The roads are filled with sweaty, rambunctious crowds; shattered glass litters your pathways, and the domineering bass speakers pass through your chest. You are 4 cups in on the rum punch that you swore didn’t have a lot of alcohol in it, and the Soca is calling around Ladbroke Grove, yet as you whine and sing along in the fete, you scan your surroundings to double check no strange looming man is dancing too close.
You adjust your outfit and hope not to get groped or seized by the countless men that roam NHC without any understanding of the Caribbean and its generations that have endured just to celebrate themselves in London. Now all you see on Instagram are highlights of someone catching their first whine at ‘Carni’ and people carrying endless Jamaican flags, even when carnival does not hail from Jamaica. Ultimately, NHC has become a breeding ground for sexual assault and hyper sexualisation of Caribbean culture.
With the historical context swept away by street cleaners picking up the litter that is left behind each year. Now the British are on the hunt again, for a new place to exert their degeneracy and hooliganism, where leaving smashed windshields is funny and exploiting the locals is nothing, and this time they chose France. The demographic I have observed across social media that sensationalises cultural celebrations has now come from my own black British community.
