ninme

I’m putting this post in Science and Nature because it’s true, damnit. Red hair is recessive-recessive. I’ll leave Mendel’s pea diagrams out of it, but the point is, you need red hair on both sides to make it work, and in this age of people in small villages in Scotland and Ireland not having to marry the guy two doors down for lack of any other option, well, we’ll be gone before long, won’t we. And then you’ll be sorry!

From last night, via Wheat & Weeds:

The Times - Family forced to flee just for being ginger

A family of six have fled two homes after enduring a vicious hate campaign, apparently prompted by the colour of their hair.

Kevin and Barbara Chapman say that anti-ginger prejudice has led to their property being vandalised and their four youngest children being subjected to a litany of cruel taunts, verbal abuse and bullying.

The Chapmans and their children, who are from Newcastle-upon-Tyne, have a blaze of red hair which, they claim, has reduced them to living like fugitives in the city. Their plight carries uncomfortable echoes of the Catherine Tate sketch in which a group of ginger-haired outcasts find safety in a refuge after being ostractised by society.

Another victim of hair-colour prejudice, the Premiership footballer Dave Kitson, of Reading, claimed two years ago that fans who made fun of his red hair were as bad as racists.

This year, David Cameron, the Conservative leader, dismissed his homeland security spokesman after a race-row scandal. Patrick Mercer, a former Army colonel, had said that soldiers with red hair were given a “far harder time” than blacks and that comments like “Come on you black bastard” and “Come on you ginger bastard” were “the way it is in the Army”.

The Chapmans – who have nine children, with only the four youngest living at home – appear unable to find sanctuary anywhere Newcastle. At each new home – three in the past three years – their windows have been smashed, graffiti has been sprayed on their walls and the children, aged between 10 and 13, have been physically attacked.

And today:

The Times - Stronger, tougher, fiery and attractive, by Charlotte Rushton, Ginger and proud (that’s their author line, not mine)

I was on the Tube last year, pregnant, and a lager lout started shouting: “Oi, oi, ginger, ginger! Do your collars match your cuffs?” Nobody came to help.

People have this obsession with whether the hair on your head matches your body hair. When I was at boarding school, a group of boys tried to pin me down on a ping-pong table to find out for themselves.

I was the only redhead in my year and they did everything they could to make me cry. We had a beautiful dining hall, like the one in the Harry Potter books, and when I walked in someone would shout “ginger” and they would all lie down on the floor to avoid catching “ginger disease”. It was quite a sight, seeing 700 people react like that.

But I would not have any other hair colour. We redheads are stronger biologically, we have thicker hair and we can withstand more pain than anyone else. Having just had a baby, I can verify that this is true: it was not that bad.

The abuse is a very British thing. I lived in America for a while, and as soon as I got there I was asked out left, right and centre. Americans see it as fiery and attractive. I married an American and we have just had a son. The only disappointment is that he is not a redhead.

And:

The Times - Long live the GLO
Redheads are endangered. They should be protected and cherished

Enough is enough. Cruelty has hounded a flame-haired family of Geordies out of house and home. Twice.

Not content with harmless teasing of the sort that anyone’s humour should be able to bear, gingerist brutes have scrawled nasty graffiti on the Chapmans’ walls, broken windows and subjected the children to ritualised bullying.

If it were any other minority, the outrage would be universal. Yet gingers, alongside the Welsh and hapless trainspotters, can be heartlessly ridiculed and then labelled “ginger whingers” when they dare to rise up and complain. …

The time has come for the clarets to fight back. Sanguine acceptance is no longer appropriate. Where there is darkness, gingers bring light. Where there is blondness, redheads bring colour. All power to the Ginger Liberation Organisation, and all those who GLO.

So, a few comments:

I too used to get it when I was a kid (though not that bad). The last time though was one night in the Safeway parking lot across the street from my dorm in Spokane and some teenagers (that’s what they do in Spokane, they hang out at grocery store and gas station parking lots) shouted at me if I was a redheaded stepchild. I was 18 then. To this day I have no idea what that means.

But by that time all the people who used to make fun of me were now spending a fortune on hair dye to look like me (there was a phase, you’ll remember, when red hair was all the rage in magazines. Now it seems to have resettled into the blonde/brunette thing, eg Jessica Simpson, Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan’s colour exploits).

Lindsay Lohan. I won’t say it, but you all know what people call her. And now she’s a brunette.

Which means that people do grow up, except for the Hollywood party crowd and the British.