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

the idea that "the slave trade" can be a unit of history and black history a month leads to our blinkered views whenever we don't acknowledge our entire social and economic system is constructed with black bodies at the bottom.

I don't think anyone has suggested any bit of history should be a unit a month.

But our entire system isn't constructed with "black bodies" at the bottom. There are all kinds of people at the bottom, and the system doesn't much care what they look like unless it makes things easier for those at the top.

That's why identity politics is basically a feature of neoliberalism, it's goal at this moment is to make sure that the the bottom, and the top, accurately reflect the demographics of the nation, so they can show us that it is all just and natural for it to be that way.

I'd be interested in reading some blogs or articles that are not from the Critical Race Theory angle.

James Lindsay on twitter. He has a blog called New Discourses which contains a Dictionary of the Wokeish, i.e an encyclopedia of critical social justice terms.

(My last post was in response to Goose's, btw. Didn't hit refresh!)

I'm inclined to agree.

I think we (as in, the West collectively) tend to fall into the same sort of error as I've denounced Americans-on-the-internet for upthread, and assume that our parochial interpretation of this thing we call "ethics" is actually universal, when in fact it's very much a product of our specific circumstances and history.

Excellent point also re: the renaming of instances of slavery. Where we've abandoned the practice, we name it slavery; where we still benefit from it we name it something else entirely.

All the black activists and thinkers that have been talking about the current uprising and protests all put this into a much longer historical context and they do include the colonial past.

Yes slavery always existed and wasn't necessarily linked to color but the modern USA has a particular history which are we intimately linked with. That history is the basis of our "Special Relationship" with the USA. My posts are not about pointing fingers but acknowledging the entire context of how millions of people of European and African descent ended up on the other side of the Atlantic and how that has fed into our society in the UK ever since. The idea that "the slave trade" can be a unit of history and black history a month leads to our blinkered views whenever we don't acknowledge our entire social and economic system is constructed with black bodies at the bottom. Just because those bodies were in the USA, the Caribbean and South Africa doesn't stop our society benefiting.

Ibram x. Kendi
www.democracynow.org/2019/8/13/ibram_x_kendi_class_race_capitalism

Bakari Sellers
www.democracynow.org/2020/6/1/bakari_sellers_400_years_systemic_racism

I'm with Bergdorf on this.

And people who are saying 'it's white Americans' need to think about Windrush and whether that would have happened if they were white.

I read this article earlier. It has interesting things to say about Robin Diangelo (the inventor of White Fragility) who seems to be using out-dated and/or highly contested claims to back up beliefs on the nature of whiteness*. She claims white people have implicit racist biases and these are good predictors of future behaviour (a claim we've seen repeated in this discussion), unfortunately for Diangelo more recent research throws these claims in to serious doubt. Has she updated her theory? Has she shite.

merionwest.com/2020/06/02/as-the-word-racism-loses-its-meaning/?fbclid=IwAR2rg0A-pxV5NqbK0ysEv7tD9JmtBJWIi2mSrIJRMj3myHhkAFMPqFRrNvc

Given the context, Goose, we should probably also mention the various indigenous American tribes who practised various forms of slavery. I'm really not sold on the idea that the only slavery worth talking about is the sort that Americans' ancestors were subjected to. It's a pretty relevant area when you're considering women's rights, from antiquity to the present day, for one thing.

I've come somewhat to the conclusion that seeing slavery as entirely normal is actually more normal for people. It seems to have been perfectly natural and sensible and not needing explanation really in the vast majority of societies, even if it wasn't as significant an institution in many.
In a way we are more unusual fr not seeing it that way. And I wonder even so if that's not just a combination of replacing much of it with tech, moving what's left out of view, and renaming it. Any one of us now on our computers in living with the fact that some form of slavery went into their production, from mining to getting rid of the toxic waste.

From my point of view, this is not coming from a position of white liberal guilt. It's coming from a position of my DS asking how on earth current day America could have ended up such that a white police officer knelt on a black man's neck for 8 minutes while the black man told him he couldn't breathe, the onlookers pleaded for the pressure to be released, told the officer the man had gone limp and unresponsive... And why (as became rapidly apparent from the news coverage) does this sort of death happen disproportionately to black people in America. How does a society end up that fucked up?

But saying "because race is a problem in America" isn't really an answer to that. It's an observation, not a cause, even if you make it a historical observation.

