Crucial to the unpacking of the assumptions articulated in Diane Abbott’s letter and to the creation and maintenance of genuine antiracist solidarity, is an examination of how “white” identity was invented.
For by the end of the 19th century with the reality of race having been firmly established, the question of who was white was deeply contested. Then, in the space of a few decades at the turn of the 20th century, “whiteness” as is now commonly understood became consolidated as much out of fear as out of self-regard.[1]
The outworking of racial categorisation begins with the trans-Atlantic slave trade. While the institution of slavery reaches back into the ancient world and was strongly embedded in most cultures and civilisations, the mode of slavery introduced to the Americas differed fundamentally from that pertaining in the premodern world. First, the industrial scale of plantation slavery required unprecedented numbers of slaves and a new and horrific degree of brutality. With their previous supply of Balkan and Circassian slaves cut off by the expansion of the Ottoman Empire, European slave traders turned to sub-Saharan Africa (as the Islamic Empire had done) as their source of human chattel. Christian Europe’s slaves became almost entirely Black African as were slaves transported to plantations in the Americas.
The outworking of racial categorisation begins with the trans-Atlantic slave trade. While the institution of slavery reaches back into the ancient world and was strongly embedded in most cultures and civilisations, the mode of slavery introduced to the Americas differed fundamentally from that pertaining in the premodern world. First, the industrial scale of plantation slavery required unprecedented numbers of slaves and a new and horrific degree of brutality. With their previous supply of Balkan and Circassian slaves cut off by the expansion of the Ottoman Empire, European slave traders turned to sub-Saharan Africa (as the Islamic Empire had done) as their source of human chattel. Christian Europe’s slaves became almost entirely Black African as were slaves transported to plantations in the Americas.
As Black slaves became the predominant labour force on New World plantations, it helped cement the categories of racial division as new arguments about the inferiority of Black Africans became entrenched in colonial communities. New laws created clearer distinctions between slaves and servants; black people and whites with laws in Virginia banning miscegenation and allowing property of backs to be expropriated and sold with the profits used to support poor whites. Beyond the pragmatic reasoning that slaves were cheaper and easier to control, the racialisation of slavery provided ideological justification for the acceptance of servitude in a society that proclaimed its loyalty to freedom and liberty.[2]
From the early days of the Republic to the 20th century only one group was deemed unconditionally as white – “Anglo-Saxons”. Who else belonged to the category was a matter of social negotiation. Doubts as to who could be white were there from the inception of the United States. In the view of Benjamin Franklin, the number of “purely white People in the World” was tiny: “All Africa is black or tawny. Asia chiefly tawny … And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians, and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion; as are the Germans also. Only “the Saxons” and “the English” were truly white. “I could wish their Numbers were increased,” lamented Franklin.[3]
A century and a quarter later, in 1911, the Dillingham Commission set up by the US Congress to investigate the state of immigration at a time of mass panic about the about the quality of European immigrants, in its report noted that the Bureau of Immigration “recognises 45 races or peoples among immigrants coming to the United States, and of these 36 are indigenous to Europe. It also noted Blumenbach’s “five great divisions of mankind” but broke down the “Aryan stock” (which it took as synonymous with “Caucasian”) into these distinct races – Teutonic, Slavonic, Italic, Hellenic, Lettic, Celtic, Illyric, Armenic and Indo-Iranic.[4]
The first group to pose the whiteness test for the American elite were the Irish. In the early decades of the 19th century, Irish immigrants were frequently referred to as “niggers turned inside out” and Black people as “smoked Irish”. The Irish were seen not just as socially and culturally, but also as physically distinct, “low-browed,” “brutish,” and even “simian.” To see white chimpanzees is dreadful,” the English historian and clergyman Charles Kingsley observed of Ireland.[5]
The British anthropologist John Beddoe, referred to earlier, created an “Index of Nigrescence” which supposedly quantified the degree of blackness in a population. He created a racial map which showed that the Irish, the Welsh and the Highland Scots were more “Africanoid” than the English. There were, he thought, traces of the “Mongoloid” among the Welsh, while the Irish were close to Cro-Magnons, a prehistoric ancestor of modern Europeans. However, in time, the Irish in America began to acquire their whiteness status partly because of their influence as a group (as in the legendary Tammany Hall Democrat political machine) partly also through their role in the enforcement of workplace colour bars against blacks (as portrayed in the film The Gangs of New York) [6]
