Is BLM a trojan horse?

As child employment is illegal, three generational unemployment would mean a child whose parents, grandparents and great grandparents had never had a job.

If you left school in 2015 and every generation of this family had children at 18, that would mean the great grandfather reached working age in 1961.

Meaning nobody with a job since the fifties.

First generations can come quite close together. There are certainly kids in schools now whose parents and grandparents have not worked. These grandparents may be in their thirties, so not WW2. The big correlation seems to be between literacy and long term unemployment. This affects both white and black British, and also some newer communities who have both poor literacy and perhaps poor English.

I thought three generational unemployment was a myth.

Even assuming you left school recently, and every member of this family had kids in their teens, three generational employment would still require a family in which nobody had a job since the 1950s.

If you left school earlier I. The 2000s it would require a family in which nobody had a job since they were conscripted during World War Two.

Wbeezer, I remember local teacher in our inner city bit of London saying the biggest predictor of low achievement in schools was not race but three generational unemployment. It was very hard to change the mindset and to create aspiration. In contrast many first and second generation immigrants, regardless of skin colour, were very ambitious and had a lot of family encouragement so tended to do well.

Goosefoot, thank you. These are clearly complex issues which require more than slogans and simple remedies.

I should think you could do a comparison on social mobility between residents of a deprived inner city area somewhere very white like Inverclyde and parts of South or East London with a high BAME population and similar social issues and below average educational attainment. I suspect on some metrics the black Londoners would do better, especially on the perceived gold standard of good old Oxbridge entry. I dont think white supremacy is holding people from Inverclyde back but failures of late capitalism certainly affect them, why should there be a completely seperate mechanism being the main cause of similar symptoms in Inner city London? This is where looking to the US for answers doesnt make sense in a British context.

Well the id politics types make the assumption that poverty in black communities is caused by structural racism. It's a lot like the assumption that racism causes police killings of black people. The question is, do the numbers support it, and do the historical facts support it, and that is not obvious, at all. It just can't be taken as a given.

Given that historically, economics created race as we know it, I think it's not an easy argument to make that fundamentally race causes economic disparity.

I agree that I feel Grabthar summed it up well.

It strikes me as a pp said that "especially black transwomen" is a telling signal that there's been some SJW stuff going on without much genuine analysis of the experiences of black trans people.

If black women have appalling birth outcomes in the US, as they sadly do here too, how would a black TM have any better experience?

That is not suggest that poor black communities in a dominant white society do not suffer from additional prejudice and/or alienation.

As to whether issues are to do with race or poverty? They are interlinked. Poverty caused by structural racism

Poverty also creates and generates its own cultures, which further trap people in poverty. This is the same for white communities too.

Sexism a blind spot? Not for me. I just can't be arsed with the fixation with Trans. And colour blindness is not a thing. It's a construct to ignore racism

if you can't see sex, or refuse to acknowledge it, then you fail to see sexism; and you also fail to see difference of the sort that requires particular arrangements and services on account of that difference.
You are the only one that has gone on about 'trans' for most of this thread.

I agree that colour blindness, in terms of not noticing that different people have a different skin tone or complexion, or national dress or cultural attire, is never going to be a thing. Same with sex. It is naive to assume that people do not, or will ever not, notice the sex of a person - that they be blind to sex.

What is most important is that people are treated according to the content of their character, in a context of equal civil rights legislation.

Late to the thread.

BLM isn't a Trojan horse but it is saturated by identity politics to the point that it's in danger of losing its main focus. I wanted to find out more about BLM's aims, so went to their website, and like the OP found a load of babble about queer identities. It's not helpful because a movement like that needs concrete aims, and it needs to know what its core message is, but it's obviously become infested with another ideology.

could you explain what you mean by this part? Opens up a lot of questions!

Sure, I'll try, anyway!

More than that, it behaves this way because it's meant to, because it is designed to protect power, it's meant to avoid looking at real mechanisms and it's meant to fracture solidarity, it' meant to be bread and circuses.

Identity politics, or critical race theory, is a type of racial essentialism. To some extent you could compare it to ender essentialism. Our race is an essential part of our identity, from this view Racism is fundamentally disparities between races. So if you see a disparity, say in something like university education, it's caused by not recognising these identities as equal.

In this way of thinking, there is no questioning of underlying structures, and there is no critique of race itself. Both the leftist and conservative critique of racism, and the civil rights movement largely too, worked on a critique of race, and one that is based in history. That is, race was invented in order to justify economic oppression. The ultimate solution to solve racism, then, is to dissolve that concept. How to do that, conservatives and leftists disagreed, at least in part, but the observation that our perception of race was constructed was fundamental.