I'm not sure that looking through the lens of race alone is likely to he enlightening TBH. The problems with policing in the US are bigger than that. The number one thing that makes you a target of police brutality there is not being black, it's being poor. This also happens when cities and police forces are led by black leaders and when the police themselves are highly integrated. That's not an equivocation or whataboutery, those are facts that you have to account for in your analysis for it to be strong, and "white people have racism in their DNA" doesn't really cut it. Even systemic racism doesn't cut it, it's just a name for an observation of a pattern, not an explanation.

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. And not only has Munroe done it to women, Munroe has then preached to women that they are the ones doing womaning and feminism wrong. Can you imagine a white person painting their face black and then acting in all manner of stereotypical ways, and then telling Munroe that they are just as a legitimate voice for black people as Munroe is? It would be fucking outrageous! I am just totally astonished that no one see the hypocrisy, but that is a different issue I guess.

Yup.

Given the context, Goose, we should probably also mention the various indigenous American tribes who practised various forms of slavery.

I'm really not sold on the idea that the only slavery worth talking about is the sort that Americans' ancestors were subjected to. It's a pretty relevant area when you're considering women's rights, from antiquity to the present day, for one thing.

Would you be able to recommend some of them please, Goosefoot? smile
I'd be interested in reading some blogs or articles that are not from the Critical Race Theory angle.

Cornel West is kind of interesting - in some ways he agrees with the CRT approach, but he seems to put its roots in modern terms in a different place. His background is marxist/Christian, I think.

Adolph Reed ad Toure Reed are both worth reading. There are tons of good articles by the former online and easily accessible. Harpers, The Progressive, would be places to check. He's probably the most significant critic of CRT on the left.

Thomas Sowell is interesting from a more conservative perspective, in many ways coming from the opposite perspective of Reed and West. Roland Fryer I think might also be considered as from the conservative side though in many ways he is very centrist - he did some studies on black interactions with the police that were not at all popular with progressives though.

From my point of view, this is not coming from a position of white liberal guilt. It's coming from a position of my DS asking how on earth current day America could have ended up such that a white police officer knelt on a black man's neck for 8 minutes while the black man told him he couldn't breathe, the onlookers pleaded for the pressure to be released, told the officer the man had gone limp and unresponsive... And why (as became rapidly apparent from the news coverage) does this sort of death happen disproportionately to black people in America. How does a society end up that fucked up?

I find it's impossible to answer that question without some sort of historical context. It's not like each of the incidents was randomly driven, in isolation, by a single "bad apple" in the police acting alone and equally randomly picking someone black as their victim.

And, although I don't subscribe to the idea that one should feel guilty for the actions of one's ancestors either, I can't deny the fact that being born white, as I was, deals one a lucky hand in life. Since it wasn't of my choosing, I don't feel guilt about it, but it would be wrong not to acknowledge it. And wrong not to bring up my son to acknowledge it. I personally don't want to turn into one of those white people who blithely says "oh, I don't even see race", as though this somehow is the ultimate trump card in proving their non-racist credentials.

Should say *lot's of people are owed lots" rather than owned

may I remind you that the USA was built on British Colonies, that the White Supremacy and race relations that you accuse Americans of was imported directly from Europe and very much from the UK.

Yes, and no. Slavery as it existed in the early modern period changed it's nature significantly in the Americas, and in some ways that was a reversal of the direction that it had been moving in Europe for several centuries.
The concept of race existed in Europe undoubtably but was not tied to skin colour, but something loser to ethnicity or even the emerging idea of something like a national identity.
Slavery as an institution is ancient and almost ubiquitous in human history, and I think that's really the key to understanding it, and the fundamental problem of Critical Race Theory. It's never really been about race, it's about an economic structure and the rights or freedoms or autonomy of those at the bottom. And there have always been gradations just like there have always been people being exploited at the bottom. The slavery of the ancient Greeks wasn't the same as that of the ancient Persians, the slavery of early medieval period wasn't the same as that of the late medieval period which wasn't the same as the chattel slavery of the Americas. The people employed by the factory owners of the Industrial Revolution, or working in mines living in mining town houses and owing their pay to the shop the mine owners sold them their necessities from weren't called slaves, but they are on a continuum with those other forms of slavery. The modern poor American who is in a shit job in an Amazon warehouse and can't move or leave for fear of losing health insurance and can't afford to improve his lot or that of his kids through education is also in a continuum. And in every case these labourers are there to benefit someone at the top.

