Re: Good news! Britain has solved racism!
Posted: Thu Apr 01, 2021 4:39 pm
Thanks for the fisking, Fishnut. What unbelievable shite.
A great problem with that is that institutions will often delegate evaluating such issues to groups like the leaders of this Great Whitewash. Independent and critical people are often too rebelliously inclined to be allowed to set directions and make important decisions.No. Stop. This thread is heading in completely the wrong direction. Turn around and go back.
When there's the stench of sewage in the Victorian streets, the answer isn't to go round encouraging individual action. "Don't empty your chamber pot out the window on market days". The answer is institutional change and pressuring the powerful to build a massive f.cking sewer to sort the sh.t once and for all...
We're seeing it fall apart; what I'm not sure is whether readers of the Mail, Express, Times, Telegraph and Sun are seeing it fall apart. To them, it is quite possible that the country is a paragon of 'how it should be done' and anyone that still thinks it's an issue is 'playing the race card'.Vertigowooyay wrote: ↑Thu Apr 01, 2021 9:22 pmShocked. I am shocked that this blatant, shoddy, dismissive, offensive report is *somehow* falling apart around their f.cking ears just over 24 hours since it’s publication.
It’s almost as if, say, including academics in the list of stakeholders who have not actually been consulted, is a move that will be called out f.cking immediately.
I recommend reading the whole thing, it's not long, is well-written and summarises the main problems with the report succinctly.Perhaps the most blatant issue is the report’s reliance on tactics that the government appears to have employed time and again: using Black and Asian representatives to minimise the credibility of racism in its many forms.
...
Singling out white underachievement in education throughout the report is striking... Pitting white underachievement against outcomes for ethnic minority groups also echoes arguments often touted by the extreme right. Race equality think tank, the Runnymede Trust, describes this as playing “into cultural readings of inequality, which pitch [white people’s] interests squarely against those of ethnic minorities, and simultaneously allows middle class commentators to blame the ‘underclass’ for their own misfortunes”.
It was part of a talk she did for De Montfort University. It looks like the event is available to view here."You are giving racists the green light"... "it has pushed [the fight against] racism back 20 years or more". “I think if you were to speak to somebody whose employer speaks to them in a certain way, where do you go with that now? If a person is up for promotion and has been denied that, where does he go with that now?
“You know, all these things we’ve been working for and showing that structural racism exists – we talk about the pandemic when you look at how many of our people have died, all the nurses, the doctors, the frontline staff, of Covid, and to have this report denying that those people have suffered?
“They are denying that the likes of my son was murdered through racism and the fact that it took 18 years to get justice for him. The report is denying all those issues.”
Conveniently all the commentators who didn’t like the vid have been highlighted with little St George’s flags and Union Jacks, I assume this is some new time-saving feature of twitter?Woodchopper wrote: ↑Thu Apr 01, 2021 6:03 pmRosie Holt tells it like it is: https://twitter.com/RosieisaHolt/status ... 55970?s=20
I had a brief glance at the Mail front page so you don't have to.Gfamily wrote: ↑Thu Apr 01, 2021 9:35 pmWe're seeing it fall apart; what I'm not sure is whether readers of the Mail, Express, Times, Telegraph and Sun are seeing it fall apart. To them, it is quite possible that the country is a paragon of 'how it should be done' and anyone that still thinks it's an issue is 'playing the race card'.Vertigowooyay wrote: ↑Thu Apr 01, 2021 9:22 pmShocked. I am shocked that this blatant, shoddy, dismissive, offensive report is *somehow* falling apart around their f.cking ears just over 24 hours since it’s publication.
It’s almost as if, say, including academics in the list of stakeholders who have not actually been consulted, is a move that will be called out f.cking immediately.
I think they might have got away with it, but the authors overreached with their 15 yr old Edgelord take on slavery, which is a short and memorable quote. It will reduce its influence massively. Even more than claims of consulting people who weren't.Woodchopper wrote: ↑Fri Apr 02, 2021 9:32 amI had a brief glance at the Mail front page so you don't have to.Gfamily wrote: ↑Thu Apr 01, 2021 9:35 pmWe're seeing it fall apart; what I'm not sure is whether readers of the Mail, Express, Times, Telegraph and Sun are seeing it fall apart. To them, it is quite possible that the country is a paragon of 'how it should be done' and anyone that still thinks it's an issue is 'playing the race card'.Vertigowooyay wrote: ↑Thu Apr 01, 2021 9:22 pmShocked. I am shocked that this blatant, shoddy, dismissive, offensive report is *somehow* falling apart around their f.cking ears just over 24 hours since it’s publication.