Through such transatlantic faux scholarship and bureaucratic methodology, his histories of whiteness developed. For Europeans, sketching out the numerous races of the continent was an aid to nation-building and a means of explaining social divisions within and between nations. For Americans, it enabled a myth of ancestry and a legitimising narrative for their revolutionary story of freedom despite the millions enslaved and the majority denied suffrage. It also became a means of evaluating immigration and of policing relations between migrant groups.[7]
However, the popularisation and enthusiastic embrace of whiteness and white superiority by elites and common folk on both sides of the Atlantic went alongside fears about the future and security of the white race. The supposed phenomenon of wantonness of an increasingly racialised lower classes and fears of racial degeneration were widely disseminated in academic and popular discourse on both sides of the Atlantic. Immigration from highly fecund Southern European groups conjured up fears of “race suicide” popularised by Theodore Roosevelt who became US President in 1901. He believed that the elimination by whites of inferior races was a moral good “for the benefit of civilisation.” He believed that for a race to succeed in “the warfare of the cradle,” it had to consist “of good breeders as well as of good fighters. Thus, wilful childlessness was a “sin for which the penalty is ... race death; a sin for which there is no atonement.” [8]
Married to the fear of race suicide were eugenic concerns about the quality of white or Anglo-Saxon stock. The promotion of eugenics is primarily associated with the polymath Francis Galton. Eugenics was “the science that deals with all influences to improve the inborn qualities of a race,” a programme for racial improvement through selective breeding. So as to ensure that in the words of the American lawyer and eugenicist Madison Grant, author of the 1916 book The Passing of the Great Race, one of the most influential work of American scientific racism, “He can breed from the best, or he can eliminate the waste”, 65,000 people were forcibly sterilised in the forty years after the Supreme Court had upheld the first eugenical sterilisation law passed by Virginia to order the sterilisation of Carrie Buck. “Three generations of imbeciles are enough” concluded Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, in summation of the Court’s verdict.[9]
But yet. White superiority and self-confidence was stalked by primal fears. In Powellian style language, Charles Henry Pearson wrote forebodingly in his 1893 book National Life and Character that:
From the early days of the Republic to the 20th century only one group was deemed unconditionally as white – “Anglo-Saxons”. Who else belonged to the category was a matter of social negotiation. Doubts as to who could be white were there from the inception of the United States. In the view of Benjamin Franklin, the number of “purely white People in the World” was tiny: “All Africa is black or tawny. Asia chiefly tawny … And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians, and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion; as are the Germans also. Only “the Saxons” and “the English” were truly white. “I could wish their Numbers were increased,” lamented Franklin.[3]
A century and a quarter later, in 1911, the Dillingham Commission set up by the US Congress to investigate the state of immigration at a time of mass panic about the about the quality of European immigrants, in its report noted that the Bureau of Immigration “recognises 45 races or peoples among immigrants coming to the United States, and of these 36 are indigenous to Europe. It also noted Blumenbach’s “five great divisions of mankind” but broke down the “Aryan stock” (which it took as synonymous with “Caucasian”) into these distinct races – Teutonic, Slavonic, Italic, Hellenic, Lettic, Celtic, Illyric, Armenic and Indo-Iranic.[4]
The first group to pose the whiteness test for the American elite were the Irish. In the early decades of the 19th century, Irish immigrants were frequently referred to as “niggers turned inside out” and Black people as “smoked Irish”. The Irish were seen not just as socially and culturally, but also as physically distinct, “low-browed,” “brutish,” and even “simian.” To see white chimpanzees is dreadful,” the English historian and clergyman Charles Kingsley observed of Ireland.[5]
The British anthropologist John Beddoe, referred to earlier, created an “Index of Nigrescence” which supposedly quantified the degree of blackness in a population. He created a racial map which showed that the Irish, the Welsh and the Highland Scots were more “Africanoid” than the English. There were, he thought, traces of the “Mongoloid” among the Welsh, while the Irish were close to Cro-Magnons, a prehistoric ancestor of modern Europeans. However, in time, the Irish in America began to acquire their whiteness status partly because of their influence as a group (as in the legendary Tammany Hall Democrat political machine) partly also through their role in the enforcement of workplace colour bars against blacks (as portrayed in the film The Gangs of New York) [6]