This is problem about talking about slave reparations. Lots of people are owned lots. Reparations is just a little readjustment for a few of them within an system that is fundamentally exploitative.

For anyone to say that race in the UK is just about "ethnicity" obviously doesn't have any black family members.

The modern context of racial groups based on skin colour is historically rooted in around the 1400s. Even in the USA in the early years of colonization Africans were indentured and could legally buy their freedom and buy land. Land was abundant and the need for labour so high that gradually servitude became permanent for black people and slavery associated with skin colour.

This gradual change can be traced in English colonial law, when the Virginian English colonial law for example changed that said children of an enslaved person had to take their legal status from their mother not their father in 1662. the act "Negro womens children to serve according to the condition of the mother," passed by theGeneral Assemblyin the session of December 1662, Virginia's colonial government attempted to better define the conditions by which people wereenslaved or free.

This was to stop what had been happening, which was the sons of enslaved African mothers inheriting their English colonists father's property. So black people were gradually moved legally from indenture to permanent servitude based on skin colour. Even free black people were prevented by law from voting in 1724 and 1735. This is all before the creation of the USA.

The extensive system of literally keeping large numbers of black people corralled and forcibly enslaved, took a social willingness to accept violence against black people as necessary and normal by white people.

The idea that this is an American phenomenon is quaint and shows you don't know much about British history. Those black communities in the ports of England were constantly physically attacked and brutalized. "Such semi-orchestrated violence culminated in the 1958 Notting Hill riots when hundreds of white people attacked black people on the streets and in their homes over a period of days."
The police are following the lead from the wider society they live within. History is messy and can't be nearly divided as if there hasn't been extensive racial violence against black people within the UK.

one we don't get to opt out of because it's uncomfortable

TangibleTuTu

I find your determination to discuss events from two centuries ago a deliberate distraction from the point I am making about the origin of BLM. Its context was specific to the US. Those who claim that there is any comparison between policing in the UK and the US are either profoundly ignorant. Or deliberately mendacious. Its Translatlantic journey has stripped it of its meaning. Because the UK police rarely exert lethal force.The concept of collective guilt is, imo, a bankrupt and reactionary thesis. Its history is bloody. By the way? Do not coopt me into your wish to hoist an ancestral burden of guilt. I am not white. Neither am I a Liberal, in its current iteration. And I am not remotely interested in white, liberal guilt.

I think your post is a deliberate attempt to divert attention from theoriginsof BLM. And why its Tranatlantic journey strips it of much of its original meaning

BovaryX why can't you say "Yes, this is all true* the history of racism in the Americas is intricately entwined with European history, just because Britian gets to stay at arms length and didn't actually have to directly deal with the consequences of the transportation of enslaved people they had initiated, funded and benefited from doesn't mean they get to reframe history and cherry pick the parts they want to acknowledge.

You seem to be getting very angry when all I am saying is take into consideration a long history of racism which our government and economy has directly benefited from. Alabama's big plantations on the western part of the state were not even developed until after 1819 when the native tribes were finally forcibly removed. Those plantations (funded from London) quickly produced massive amounts of cotton for the English markets and were part of the direct development of northern towns and the enrichment of London's financial center. So 200 years ago, not long historically. You can't understand BLM without understanding the context of a social structure that always regulated black bodies. In my own West coast city, neighborhoods had covenants preventing black, Jewish and Asian people from buying or renting property into the 1950s. Harlem became a large black community because black people were preventing from purchasing or renting anywhere else in NYC. You can just talk about current cases of police brutality but this behavior has a long, long history, one we don't get to opt out of because it's uncomfortable.

Politicians make all the right noises, but when it comes to a political moment where they need to compromise with the other side for their own political gain or survival, suddenly other things are more important than a commitment to righting injustice if they're not actually the ones on the receiving end of the injustice themselves.

Absolutely. And this isn't unique to 'white' people. All human societies have done these sort of things at one point or another. If an alternative historical timeline had an Asian or African population that was the dominant power, they would be enacting similar behaviours to consolidate their political and economic powers.

