By: Kirsten West Savali, Your Black World
Though the blokes in the UK apparently aren't coming "to the yard" for singer Kelis's"Milkshake," one man had no problem going all the way back to the plantation.
The eclectic singer and ex-wife of Hip-Hop icon,Nasir Jones, cut through the line going through passport control at Heathrow Airport when, a "red faced sweaty man started calling me slave and told me to call him sir," according to the singers' Twitter page.
She tweeted to her over 160,000 Twitter followers about the incident, claiming that the man also called her "a disgusting Nigerian" and "Kunta Kinte."
According to the singer, "The man behind the desk laughed and shook his [head]," while over 50 people stood by and said nothing:
“[They] didn’t flinch. We all know I’m no saint, so I retaliated. Not the way I wanted to, or how that pig deserved. But #1 my gorgeous baby boy was literally sitting on my hip and #2 I’m a believer. And we are better. Supposed to be anyway. It made me think. This person was approximately a 50 year old English man.”
Kelis followed with a series of tweets discussing race in the UK. She travels there extensively, and calls the bigotry and prejudice "disgusting":
"I didn't say anything at the time of the riots in London [protests over the shooting death by police of a local Black man, Mark Duggan] for a lot of reasons. But I am in london all the time and today I'm gonna say that the racial issues in the uk are disgusting. Its racially decades behind progression because everything is swept under the rug. People don't talk about it. People don't fight about it."
No official complaint has been filed and this situation is not being investigated.
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Although no official complaint was made, the press reported that the Mayor of London contacted Kelis and wrote to the Secretary of State for the Home Department (who has ultimate responsibility for immigration staff, regarding the incident). Kelis subsequently tweeted to clarify that the incident happened in Spain, not in the UK. At this stage, we know very little about the passenger, apart from the fact that he is white and speaks English. We also know very little about the immigration officer, apart from fact that he was in Spain. Hopefully, Kelis will make an official complaint, so as to enable the Spanish authorities to identify the passenger and the immigration officer (e.g. from the CCTV footage and from the passengers immigration data), and launch a proper investigation into this matter.
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