UK Politics: Black Lives Matter Here Too

[Guest]

5 minutes ago, Ran said:

I wonder what would have happened if the protests and petitions around this time succeeded in having the statue removed as well, and this in turn led to more statues being removed in similarly democratic ways.

I have no idea what the political climate was in Bristol for the removal by peaceful and democratic means. Was it a matter of just not happening quickly enough? But what you say above appears to support the notion that "the ends justify the means", and I find this surprising.

Doesn't that depend on viewing the destruction of property as being a negative means on its face?

[mormont]

15 minutes ago, Ran said:

I have no idea what the political climate was in Bristol for the removal by peaceful and democratic means. Was it a matter of just not happening quickly enough?

As far as I can tell, it was a matter of the issue not being regarded as important enough and opposition by influential people combining to frustrate progress.

The fact is that certain people - largely cis white men of a certain age and class - have resources that others don't, in political circles. Particularly local politics. Money. Access. Experience. Knowledge. Understanding how things are done and how to stop them being done. Overcoming these advantages requires pressure and impetus. This incident created that impetus.

15 minutes ago, Ran said:

But what you say above appears to support the notion that "the ends justify the means", and I find this surprising.

The ends don't always justify the means, but they don't never justify the means either.

[Spockydog]

42 minutes ago, SeanF said:

I think they're rather confused, ideologically.

Aren't they all? 

[Heartofice]

30 minutes ago, mormont said:

Tearing down the Colston statue has directly given impetus to campaigns to remove several other statues (by democratic means) and rename buildings and streets. It's raised awareness of the UK's historic role in the slave trade more than any other single event I can recall in my lifetime, and I'm nearly 50 years old. It's kept the demonstrations high up the news agenda. Yeah, it has benefited the anti-racism cause.

So is the entire portrayal of the character of Manuel. Yes, there are attempts to make Manuel more sympathetic, largely by having the pretty white lady be kind to him. But in general, the problem is this: Basil is awful to Manuel because he believes Manuel to be a useless foreigner who talks funny. But the writers regularly use punchlines that depend on Manuel being a useless foreigner who talks funny. The only point of difference between the writers and the character of Basil, really, is whether they get angry at Manuel or whether they think he's a figure of fun.

But that, sadly, is pretty typical of the writing, which relies more heavily than we like to admit on lazy stereotyping.

So your argument is that the great positive effect of removing the Colston statue is that it has raised the awareness of how oppressive other statues are, and so other statues have been removed.

Also it’s raised awareness to people of how they were being oppressed by statues, something they were currently unaware of.. begging the question of how they could have felt oppressed by them in the first place.

cool.

[Guest]

21 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

So your argument is that the great positive effect of removing the Colston statue is that it has raised the awareness of how oppressive other statues are, and so other statues have been removed.

Also it’s raised awareness to people of how they were being oppressed by statues, something they were currently unaware of.. begging the question of how they could have felt oppressed by them in the first place.

cool.

So, when a PoC explains that these symbols are daily reminders of the systemic oppression they experience (and indeed were likely intended as such), do you make sure and tell them how wrong they are?

[Werthead]

 

 

6 hours ago, Heartofice said:

Little Britain I think is a slightly different case. I watched it a few months ago and was really amazed at how cruel it was, which I think is part of the appeal. I’m more understanding of anyone being upset at that show, though it is strange that it’s so recent and there wasn’t a huge uproar about it before.

There was, but it was before social media (the last regular season of LB aired the same year that Facebook went global, and two years before Twitter) so it wasn't amplified as much. I never really understood Little Britain's appeal in the first place. It had a lot of catchphrase characters which were funny the first time or two times you heard them, but four seasons in had gotten hugely old. The Fast Show did a much better job of catchphrase comedy by constantly finding ways to spin the catchphrases depending on the situation. With LB it never seemed to really evolve beyond "showing a bigoted middle-aged woman projectile-vomiting because they're in the vicinity of a black person" as a gag. Possibly a bit harsh, but I always considered it the Mrs. Brown's Boys of its era.

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 And that one of the show's biggest failings is in relation to Basil's racism, which the writers include as a negative aspect of his character but never really get to grips with in the way that, say, Rigsby's racism is tackled in Rising Damp.

I was thinking of Rising Damp, actually, which had a really surprisingly nuanced take on racism, at least by the standards of the day (Don Warrington playing into Rigby's stereotypical fantasies of life in Africa to mock him was a great gag, and amusingly I saw it being reused 35 years later in Parks & Rec with the attitude of the townsfolk to the Native Americans).

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Stereotyping the Irish. Another issue with Star Trek, mainly TNG and Voyager. Though TOS was pretty stereotypical with Lt Riley.

Sort of mitigated with Ch O’Brien, though he didnt get a name for a while, and they retconned his rank (he was originally an ensign at the helm).

