Munroe Bergdorf makes George Floyd/Black Lives Matter all about Munroe Bergdorf

What does make me laugh is that MB tells white people that they cannot possibly understand what life is like as a black person, and they are right. And yet that is exactly what Munroe has done to women

Yep, totally agree. Munroe has been invited to speak to an organisation I work for and as a Black woman I really want to ask that question but we have to send questions before the event and I doubt it will get past the woke moderators from our Inclusion Team.

I'm already on their shit list as I haven't downloaded the company's new autosignature template with my preferred pronoun included. I told a member of that team that I can be referred to as she/her and it isn't my 'preference', it's my expectation since I'm a bio woman which is a simple fact. This resulted in a complaint to HR and I then had to have a meeting with my manager. He admitted that he didn't really understand the issue or why the complaint was made but he was instructed to conduct an enablement session with me and had been given a booklet on how I can be a better ally for my LGBTQ colleagues to 'help guide our conversation' .

I used the session to talk to him about the GRA, trans activism and the issues women are facing. He is a 50 something man with daughters so it was an interesting conversation for us both. We didn't even get around to opening the booklet which was a bonus:)

MB thinks that anyone who doesn’t do what they say/want is transphobic and/or racist. Never misogynist though, which is odd considering...

Yes Munroe has got her career back on track, Mermaids gets a nice donation and meanwhile another huge corporation has clawed back its woke credentials, and can sell more hair and make-up products to people. 'Because you're worth it' - must admit to feeling made to feel pretty worth-less today with all the woman-erasing shit going on. And MB has a beatific portrait on their Instagram - all head-tilty and glowy - doing the 'woman' thing far better than any of us.

And MB has 'written' (I put the word in inverted commas because MB has the clunkiest writing style) that Transphobia = White Supremacy. And if MB thinks that anyone who doesn't buy into TWAW is Transphobic, then she is accusing everyone of us of being a White Supremacist.

Allison Bailey that includes YOU.

I'm finding it hard to hold it together today.

A week ago www.theguardian.com/fashion/2020/jun/02/munroe-bergdorf-accuses-loreal-of-racial-hypocrisy

www.independent.co.uk/life-style/munroe-bergdorf-loreal-black-lives-matter-transgender-delphine-viguier-a9556181.html

www.glamour.com/story/munroe-bergdorf-loreal-diversity-board

Well that's another brand off my shopping list....

www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-8402259/Munroe-Bergdorf-makes-peace-LOreal-Paris-racism-row.html

Elder is interesting. Not really on my political wavelength, but I appreciate that conservatives like him, or Sowell, make a point of looking at the numbers, at what is actually happening, to draw their conclusions. You see something similar with some leftist thinkers - Reed makes the point that if you start looking for racial or sex or other categories of differentiation, you will almost certainly find them, even if they are not actually the primary or causative differences.

I find this is stark contrast to the neoliberal race commentators like Coates, who seem to work from the opposite perspective, where you begin with a theory cause and then ask questions to elicit the information you expect.

^^^^
Where Larry Elder challenges Dave Rubin to
give examples of systematic racism in American society

Meanwhile here is another black man's point of view.

This is really interesting to me - in general the police here and I suspect in the UK are trained to deescalate situations. That doesn't mean not having authority but it seems really very different than what the American police seem to encourage.

A few years ago there was a video taken on the subway in New York where someone who appeared to be under the influence of some substance/s started kicking off and two Swedish cops who happened to be there on holiday stepped in and deescalated, calming the person who'd been kicking off down and resolving the incident with no violence. The reason I remember this was because it got passed around with lots of Americans going "hey, how come our cops can't or won't do that?"

Yes, the weaponisation of the police definitely contributes to the dynamic - personally seeing an armed police officer makes me feel jumpy not safer - but other countries also have armed police without a similar proportion of civilians killed.

The training variability in the US is extreme - some places have just 4 weeks of training, and a large issue is the hired in training from external companies with very questionable values.

In Minneapolis they've used Warrior training which uses "killology" techniques. It was banned by the Mayor after other police-related killings but the Police Unions continued to offer it in defiance saying “It’s not about killing, it’s about surviving” which illustrates the mindset pretty clearly.

www.motherjones.com/crime-justice/2020/05/bob-kroll-minneapolis-warrior-police-training/

Munroe's "this is what you dropped me for" (to paraphrase) isn't entirely fair. Iirc they dropped Munroe because comments were way too general in an "all white folks are racist" sort of way.

Absolutely not the same thing. Munroe is an opportunistic chancer.

I fully support BLM protests, for what it's worth. Munroe is much too full of ego and self promotion to be of any use to anyone right now. Hey Munroe, IT'S NOT ABOUT YOU. Deal with it ffs.

Talking about the militarisation of the American police force is capitalism writ large. While America is involved in armed conflicts there is a huge and astonished lucrative market for military equipment.

Any de-escalation of conflict means that organisations making profits from war require new markets - and the police are an obvious one.

And once the tools are available, they will be used, given the police already work in deeply conservative and punitive contexts.

No conversation ever went:

“I see we have all those new armoured vehicles and big guns arrived.”

“Yep. Nice and shiny aren’t they?”