Tyro - your point that the US has a massive race issue whereas in Europe it's more of a xenophobia issue makes a lot of sense to me. Despite the UK's colonial past and involvement in the slave trade etc, the vast majority of people in the UK would have had no or very little experience of living with people of a different race in this country until comparatively recently. I don't think that conflating the history of black people in the UK with that of the US helps at all.

That's true, Nonny.

There's all sorts of these pragmatic moves during the history of abolition and the years that followed it. It was only half way through the American Civil War that Lincoln switched to a "free all the slaves" platform - previously he'd been anti slavery in the sense of resisting its extension to the northern states, and being prepared to argue in court that it was a bad thing, but took a gradual approach to abolition, hoping it would die out "naturally" in the southern states. He switched for reasons of military strategy - to put economic pressure on the south and cut the funding out from under their military. Likewise, the Jim Crow laws came about after a "hung parliament" type situation in American politics - one candidate won the popular vote, the other the college (remind you of any recent elections?) and the eventual compromise was that Hayes became president if he was prepared to remove troops from the South, thus ending the pressure on them to actually enact the equal rights amendments to the constitution. Cue nearly 100 years of segregation.

It makes me think that history illustrates the problem of "white saviour" complex in a nutshell. Politicians make all the right noises, but when it comes to a political moment where they need to compromise with the other side for their own political gain or survival, suddenly other things are more important than a commitment to righting injustice if they're not actually the ones on the receiving end of the injustice themselves.

all British slave owners were given government compensation for having owned slaves.

Is it just me or does that make a bit of a mockery of the idea that slavery must be eradicated for ideological reasons of human rights?

Because it means the slave owners weren't actually made to free their slaves, they were made to sell them on to someone who would free them.

For instance, in the immediate aftermath of abolition, all British slave owners were given government compensation for having owned slaves. No compensation was given to the people formerly enslaved.

As I understood it, a large proportion of the economy depended on slavery.
If you wanted to end slavery fairly quickly, you needed to convince the slave owners en masse to move into businesses and ventures that did not require the use of slaves. People are less likely to sign up to something if it will have a negative impact on them - see the shrieks of communism every time a politician suggests tax rises these days.

So by paying a hefty lump-sum to slave owners, they either happily retired or used that compensation to invest in some other line of business. Thus relinquishing the 'assets' of slaves. It was a pragmatic move to swiftly put an end to a practice without getting into a giant dispute with very wealthy and powerful business owners. It wasn't some grand messianic gesture to bring peace and goodwill and redress moral injustices of past and present.

As I mentioned in a previous post, a number of 'advances' in human society were made out of calculated pragmatism and self-interest in addition to any altruistic motives.

When you want people who fundamentally disagree with you to adopt your ideas, you have to be able to sell it to them... As well as bribe them.
When the foundation for the NHS was being established, the GPs and the BMA fought tooth and nail against it because they didn't want to lose their income from wealthy private patients. To overcome this, they were paid generously for taking on NHS patients, hence the quote by Bevan about stuffing their mouths with gold. There wasn't some universal burning SJW desire to do good for the poor. Those narratives are for fairytales.

Because if you challenge any of this, there is just a torrent of abuse

I find it depends how you phrase it. I keep pointing out that there are violent thugs across the political spectrum, and those on the left tend to gravitate towards antifa. So far the response has been tumbleweed.

let's disabuse anyone of the notion that the British were not deeply involved in the development of and directly benefited from, the slave trade in North America

Not sure anyone (okay, maybe one person) was actually disputing this.

It's more that we're being assumed to have American-specific cultural values and biases simply on the basis of our skin colour. And the assumption that the white British population and the UK authorities are in any sort of agreement about basically anything.

Quite a lot of white British people are actually quite keen on holding our own government to account for supporting and colluding with the American regime. I'm guessing that fact flies under the radar across the pond.

The idea that racism against dark skinned people is in the DNA of white people is not really a metaphor for them.

That's a really blinkered view of humanity's capacities. We're pretty big on the demonisation of outgroups generally; skin colour just happens to be an obvious physical characteristic for this to revolve around. In the absence of other skin tones we're perfectly capable of finding a different marker to identify the shat-upon caste.

Just a thought: does it seem reasonably accurate to say the US has a massive race issue whereas in Europe it's more of a xenophobia issue?

And another thought: on the English-speaking internet, the default human is American. This grates.