Through such transatlantic faux scholarship and bureaucratic methodology, his histories of whiteness developed. For Europeans, sketching out the numerous races of the continent was an aid to nation-building and a means of explaining social divisions within and between nations. For Americans, it enabled a myth of ancestry and a legitimising narrative for their revolutionary story of freedom despite the millions enslaved and the majority denied suffrage. It also became a means of evaluating immigration and of policing relations between migrant groups.[7]
However, the popularisation and enthusiastic embrace of whiteness and white superiority by elites and common folk on both sides of the Atlantic went alongside fears about the future and security of the white race. The supposed phenomenon of wantonness of an increasingly racialised lower classes and fears of racial degeneration were widely disseminated in academic and popular discourse on both sides of the Atlantic. Immigration from highly fecund Southern European groups conjured up fears of “race suicide” popularised by Theodore Roosevelt who became US President in 1901. He believed that the elimination by whites of inferior races was a moral good “for the benefit of civilisation.” He believed that for a race to succeed in “the warfare of the cradle,” it had to consist “of good breeders as well as of good fighters. Thus, wilful childlessness was a “sin for which the penalty is ... race death; a sin for which there is no atonement.” [8]
Married to the fear of race suicide were eugenic concerns about the quality of white or Anglo-Saxon stock. The promotion of eugenics is primarily associated with the polymath Francis Galton. Eugenics was “the science that deals with all influences to improve the inborn qualities of a race,” a programme for racial improvement through selective breeding. So as to ensure that in the words of the American lawyer and eugenicist Madison Grant, author of the 1916 book The Passing of the Great Race, one of the most influential work of American scientific racism, “He can breed from the best, or he can eliminate the waste”, 65,000 people were forcibly sterilised in the forty years after the Supreme Court had upheld the first eugenical sterilisation law passed by Virginia to order the sterilisation of Carrie Buck. “Three generations of imbeciles are enough” concluded Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, in summation of the Court’s verdict.[9]
But yet. White superiority and self-confidence was stalked by primal fears. In Powellian style language, Charles Henry Pearson wrote forebodingly in his 1893 book National Life and Character that:
The day will come, and perhaps it is not far distant when the European observer will … see the globe girdled with a continuous zone of black and yellow races, no longer too weak for aggression or under tutelage, but independent.
And whites … would be:
elbowed and hustled, and perhaps even thrust aside by peoples whom we looked down as servile and thought of as bound always to minister to our needs.[10]
Such apocalyptic fears fuelled the immigration panic in the US which led to a series of legal restrictions, culminating in the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act of 1924, which banned all immigration from Asia and set quotas for European migrants based on the proportion of the American population already from a particular country.[11] Of course this was a global phenomenon as well, particularly in Britain’s “White Dominions”. Australia inaugurated its White Australia policy in 1901 with the passage of the Immigration Restriction Act. It was soon followed by Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa. The mother country, of course, followed suit with the Aliens Act, 1905. Such immigration laws represented segregation on a large scale. It aims was to create a global version of Jim Crow laws.[12]
The Dead Ends of Racial Nomenclature
It is important to deconstruct “whiteness” and “white identity” because, by extension, all racial categories are artificial creations and, if antiracists are to avoid working in silos, it is of the utmost necessity to avoid falling into the essentialising traps that racial categories create. Racial categorisation has facilitated the emergence of competitive antiracism and hierarchies of oppression and the diversion of much discursive energy into the cul-de-sac of identity politics. At the heart of Diane Abbott’s letter is a failure to fully appreciate the dynamics of race formation how groups who do not have a “Black” or “Brown” skin colour such as Irish or European immigrants and Roma/Gypsy/Travellers were nevertheless abused in simian style ways. Two elements of Critical Race Theory therefore have to be challenged and removed from the repertoire of antiracism: White Privilege and White Fragility.