 

They nearly did it in DS9 as well, but Colm Meaney had a lot more power by that point and threw a fit when he read a script that had O'Brien interacting with a leprechaun. The writers changed it to Rumpelstiltskin, but you can see him being pretty pissed off through that whole episode.

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I have no idea what the political climate was in Bristol for the removal by peaceful and democratic means. Was it a matter of just not happening quickly enough?

They've been trying to do it for years, but it kept getting bogged down and the whole process reset from scratch every couple of years.

There's been talk about removing the Cecil Rhodes statue from Oxford University for much longer, but apparently there's a major problem in that several charitable endowments to the university have made it a stipulation that the statue remains. If the statue is pulled down, the university would lose millions in funding every year. Apparently they've be discussing other options, such as blocking it off and having some sort of viewing area for people who really want to see it, which wold satisfy the criteria, but this would be fairly expensive and logistically challenging. I suspect they're revisiting those plans now.

 

 

[john]

Re the tv shows getting removed - The Papa Lazarou one I did initially find odd, because it’s the character in blackface. But they don’t address it, he’s a weirdo not a racist so maybe it amounts to the same thing in the end. Other examples, some are worse than others. Ant and Dec dressing up as black and Asian characters for fake auditions is particularly egregious. Little Britain and Keith Lemon are using pretty basic stereotypes.

Even more subtle comedy is worth interrogating, I read an article about how Harry Enfield defended portraying Nelson Mandela as a drug dealer by explaining that he was making fun of the stereotype of black men only being seen as drug dealers. But the author of the article pointed out that he didn’t use any white people stereotypes to help him make comedy about the real life white people he portrayed.

edit - it’s also interesting how blackface was already unacceptable at one point decades ago but then apparently became acceptable so long as you were portraying an individual character not a general black person. Now it’s obviously unacceptable again. And I suspect there were plenty of voices saying it was unacceptable all along.

4 hours ago, Heartofice said:

Agree it’s a distraction and unhelpful. In the same way the discussion about statues is a distraction and unhelpful. None of this is doing anything to engender public support for anti racism causes, instead it will more than likely create a backlash against this over reach.

You always think things designed to combat racism are a distraction from combatting racism.  But artillery bombardments tends to do more damage that a sniper campaign.

I don’t think it’s a distraction, but I do find it annoying that commissioning editors, or whoever makes these kind of decisions (usually white males) seem to think they’re smarter than their audiences, that they can recognise a subtlety we can’t. I definitely feel like I benefited in my outlook by being able to read or watch whatever I wanted and somehow avoided ingrained racism.

[mormont]

1 hour ago, Heartofice said:

So your argument is that the great positive effect of removing the Colston statue is that it has raised the awareness of how oppressive other statues are, and so other statues have been removed.

Also it’s raised awareness to people of how they were being oppressed by statues, something they were currently unaware of.. begging the question of how they could have felt oppressed by them in the first place.

cool.

The nicest thing I can say about this is that you used 'beg the question' correctly. Otherwise, I'd point out that this is at best a weak caricature of one argument among several, and I feel reflects a lack of good faith. I won't be engaging with it further.

32 minutes ago, Werthead said:

I was thinking of Rising Damp, actually, which had a really surprisingly nuanced take on racism, at least by the standards of the day (Don Warrington playing into Rigby's stereotypical fantasies of life in Africa to mock him was a great gag, and amusingly I saw it being reused 35 years later in Parks & Rec with the attitude of the townsfolk to the Native Americans).

It is a great gag, but it works because of the underlying premise - that Philip embodies all of the virtues Rigsby wants to have (educated, intelligent, cultured, attractive, well connected) but Rigsby can't admit that to himself because he's blinded by Philip's race. Rigsby's jealousy and racism are all mixed together to the point where it's not clear which drives which. It's a really interesting tension, much more so than the slaptstick of Basil and Manuel, and helped by the fact that Leonard Rossiter is just an insanely talented comic actor, much more so even than Cleese.

Apologies to all for indulging one of my hobby horses. Back to the politics. :p

[DaveSumm]

1 hour ago, The Great Unwashed said:

So, when a PoC explains that these symbols are daily reminders of the systemic oppression they experience (and indeed were likely intended as such), do you make sure and tell them how wrong they are?

Just to try and stop this going round in a loop, is it possible that the actual systemic oppression itself should be the target of removal, not just the reminders? If you’re not being reminded that you’re oppressed, great, but aren’t we aiming to actually stop the oppression?

[Guest]

4 minutes ago, DaveSumm said:

Just to try and stop this going round in a loop, is it possible that the actual systemic oppression itself should be the target of removal, not just the reminders? If you’re not being reminded that you’re oppressed, great, but aren’t we aiming to actually stop the oppression?