In the id politics conception of equality, because race itself is fundamental, equality and justice means lack of discrepancy between races on various measures. So as long at the % of blacks in university, killed by police, with degrees, heading companies, matches the general population, that is racial justice. But what you notice about this is what it really doesn't do is challenge the underlying problems, and especially not the economic system that needs exploitable workers at the bottom.

There are a lot of people with a strong interest in having exploitable workers at the bottom, and it no longer is very useful to them if they are defined by race. In fact it is useful to them to point to them being racially diverse, because that shows that the situation is just. So these people and organisations will tend to like these kinds of formulations. The Democratic party is the best example by a long shot, they can continue to be the party of the corporate sector and the 1%, and also claim to be the party of social justice. It deflects pressure on their paymasters by those with an interest in justice issues, their energies are being spent elsewhere.

It's not unimportant that it was after the uprising by black and white slaves in Haiti that African chattel slavery was introduced. And it's not unimportant that in the case of the the civil rights leaders, it was when they started to see the economic system as a whole at the root of the problem, many of them were radicalised, and began to make increasing moves to solidarity between groups and for workers, that you started seeing things like assassinations.

Reed has called this kind of race identity politics the lapdog of neoliberalism, and I think that's a useful image.

Sexism a blind spot? Not for me. I just can't be arsed with the fixation with Trans. And colour blindness is not a thing. It's a construct to ignore racism

And Trans rights Insistence of gender over sex is a construct used to ignore sexism. Enshrine that in law and girls worldwide are fucked. Completely fucked.

Crikey, so close, yet still you refuse to see it.

I am only referring to the U.K.

@stripesgalore - Many police officers are racist is quite a sweeping statement! Are you talking about in the States or in the UK or just worldwide in general?

Goosefoot, I would separate out the poor from people of colour because I think that these groups overlap but are somewhat different.

Part of why black people are treated differently is due to global attitudes to Africa and people with a connection to it. A variety of countries have colonised areas of Africa (the Chinese currently) and caused all kinds of problems there. That ongoing situation of exploitation changes how people see black people, even when they no longer live in Africa or are not individually poor.

Many police officers are racist. It isn’t anything to do with unconscious bias. They just are racist people, and if they hadn’t gone down a racist path they would find another group to harass. A lot of people become police officers for the wrong reasons and police forces by their very nature are always going to be susceptible to corruption.

I name change frequently, and always admire your posts Goosefoot. I think you’ve explained many issues very well.

I’m not attempting to form any kind of complete analysis, nor am I capable of doing so, just highlighting a couple of examples at another poster’s request.

This video was shared by a friend: m.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=4FngeEwsVLU

I haven't watched it yet so can't comment, but sharing as it features Adolph Reed who has been mentioned in this thread, so I thought some of you might be interested in watching.

@Goosefoot could you explain what you mean by this part? Opens up a lot of questions!

More than that, it behaves this way because it's meant to, because it is designed to protect power, it's meant to avoid looking at real mechanisms and it's meant to fracture solidarity, it' meant to be bread and circuses.

This business of colour blindness - that is something to be careful of.

The way it's sometimes been meant is just that institutionalised forces still act on people based on categories like race.

But there are still plenty of activist who take the more traditional view that the only way to destroy racism is to destroy race, which after all is a construct. If that is true that colourblindness is the goal and taking steps that undermine it needs to be considered very carefully, especially i they become institutionalised.

Stripesgalore

Look, your thoughts there are fine as far as they go, but there are some assumptions there that are really important and require unpacking.

The first one being, how and why is it that you separate out the poor and people of colour? How is it that we have a group called PoC anyway, and why are they poor? Is there something different required to help them, compared to the poor who are white?

In terms of the BLM cause, police violence, the relevant question might be, are blacks so often targeted because they are black, or because they are more likely to be poor? Because the solutions to those two problems might be very very different.

Colour blindness is not a thing.

Sex blindness is not a thing. Yet it suits certain individuals and certain groups to pretend that it is. What does that achieve?

It’s a bit like when the Tories tried to solve child poverty in the U.K. by changing the way the poverty line is calculated. Looked good on paper but did nothing for the kids being fed out of charity food banks.

Insisting biological sex is a made up, colonial concept doesn’t stop baby girls being murdered for having the audacity to be born female, it just makes it harder to talk about and harder to document and harder to action against.

I’m thoroughly bored of people who claim to be progressive doing the work of male supremacy. Massive blind spot, sexism, isn’t it?

