redheads in Britain”, Reuters reported. The Scottish team discovered that as many as one in three Britons carry red-head genes, meaning that even if they are not redheads themselves, “their future children or grandchildren could be”. Between 1% and 2% of the global population have red hair, but the figure is much higher in England, at 6%, and higher still in Scotland, at 13%. She told the Sheffield Star that she had recently witnessed a case of “a family physically abusing their baby for having red hair as they equated her red hair as being the ‘mark of the devil’”.

Yet the racial justice debate became so sore locally that even now, a year later, interviewees bristle at the mention of BLM. Some become deeply uncomfortable and are unwilling to give voice to their feelings on the subject. Even those who declare themselves as anti-racist allies later withdraw their consent for being mentioned, for fear of “any negative association”. One woman messaged: “We are a positive [business] and positive people and have found our community to be the same”, as if discussion on achieving racial and social justice might not actually be a positive thing. Racism, sexism and homophobia are not just woven into the fabric of our history, they are living dynamics in our culture, even in our economy. They are, to greater or lesser extents, systematic and institutional in most aspects of life and the struggles to remove them are intrinsic to wider political battles over the very nature of our society, public policy and economic system. In that light, I would not hesitate to add disablism to the list of systematic oppressions. The research was published months after of a teenager took her own life after teased about her red hair. Following her death, the father of 15-year-old Helena Farrell, from Cumbria, “demanded discrimination against ginger people to be made a hate crime”, said The Telegraph. I'm a proud ginger and I've been abused, insulted and even, as a child, assaulted and bullied for it. I wouldn't wish that on anyone, but I'm pretty sure I have never been denied a job or the lease on a flat because of my complexion. I haven't been stopped and searched by police 25 times within a year because I am ginger, or casually assumed to be a threat, a criminal or a terrorist. I am not confronted by political parties and movements, some with democratically elected representatives, which would like to see me deported from the country or granted second-class citizenship.

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Khady Gueye, left, and Eleni Eldridge-Tull at Bathurst Park, Lydney, where they arranged their 2020 BLM event. Photograph: Francesca Jones/The Observer Although gingerism may be presented as just “banter”, rights campaigner Meleady, “who is ginger herself”, argued that such so-called jokes can “strip red-haired children “of their positive self-identity and confidence”, said The Telegraph.