I definitely think that removing both should be a goal, and removing the symbol without removing the oppression is an empty gesture. But, I think removing the symbol can be a good start.

[Heartofice]

1 hour ago, mormont said:

The nicest thing I can say about this is that you used 'beg the question' correctly. Otherwise, I'd point out that this is at best a weak caricature of one argument among several, and I feel reflects a lack of good faith. I won't be engaging with it further.

 

You simply have a weak argument that is easy to caricature. 

"Tearing down the Colston statue has directly given impetus to campaigns to remove several other statues (by democratic means) and rename buildings and streets."

 

This does nothing to counter my argument that tearing down the statues themselves makes almost zero material benefit to the lives of anyone. You simply stated that by tearing down one statue we can now tear down a load of other statues, an action which in of itself does nothing to solve the problem of racism. Do you not see the problem there?

How many people do you genuinely think even are aware of these statues? How many of those people know who the statue is of, and how many of them know anything about the history of that person.

A petition to tear down the Colston statue had managed to accrue 100 signatures in 3 years a week before it was torn down, suggesting there wasn't a huge groundswell of the population who were being oppressed by it. 

Going back to my original point, if there was a top 10 actionable things a government could do to help solve racial inequality in this country, I'm pretty sure pulling down some statues and removing some tv shows from Netflix wouldn't be one of them.

I guess your other argument is that this statue furor has kept the movement in the news. Well it has, and not in a good way. Instead of discussing issues about what the UK can do to solve inequality, now we have asked the general public to take sides. The conversation has moved entirely away from making material change in this country, and has moved the whole issue from one that almost everyone agreed on (racism is bad) to one that is far more divisive (do you want to remove all historical symbols of slavery and racism from our society) 

I think we have gone from a point last week where everyone was on the same page, to a point where people are taking sides and feeling less focussed. The statue debacle has given the sense that the whole movement is driven by some left wing students who have little skin in the game, which is deeply unfortunate.

[mormont]

30 minutes ago, DaveSumm said:

Just to try and stop this going round in a loop, is it possible that the actual systemic oppression itself should be the target of removal, not just the reminders? If you’re not being reminded that you’re oppressed, great, but aren’t we aiming to actually stop the oppression?

I'm not sure what the argument here is, exactly, but it appears to be a suggestion that the symbols of a systemic oppression are not part of the systemic oppression.

[Zorral]

Links to supporting material in the original:

"Monuments of white supremacy obscure the history of colonial crimes. That’s why they must come down."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/06/13/monuments-white-supremacy-obscure-history-colonial-crimes-thats-why-they-must-come-down/

Quote

 

[....]What these critics conveniently leave out is the fact that the countries that glorify these figures have also, in many instances, chosen to hide from public view documents that detail their cruel colonial past, or worst have actively destroyed records of crimes against black and brown people. Powerful governments erased the contributions of black people, the customs and traditions of native populations during colonization — and then whitewashed the evidence of the great harm done to these communities. This is what fuels the current moment: the statues are monuments to ignorance, to denying responsibility, to the romanticization of a history without reckoning with the dehumanization and violence that came with it.

Even the contributions of black soldiers in more contemporary events were not acknowledged. In fact, they were actively minimized by racist policies. Around 1 million Africans died in World War I while serving European countries on both sides of the conflict. As the writer and researcher Kathleen Bomani has pointed out, Germans and British forces exploited black “native carriers” who were forced to haul supplies and cook and clean for European troops.

And while white soldiers were given tidy, marked graves in well-kept cemeteries, scores of Africans were buried without markers in overgrown unkempt bush. “Most of the natives who have died are of a semi-savage nature and do not attach any sentiment to marking the graves of their dead,” one British officer, Maj. George Evans, wrote during the 1920s. “I consider the erection of individual headstones would constitute a waste of public money.” Churchill, then the chairman of the Imperial War Graves Commission, agreed.

After the independence of Britain’s former colonies, the records of colonial crimes were destroyed. As the Guardian reported in 2012, during the last years of the British Empire, the foreign office wanted to avoid embarrassing information from getting into the hands of newly independent governments. One memo read “it is permissible, as an alternative to destruction by fire, for documents to be packed in weighted crates and dumped in very deep and current-free water at maximum practicable distance from the coast.”

It is this history of deliberate erasure that must be corrected. Those criticizing protesters for pulling statues down (many of which could be put into museums or other spaces where they could serve a truly didactic purpose), should focus instead on pressuring governments to make records public for research and study. This would be a good way to honor the descendants of people who were erased, and it will be a step to have a complete and honest account of our shared history.[....]