The problem of racism is primarily social and structural – the laws, practices and institutions that maintain discrimination. The stress on “white privilege” turns a social issue into a matter of personal and group psychology. Decrying white people in the manner of Chicago Tribune columnist Dahleen Glanton “White people, you are the problem” and public declarations of mea culpa as that by the US-based British writer Laurie Penny who insists “ For White people acknowledging the reality of racism means acknowledging our own guilt and complicity”, distorts actually helps keep discriminatory power structures untouched. Yes, African American people are more likely to be arrested and incarcerated for longer periods than white people in the US and have experienced well publicised brutality and homicidal treatment from police. But some analyses suggest that the best predictor of police killings is not race, but income levels – the poorer you are, the more likely you are to be killed.[13]
Similarly, the disproportionate impact of the Covid-19 virus on BAME communities has been well documented. But class inequalities are important too – people living in the most deprived areas in England and Wales died from the virus at twice the rate in the least deprived areas. [14]
So, in these contexts, there is no need to set up race and class as differential and competitive casual categories against each other. Minorites of all hues comprise integral parts of the working class and often share similar experiences of state authority. Race and class shape people’s lives in complex, and dare it be said, intersectional ways.[15]
But perhaps the most egregious abuse of the concept of white privilege has been its application to Jews and Jewish experience of the Shoah/Holocaust. In a discussion on ABC’s The View on the removal by a Tennessee school board from the curriculum Maus a graphic novel about the Shoah, Whoopi Goldberg notoriously opined that the Holocaust “is white people doing it to white people, so y’all gonna fight amongst yourselves”; it was “white on white” violence that exposed “man’s inhumanity to man”. Notwithstanding her profound apology in the wake of the ensuing outcry, what was disturbing from an antiracist viewpoint, was her ignorance about the historical use of racial categories. For race has never simply been about black and white. It’s a concept that has been used to deem certain people biologically incapable or unworthy of being equal. As we have seen, over the past two decades, not just Black and Jewish people, but Irish, Slavs, even the working class have, at various times, been viewed as racially distinct and inferior.
In relation Nazi Germany and the Jews, Goldberg’s comments demonstrate a stunning lack of awareness of the influence of US racist law on Nazi racial policy. The 1935 Nuremberg laws that established that a “citizen is exclusively a national of German blood”, that Jews were not of “German blood” and that marriages and “extramarital intercourse” were forbidden between Jews and citizens of German or racially related blood were directly influenced by the American “one-drop rule” – the belief that one drop of black blood made you “unwhite”.