It’s almost as if, say, including academics in the list of stakeholders who have not actually been consulted, is a move that will be called out f.cking immediately.
The Mail does have one article which: a) reports Doreen Lawrence's criticisms; b) Boris Johnson stating that "I don't say the Government is going to agree with absolutely everything in it, but it has some original and stimulating work in it that I think people need to read and to consider" and c) it states that "children from many ethnic minorities do as well or better at school than white pupils" and "white British boys from poorer backgrounds are among the most disadvantaged".
In another article I learnt that an academic who is a person of colour and a critic of the report had falsely accused Tony Sewell of faking his Dr title and then compared him to Goebbles. And in another article that a nationally prominent person of colour believes that "Asian culture has held her back more than racism as she credits Britain for 'encouraging her to make the most of herself'".
Mail readers are going to be aware that there has been some criticism, but they're not getting the impression that the report is falling apart.
Don't forget that, for Johnson, outrage from Guarding reading lefties is a bonus. Every article from them criticizing the report is a signal to his supporters that Johnson is on the right track. If only the left was even half as effective at manipulating the public.
The optimist in me hopes this is the case, and that it will mark the end of (not) dealing with problems by having an inquiry. This report being so terrible highlights how they can be used to just cover up problems, avoid confronting them, or avoid admitting guilt. More people might start realising that because of this. That might lead the way to actual stuff being done to make people's lives better.
That looks like a rhetorical question. I'd better answer it.Fishnut wrote: ↑Thu Apr 01, 2021 12:31 pmSuccesses are important, but this feels like an attempt to diminish any problems - individuals can succeed so if you don't it's because you didn't try hard enough and you're just blaming your failures on your race because you don't want to admit you didn't. I don't doubt that the media have ignored success stories in minority communities and I would be interested to know if they examine why this is. Could it be, possibly, that institutional racism makes these stories less appealing to editors and publishers?The data also revealed many instances of success among minority communities. These have often been ignored or have been seen to be of little interest (to the media). But we wanted to understand the reasons for the success and whether there were any lessons to be drawn.
Very interesting thread, thanks for sharingjdc wrote: ↑Fri Apr 02, 2021 4:49 pmThere's a longish thread here: https://twitter.com/StopFundingHate/sta ... 4074407936 about the racist UK media.
This was a point I hadn't registered when doing my dissection of the introduction but it's so obvious once pointed out,The Report of the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities is the latest and perhaps most important component of the government’s strategy of denial and disavowal. It fleshes out, suspiciously neatly, the narrative that Boris Johnson first drafted as a direct riposte to the Black Lives Matter movement in June last year.[6] It appears to be not just a response to the Black Lives Matter protests, but part of a well-orchestrated backlash.
I had no idea about any of this,“There is a new story about the Caribbean experience which speaks to the slave period not only being about profit and suffering but how culturally African people transformed themselves into a re-modelled African/Britain.” This would not be a new story at all. British slave traders and owners told a similar story when they sought to resist abolition and emancipation in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: Africans could only ever be culturally transformed and improved, they claimed, if they were extracted from the mire of savagery in which they were sunk in Africa, and exposed to the better example of British owners on Caribbean plantations.
This gets to the heart of the problem with the report,Enslaved Indians were exempt from the Abolition Act and their indenture enabled post-abolition labour shortages to be met in the former slave holding colonies.[13] Whilst destroying and sometimes enslaving Aboriginal communities, Britons also kidnapped Pacific Islanders to transfer sugar production from the Caribbean to Australia.[14] Nevertheless, the supposition that Britain was an antislavery nation became its excuse for the aggressive expansion of its empire through the conquest and subjugation of African societies during the second half of the nineteenth century.[15]
Rather than seizing the opportunity to acknowledge the wrongs of the past and provide a more reconciliatory history, it seems intent on reassuring resistant white Britons that they need not take the trouble to understand Black Britons’ experiences of racism. Racial discrimination, just as they long suspected, is all in the minds of Black people, especially those of Caribbean descent. Even worse, it is just a cynical strategy of self-advancement – “playing the race card”.
and:A source close to Downing Street confirmed that no other government report in recent memory has had its evidence and analysis so comprehensively discredited across a wide range of topics and domains. They said there had been “a failure to grasp the issues” and that No 10 “was clearly not motivated into looking into what can actually be done. The success of the gender pay gap reporting, for instance, started a positive national conversation; this report has taken a culture war direction. It’s done a great disservice to the country”.
That response should be very interesting reading.Dozens of organisations are planning a coordinated formal response with requests to be removed from the report, as they say they were included without being consulted.