EACLucifer wrote: ↑Mon Jun 01, 2020 7:43 am
Bird on a Fire wrote: ↑Sun May 31, 2020 11:20 pm
Ok I've seen more photos, and clearly not everyone was masked or socially distancing.
However, I'm still not happy about calling protests organised by and attended by black people "idiotic", nor the way EACL implies that they don't actually care about others and are just trying to be righteous.
It was a bunch of student protestors - I did not see a single person involved* who did not fall somewhere in the last couple of years of school through to end of undergrad age range, nor a single person with any sign that they were not fully fit, a striking contrast with the American protestors. This was a group of people in the lowest risk category, privileged in the knowledge that their chances of dying from the virus are relatively low compared to the people they will spread it to.
Of course the foreign protests have value. They demonstrate that the black community in the USA is not standing alone while their government uses the tactics of fascism to oppress them.
They are other ways of expressing solidarity - all people in the US will get from this is a few pictures online or (relatively unlikely) on the news - that kind of effect can be got without an unnecesary mass gathering in the middle of a pandemic. They could have said "we are in the worst hit country, with a government that has f.cked up the response at the cost of BME people; we are with you, and here is how we are showing it without further endangering those communities most endangered by our government's terrible handling of the pandemic"
The calculations are very different in the states, where this is an immediate and local issue, be it the cold blooded murder of a man by police, or the attacks on peaceful rallies by militarised police. And in the states, I think the protests probably did lead to the arrest of Chauvin. They are still a danger, but given the fact that much of the US has not been hit as hard as London and the much greater need for immediate protest, the risk/necessity calculations come out very differently.
There are of course issues with police brutality in the UK, which disproportionately affect black people. Black people are also disproportionately incarcerated, where overcrowded conditions create a huge risk. I know that BLM in the UK would like to increase awareness of those problems - too many people have this smug idea that judicial racism is an exclusively foreign problem.
Police brutality absolutely is a problem here, and nobody has denied it. However, to put things in context, British police killed three people last year, twenty two in the last decade. Let's put that in or compared to the pandemic this protest ignored, which takes less than half an hour to kill that people, or, putting it another way, takes just a few hours to kill as many people as the police have killed in the last couple of decades, regardless of justification. This is not an attempt at whataboutery, not an "how can you care about <small number> when <big number> exists. The need for the comparison exists because they did one of the worst things they could do to to worsen the big number.
By contrast, not only are the American protesters responding to an immediate event - and achieving something with their protest - American police kill people at something like ninety times the rate of British police. I saw someone run through the numbers and show black men are, despite the pandemic's disproportionate impact on ethnic minorities in the states as well as here, still at greater risk of being killed by the police than the virus.
So there are clearly sensible, legitimate reasons to protest, along with sensible, legitimate reasons not to. I'm not comfortable with people dismissing the protestors as idiots. It would have been safer for them to have found an alternative protesting strategy, sure. But it's an important and emotive issue and I can't blame people for reacting emotionally.
Frankly, I don't care what you are comfortable with. They put out an invite for people to travel to all meet up in one place. As far as I can tell, it is the first such event since the start of the lockdown. Going by videos people there and supportive of the event posted, social distancing was completely ignored, and some people in masks had pulled them down to chant.
The involvement of planned, organiser lead chanting shows they weren't interested in adjusting their protest to reduce the risks to those present, or their families, or healthcare workers. Compare and contrast with this protest into the far more immediate issue of inadequate PPE for healthcare workers, something that has killed BME people far more than police brutality has lately.
It's not that their cause is not important, it is, and outside of a pandemic, I'd be supporting them, it's that they didn't make the slightest adjustment to how they protested, didn't give the slightest consideration for those without the privilege of youth and good health who they have endangered. They put out a call for people to travel and meet up in one place and do the highest risk thing they could do short of an orgy or a mass licking session. Had they asked for actual social distancing**, only local people to attend, a silent protest - silent protests can be very powerful - they would at least have tried. They chose not to even try.
*Not saying there weren't any people outside of this age range, but if there were, they were vastly, vastly outnumbered.
**There was a footnote on their communication calling for people to attend saying "please attempt social distancing". That was it. Not only did we see hundreds just ignore it entirely, including, as far as I can tell, the people leading the chants, those that were spaced out could still have reached out and touched people in several directions without moving their feet.