But for someone to say unless and until they are provided with a written manifesto that they are not going to take part or even examine themselves, as Goosefoot has said, just illustrates what BLM is about. It isn't just about institutional racism in the police but in all of us and starting to make change. That is why it is 60s politics. ie the personal is political.

Ah, no, I haven't said anything like that. I "look into" myself every day as a discipline, and my commitment to how I behave ad where I place my energy and how I love people is based on a conviction about the universality and dignity and worth of people, no matter what category they slot into, whether I like them or agree with the, and even whether the are good people or objectively horrible. The assumption that people don't do this because unless a bunch of right-on people tell them they need to check their privilege is just presumption.

What I've said is that protests that are looking for political change need to have a concrete focus. And that requires a real understanding of the problem.

The problem that BLM has is that it not only doesn't have that understanding, it is explicitly based on a theory that does not and cannot create such an understanding, it prevents such an understanding. It's a race essentialist understanding as well which is dangerous, and racist in the most literal sense of the word. More than that, it behaves this way because it's meant to, because it is designed to protect power, it's meant to avoid looking at real mechanisms and it's meant to fracture solidarity, it' meant to be bread and circuses.

I'm sorry, some sort of vague look into yourself justification does not cut it as a response or justify saying that people who don't hop right on the train must be bigots, or lack self-reflection.

This thread has been so interesting to read and I want to thank all the posters for supplying interesting comments and links. People were all conforming to the one narrative on my social media feed, and how there was peer pressure to pledge allegiance to BLM or else be condemned as a racist. The whole thing was making me feel very uneasy, and for a whitey that means doubting yourself and asking if you really are a racist if you don't want to go along with the ideology being put forth (which I think is a very intentional and manipulative technique being pushed by those with an ideological rather than anti-racist agenda). I can now see anti-racism as a sentiment and the identity politics rooted ideology being pushed are two entirely different things.

I use social media and saw many people I follow posting the black squares as well as many messages very dictatorial in tone which told white people that silence is compliance, but at the same time you will never know enough to ever comment, and you must read this list of books etc etc. I'm someone who has always been angered and sickened by racism, but was very reluctant to follow the social media trend without reading the small print (as another poster put it) first, due to what I saw of the identity politics agenda caught up with with the BLM movement. I then had a couple of my followers bullying me into posting a black square, accusing me of being a racist for not doing so (I don't have a massive following, but there are various followers I've collected along the way who don't know me personally). It's deeply insulting and frankly fills me with rage that someone would call me racist without knowing anything about my views or how I live my life, because I won't go along with a social media trend that originated from a corporation (Atlantic records) and certainly does not convince me to comply. Divisive, dictatorial shaming techniques such as this are the usual employ of the woke crowd, that you have to show complete and utter compliance without question or else you must be a racist. It can only have negative effects. It either means that people's compliance is very superficial, driven by guilt, or on the other hand it will drive those people who won't be dictated to away. I'm so glad to read this thread, which has given me some resources from black scholars who don't conform to the critical race theory view (which I am also just learning about now here). Social media has been full of posts saying that we need to use this time to 'amplify melanated voices' - but I'm pretty sure they don't mean those who have been linked here! Hypocritical in the extreme, to present black people as a monolith all with the same views. I do also intend to read some of the resources suggested on my social media feed to gain a balanced view. I doubt those going along with the crowd will attempt to do the same. Coming back to the title of the thread (which I do think is a bit unfortunate, but I get the point) the techniques I've mentioned are brainwashing, as with the TWAW mantra. I think the vast majority of people going on the marches simply want to voice their support for their black communities and outrage at the death of George Floyd, and good for them, but certain influencers guilt tripping their followers into compliance in the way they have, (and indeed with trans rights activism) reminds me only of psychological warfare.

I would not consider myself to be knowledgeable about race in the way I am about sex, but my understanding would be as follows.

Most essential work is done by overlapping groups of women, the poor and people of colour. People in positions of power and privilege make enormous amounts of money from exploiting these groups and treat them to greater or lesser degrees as expendable.

Large numbers of people still live in slavery and extreme poverty for the benefit of wealthy and corrupt institutions that protect wealth.

We can see for example, how large numbers of essential workers have become hospitalised in excess of the rates for nurses, because they were denied PPE despite working with the public. This disproportionately impacted BAME people. That is an example of systemic racism - the government and large employers denying people’s basic safety while still paying out huge sums to shareholders.

There may be such a thing as unconscious racism, but I certainly don’t think there is such a thing as unconscious sexism. It is done on purpose.