Okay, so this has never happened before, only since Jan’17.
5 Likes
Myself has experience with heavy handed French police a couple of years ago laying down on the asfalt with 2 special police officers knees on my neck and sub machine gun touching my back and the rest of them where searching My car for drugs the ripped the door cards of the doors and pulled down the headliner I was on the floor for one hour until the let me go with not even a sorry the damage to the car I newer got I had my lawyers complain at the French ambassador office
I am not surprised.
They shot and killed our neighbour when they were supposed to be on the look out for him as a potential suicide.
I too, have been a victim of their high handedness.
@anon88169868 and Jack Gill’s videoclip that I urge everyone to watch (it’s short).
Powerful, and very very very true. Every word. It took me twenty years in a mixed race marriage to stop saying “I understand how you feel” because I couldn’t understand how it feels to be black in a white society.
I have learned very very very slowly and with lots of back-sliding to SHUT UP (like the man says), to LISTEN and to LEARN.
Let me tell you it’s two steps forward and one back. Our children (“half white half black”) have always experienced what being black means, and have eventually forgiven my white-privilege blindness to their suffering, because they love me.
Read and listen and learn. Many, maybe most of you will find yourselves denying my experience, or saying it is untypical, or that in the same circumstances they would be different. They/maybe you would understand. So there you go! That’s the problem… 
6 Likes
Unusually for me, I’m not fully on board with your view here Peter.
Generally, the ‘you don’t understand, and that’s the problem’ line is used to - or at least has the effect of - closing down discussion, rather than enabling further exploration. That is, perhaps, what has happened to this thread.
But behind this, I think, is a fault in the idea of ‘understanding’ as something that can ever be more than partial - for anybody. This could be discussed at a philosophical level (the origin of all concepts in metaphor, etc) - but perhaps some practical examples will serve better…
As a working class lad,the ‘angry young man’ novels of Alan Sillitoe had a tremendous impact on me. I actually worked in the very Raleigh factory featured in Saturday Night, Sunday Morning. Of course there was a depth of self-recognition, emotional identification, etc, there that would indeed be inaccessible to a more privileged reader. But does this mean they can never ‘understand’ the book or its meanings? - or is their thoughtfulness, empathy, etc - their rounded humanity as readers - rather more important to understanding than their particular personal experience? I later went on to study literature in some depth - and discovered indeed lecturers that were from privileged backgrounds, but could nevertheless offer insights into those very books that had escaped me. Thankfully, they did listen, but equally thankfully, they did not shut up.
I can think of many more examples - in what sense did the roma people in Hitler’s death camps not understand the experience of the jews there? - but the point is that ‘understanding’ is never monolithic, is never complete, is always a question of degree - and people’s individual history and experience is only ever one - often minor - contributor to it.
1 Like
Where do you stop when you are talking about history?
There is the history of the black people in the USA and the Caribbean and that they were there because slave owning and trading was an integral part of African life.
The slaves that found their way to the appalling slave holding ports on the west coast of Africa were there because they had been taken by Arab and African Slave traders who knew full well that they were selling their fellow men into bondage. It was common practice to sell off the people from differing tribes who had been captured in warfare.
Christians were enslaved on the North coast of Africa, again by Arab slave traders after being captured by brigands and pirates.
There were slave trading routes into Arabia from the East coast of Africa.
There were many types of slavery in Africa and different hierachies of slaves themselves.
Should we now be saying that black lives should have mattered back in Africa itself?
2 Likes
Jane well said. There is still slavery going on today, the modern term is cheap labour, big companies are involved such as Apple, Nike etc. So remember when you buy Nike or Apple products to name just 2, you are contributing to slave labour. How many of the protesters know or even care about this. Probably Nada.
3 Likes
The toppling of the Colston statue was a truly beautiful act, wasn’t it?
David Olusoga’s equally beautifully written article in The Guardian explained just how historically fitting it was (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jun/08/edward-colston-statue-history-slave-trader-bristol-protest) - and there was also more real artistic meaning in this act than in any number of tired remnants of exploitative hubris.
If we were to tear down everything built out of slavery and colonialism we would have to demolish much of every developed country - but the point is that the protesters didn’t do that: they thoughtfully - and without harming anybody - and with sensible policing for once - targeted a symbol that would enhance awareness of precisely the issues we broach here.
Addition 13/6/20 - nice to have official backing for my perspective…
Really!!
Asian construction workers in the Arab states who have their passports taken from them and live in appalling conditions.
Young people who come into UK to work for immigrant families who are really slaves.
The list goes on.
2 Likes
There is the renaming of the Colston Hall to be considered as well.
Are they going to tear that down as well?
If we do not acknowledge our past, the good and the bad, how are we ever going to learn? The main problem is that people are history, living breathing people just like us, who had ambitions and who made mistakes and we do not acknowledge that.
I come from Lancaster, which was a slaving port and we had a wonderful history teacher who told us about it.
We do need to acknowledge that the treatment of enslaved black people by white people was appalling, but we should not scrub everything off the slate of history.
1 Like
So what about Jimmy Saville? Does he deserve to be celebrated for his charity work and the people whose lives were saved because of Clunk-Click?
1 Like
No , I think you realise that
In Saville’s case I think it is easy enough - he did raise funds for charity, that is true, but it was often a smoke-screen for his other activities and done to give him easier access to the vulnerable and/or young targets of his abuse.
So you cannot offset the “good work” to set against his abuse on Anubis’s scales - the so-called “good work” was actually part of the abuse.
Churchill, say, is much more complex - he wasn’t inherently bad (unlike JS) and clearly was the man the nation needed at the helm during the war - but he held quite distinctly racist views - how do we judge his legacy dispassionately?
The evil that men do lives after them, the good is often interred with their bones. . . . .
How did Iron Maiden get into this conversation ???
You may just get away with Clunk Click, but a lot of Jimmy Savilles charity work was intended to support his more nefarious activities
Inherently bad is an over simplification. All of us are capable of good and evil and retrospective evaluations are not always helpful. Churchill shared with Hitler, a misunderstanding of Darwin that was prevalent at the time, and resulted in terrible crimes. But it is interesting to note that he was not anti-Semitic at a time when practically every one else was.
And probably still are - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dUwbZ9AlSPI
History is a tricky devil - unfortunately full of detail. There is a brilliant analysis in Asad Haider’s book Mistaken Identity of just how different - and how much more racist - the Atlantic slave trade was from other forms of slavery, or the indentured labour that preceded it (the first Africans to be taken to America in 1619 were, in fact, indentured labourers - it was - surprise, surprise - the development of capitalism that required the development of a specifically racist form of slavery).