“They are. Look at pretty camo paint.
But let’s not use them today.”

“Yeah. Good call.”

So ALL white people are the problem? What a racist thing to say.

No. Because for a start racism is an institutional construct predicated on the idea that your skin colour is a predictor of your worth as a person. Racial prejudice is not the same because it’s not embedded in institutional power structures.

But white people, even those who individually bear no sense of superiority to black people. Every black person who doesn’t get a taxi because they are black, means more taxis for white people.

Every black person who doesn’t get a job, or even an interview because they have a “black name”, makes it easier for white people.

It’s the same way that all men benefit from male violence, while not being violent men themselves. A woman won’t take a job working at night, or in a remote location because she fears for her safety, which directly benefits men who now have more job opportunities.

And these are small examples, but multiplied over days and months and years and millions of lives, create enormous advantage for those who are most powerful.

And while I think Munroe Bergdorf is a twit, being a twit doesn’t mean you don’t experience systemic racism because of your skin colour. Being oppressed doesn’t mean you’re any kind of person, just that you’re a person living in an oppressive system.

So Bergdorf may not be sensible, they may be narcissistic, but they also have every right to speak about their own experiences of racism. And that experience is real, whatever their character.

The big corporations are neck deep in continuing racism and sexism. They profit directly from both systems, as they hope to profit from being seen to support racial equality.

I don’t like to think of myself as a racist, and hope that in my life I try and dismantle what I can reach, of structural racism. But I do benefit directly and indirectly from other people’s oppression, so I need to pay attention to some humility in my thinking.

It's also how they're trained. Reading about how they're trained to respond to perceived challenges to their authority can be very illuminating.

This is really interesting to me - in general the police here and I suspect in the UK are trained to deescalate situations. That doesn't mean not having authority but it seems really very different than what the American police seem to encourage. The goal is very mch to make any problem situation come out as well as possible for everyone involved, and there is a sense of duty of care even to people who are being a problem.

That being said, over the past 0 years or so there have been some changes and I think examples of worse policing here, particularly noticeable with the Mounties. My husband deals with them some in his work, and his sense is that a lot of it comes from an increased focus on liability. They are so focused on worker safety that the emphasis is always on the officers protecting themselves, wearing vests all the time, and so on - and it creates a different focus when you are trained that way.

And then add to that many officers now travel alone where they used to travel in pairs. Which makes them more vulnerable and more likely to worry about losing control of a situation.

Oh, yes. I can see that is confusing looking back.

I think Tyro didnt realise you meant Trade in european slaves when you said European slavery.

Also, I thought of just leaving the irony of Goose's last post to speak for itself, but it feels a little underhand. The Barbary Coast is the North African side of the Mediterranean, for those that don't know. The aforementioned corsairs weren't an example of European slavers; nor were they what's considered "white".

I'm not sure what you are getting at here? Who said they were white, or European?

My thoughts exactly.

Like most things in America it also fails to consider class, which has a substantial impact on whether a person is allowed to perform fragility and have it taken seriously.

That article critiquing "White Fragility" was a real brain workout but did express similar misgivings to my own , that the concept t is a hothouse orchid if an idea that can flourish in an academic hothouse but wilts when applied to the harsher more complex conditions of real life.

It's completely bonkers, Kittens.

Yet the reaction from all sides when anyone suggests maybe the fact that everyone's armed really isn't helping matters...

Also, I thought of just leaving the irony of Goose's last post to speak for itself, but it feels a little underhand. The Barbary Coast is the North African side of the Mediterranean, for those that don't know. The aforementioned corsairs weren't an example of European slavers; nor were they what's considered "white".

Also also, a lot of soldiers come home with PTSD, and that's inevitably going to add to any tendencies to be over reactive that they might already have had. Like, think of everything we know about the impact that serving in the various Gulf wars had on people and how twitchy they often remain even years after coming home, then take those people, give them guns, and set them to patrolling a civilian population when they've been socialized to see black people as a threat. In many areas they carry on acting just like they did when they were an occupying force charged with "subduing" what they perceive as the enemy.

And give them guns, I meant to add to that first sentence.

Also from a British perspective, if you take people who may already be more prone to reacting poorly to what they perceive as challenges to their authority guns then it's not surprising that that doesn't end well. The psychological impact on both the police themselves and the general population of knowing that they're walking around armed at all times shifts their relationship with the population in a deeply dysfunctional direction, imo. Add racism to the mix and you have a huge fucking mess.

Yes, the European slave trade was a real thing, many Americans seem quite unaware of it.

You're not wrong there!

I was raised by a military history nerd (among his many obsessions), so this stuff was unavoidable. He got a bit irate when we were talking about this thread today; not happy that West African slavers apparently get a free pass, because it's historically inaccurate.

Someone upthread said the transatlantic slave trade destabilised Africa; this is basically because the American project (as it were) massively increased demand in the long-established slave markets, and the slavers had to push further and further inland to capture enough bodies to meet that demand.

In other words: we didn't found the market, we just put pressure on it that it wasn't equipped to cope with.

There's an obvious parallel with the legalisation of renting women as wanksocks driving an increase in human trafficking in the present day.