 

 

[Heartofice]

49 minutes ago, DaveSumm said:

Just to try and stop this going round in a loop, is it possible that the actual systemic oppression itself should be the target of removal, not just the reminders? If you’re not being reminded that you’re oppressed, great, but aren’t we aiming to actually stop the oppression?

Also worth mentioning that symbols are subjective and what means something to someone might mean something entirely different to someone else.

Also for a symbol to remind you that you are oppressed you’d first need to be aware that the symbol exists.

[john]

46 minutes ago, DaveSumm said:

Just to try and stop this going round in a loop, is it possible that the actual systemic oppression itself should be the target of removal, not just the reminders? If you’re not being reminded that you’re oppressed, great, but aren’t we aiming to actually stop the oppression?

Sure, I’ve got a great plan for that. We gather up all the wealth, land and property and redistribute it on a graded system depending on the exploitation of your ancestors and any current disadvantages faced. Then we devise a machine to wipe our memories in order to avoid any resentments arising from the first part of the plan. Let’s get to it.

[SeanF]

2 hours ago, Werthead said:

 

 

There was, but it was before social media (the last regular season of LB aired the same year that Facebook went global, and two years before Twitter) so it wasn't amplified as much. I never really understood Little Britain's appeal in the first place. It had a lot of catchphrase characters which were funny the first time or two times you heard them, but four seasons in had gotten hugely old. The Fast Show did a much better job of catchphrase comedy by constantly finding ways to spin the catchphrases depending on the situation. With LB it never seemed to really evolve beyond "showing a bigoted middle-aged woman projectile-vomiting because they're in the vicinity of a black person" as a gag. Possibly a bit harsh, but I always considered it the Mrs. Brown's Boys of its era.

I was thinking of Rising Damp, actually, which had a really surprisingly nuanced take on racism, at least by the standards of the day (Don Warrington playing into Rigby's stereotypical fantasies of life in Africa to mock him was a great gag, and amusingly I saw it being reused 35 years later in Parks & Rec with the attitude of the townsfolk to the Native Americans).

They nearly did it in DS9 as well, but Colm Meaney had a lot more power by that point and threw a fit when he read a script that had O'Brien interacting with a leprechaun. The writers changed it to Rumpelstiltskin, but you can see him being pretty pissed off through that whole episode.

They've been trying to do it for years, but it kept getting bogged down and the whole process reset from scratch every couple of years.

There's been talk about removing the Cecil Rhodes statue from Oxford University for much longer, but apparently there's a major problem in that several charitable endowments to the university have made it a stipulation that the statue remains. If the statue is pulled down, the university would lose millions in funding every year. Apparently they've be discussing other options, such as blocking it off and having some sort of viewing area for people who really want to see it, which wold satisfy the criteria, but this would be fairly expensive and logistically challenging. I suspect they're revisiting those plans now.

 

 

The joke was always on Rigsby.  But, the satire was gentle, rather than savage.  

I still die laughing at them singing "Rock of Ages" while placing Miss Jones' fox fur wrap in the furnace.

[HexMachina]

Today in Newcastle...

https://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/news/north-east-news/black-lives-matter-newcastle-live-18414901

[HexMachina]

59 minutes ago, DaveSumm said:

Just to try and stop this going round in a loop, is it possible that the actual systemic oppression itself should be the target of removal, not just the reminders? If you’re not being reminded that you’re oppressed, great, but aren’t we aiming to actually stop the oppression?

Removing one does not mean ignoring the other, and in fact indicates at the very least an environment where more tangible change can be made. No one is saying  removing these statues is the be all and end all, it is a starting point for further change. Targeting symbols of oppression can be part of tackling the actual systemic oppression.

[Ran]

2 hours ago, Werthead said:

They've been trying to do it for years, but it kept getting bogged down and the whole process reset from scratch every couple of years.

I read up more on this, and I see over the last few years a number of locations have changed ( a primary school) or were in the process of changing their names (the music hall) already thanks to a sustained campaign.

I suspect the push to have the statue moved to a museum would have been successful this time around given the climate and attention without needing to topple it, and it would have done so under color of democratic institutions and process.

54 minutes ago, DaveSumm said:

Just to try and stop this going round in a loop, is it possible that the actual systemic oppression itself should be the target of removal, not just the reminders? If you’re not being reminded that you’re oppressed, great, but aren’t we aiming to actually stop the oppression?

People are capable of doing many things at the same time. Short of evidence that the one prevents or hampers the other more than it helps, a matter of substantial argument and interpretation, I don't really think it's a profitable way of looking at it. 

[DaveSumm]

26 minutes ago, mormont said:

I'm not sure what the argument here is, exactly, but it appears to be a suggestion that the symbols of a systemic oppression are not part of the systemic oppression.

It’s a tiny part of it. If we’re looking to actually improve the lives of black people in the UK we’ve successfully tackled the thousandth most pressing problem.