Mandingo Cliche II
10:00 am on the 25th of February, 2004It’d probaby be best if I wrote in a slightly more coherant way today but I’m not promising anything.
Well thanks to Derek’s comment we now know what it means. I think.
My original post was going to be something based on my understanding of it being about people’s public and pivate feelings; where someone tells people that they hate one thing and would always chose the other when actually they feel differently and only have the ‘public’ opinions they have because they are told that that is the only way you can think by the public. It seems that is kind of right, the girl in Storytelling ‘demonises’ blacks when she actually ‘thinks they’re cool, and exotic.’ I was going to apply it to me, but in the more general sense I described above.
Yesterday in uni the lecturer just out of interest after talking to two folk in my class asked which union we’d all joined*. I was quite pleased to see only two qm members, I’m a guu member you see, but then I started thinking about something, I dislike both places equally. I could give you a long run-down about why I’m a guu member but that’s not my point at the moment. I always enjoy slagging off qm members but equaly despise going to the guu. It’s only because at Glasgow you get it drummed into you that there is only one union worth existing, what that union is depends on who you talk to.
In short I’m more likely to go to the guu for lunch because it’s cheaper, nearer to my building, has more rooms and people so is easier to find someone to talk to or find somewhere to hide and read, but I hate going out to the guu at night, with the exception of the beer bar and only on some nights when they have some good beers.
I don’t like going to the qm except on gig nights and that costs money.
It all comes down to Mandingo Cliche, in classic racist tradition I demonise then run for cover, but then, how could I behave otherswise, I’m just a student of an academic based subject with a ‘they’re all queers and misfits’ complex.
*There are two student unions at the University of Glasgow, the Glasgow University Union (GUU) and the Queen Margaret Union(QMU), there is also the Student’s Representative Committee (SRC) which was borne out of the GUU. The GUU was set up first in 1885 and only allowed males to join until the Uni threatened to remove it’s funding in 1981, the last union in Britain to do so. The QMU was set up for somewhere for female students to join in 1890 and only allowed male members from 1979. There is a kind of mutual hatred between the two unions and their members.
April 16th, 2004 at 12:27 am on the 16th of April, 2004
There are three student unions at GU. You missed the Postgraduate Club.
April 16th, 2004 at 5:24 pm on the 16th of April, 2004
sorry!
February 23rd, 2006 at 2:41 pm on the 23rd of February, 2006
was also trying to find out what mandingo cliche meant and if it was an actual ism and came across your site. Dont know whether you go any thing further - but Mandingo was some dodgy 70s film about a guy who teaches his slave to box, unaware that his daughter is using the slave for some other purposes. i used to work at a tourist restaurant in cape town, sa where we had a marimba band every night. foreign white girls used to literally throw themselves at the marimba players. sexual curiousity or racism. it is but a fine line.
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