Critical Whiteness and Jews
The case of the Jews among the whites illuminates the methodological problems of Critical Whiteness Studies and the discourse it is embedded in, not least on the concept of “whiteness” as such. It reveals a political problem, namely the disturbing presence of Jews in the arena of ethnic minorities as well as the presence of antisemitism in its multifarious manifestations.[16]
Over the past twenty years, it has become fashionable and even mainstream in American race scholarship to assert that Jews are white; that they belong to the dominant majority. This means, that as a collective, due to embedded racialised structures in society, they benefit from their dominant position and are complicit in oppression while, in a somewhat twisted manner, they are sometimes taken to be complicit in oppression also as individuals.[17]
The “whiteness” of Jews has, in the US at any rate been defined in two polar opposite ways. From the first, descriptive or interpretive, perspective, the question posed is whether Jews are still considered part of the nation; are they still “aliens” corrupting white America. This was definitely the stance of white supremacists and nativists throughout American history and which, through the emergence of the Alt Right under the Trump Presidency, may be gaining currency again.[18]
The second, critical, view, tries to establish that Jews, at least Ashkenazi Jews who make up the majority of American Jewry are unquestionably white, as they enjoy a. stable place in the white majority. This stable attribution of “whiteness” is problematic as it reflects an intention to show that Jews, despite their former status, as an ethnic and religious minority have come to occupy powerful and dominant positions in society and now belong to the oppressive white power structure. On this reading, Jews realise the curse of all promises: they enter into the world of the multicultural and become successful within it. Thus, they become the new “establishment” when, by the 1960s, other groups in the Western world begin to seek their multicultural space. The trajectory of the image of Israel from the embattled, overwhelmed, rescued fragment of European Jewry to “Super-Jew” and then the “racist” archvillain parallels this cultural tale.[19]
This image of Jewish whiteness is often reinforced by the conception of “intersectionality,” which formulates the interconnectedness of all dominated positions and the experiences of oppressed groups, and which thereby links Israel to Jewish whiteness and domination. In this kind of discourse, the U.S. represents an empire of interlinked systems of white supremacy, imperialism, capitalism and patriarchy, and Jews can be presented as white dominators in the Middle East, colonising indigenous non-white Arab population. It must be emphasised though that critiquing this racialised view of the Israel/Palestine conflict does not amount to a defence of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank; the oppressive controls exercised over the Palestinian Arab population in that Iron Cage or the blockade of Gaza. Its criticism of the introduction of a colour line into conflicts that relate neither to American race relations nor with European Scramble for Africa type of colonialism.[20]
Critical Whiteness and Intersectionality also seek to relegate antisemitism to the background or to the embers of history as it would dilute the criticism conducted in favour of the “really oppressed.” This discursive imperative is explicitly articulated by the leading figure of “intersectional feminism,” Linda Sarsour. Speaking in a video published by the antizionist Jewish Voice for Peace group, she said in terms not dissimilar to that by Diane Abbott:
I want to make the distinction that while anti-Semitism is something that impacts Jewish American than anti-Black racism or Islamophobia because it’s not systemic ... Of course, you may experience vandalism or an attack on a synagogue, or maybe on an individual level … but it it’s not systematic and we need to make that distinction.[21]
So, for its polemicism on “colour blind” racism is utterly blind to the nature of antisemitism which unlike racism, which was birthed in modern times by 19th century pseudo-science, is a conspiracy theory which like all conspiracy theories conjure up a demonic elite oppressing and exploiting the common people. Consciously or unconsciously, by reducing all conflicts and social antagonism to race or a colour line, it reproduces the racial categories created by 19th pseudo-science on which white (or more accurately Anglo-Saxon) domination is built while closing off emancipatory projects based on class or other forms of social solidarity.
The Weakness of White Fragility
An associated construct with Critical Race Theory and/or Critical Whiteness is White Fragility. Popularised by the book of the same name by the sociologist Robin DiAngelo. She defines White Fragility as “a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves. These moves include the outward display of emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and behaviours such as argumentation, silence and leaving the stress-inducing situation. According to her analysis, white people are all the unconscious beneficiaries of racism. But because they are insulated from this fact, they react defensively when confronted with racial realities. The feelings and behaviours that DiAngelo describes are for her mechanisms that protect white privilege by shutting down discourse and restoring a white racial equilibrium.[23]
In her critique of White Fragility, the social psychologist Valerie Tarico notes the absence of rigorous, statistical hypothesis testing in DiAngelo’s work but that, despite it’s apparent nebulosity and weak research base, the concept has spread widely into the corporate diversity and equality training world, the popular media and college curricula. She acknowledges that the concept of white fragility has resonated with millions of progressive activists and that confronting ugly unacknowledged, unconscious, “shadow” parts of ourselves, can be difficult and painful and can enable personal growth and more listening and engagement.[24]
But yet. Tarico argues that to assess the validity of white fragility as a valid psychological construct the following questions need to be asked: is the pattern of emotions and behaviours that it identifies unique to white people and to conversations about race; is it a single or multi-pronged pattern; do these responses actually function to restore white racial equilibrium and do these patterns change over time? She goes on to cite the Barnum effect whereby if a concept is defined broadly or loosely, it is easy to find examples like a fit. She points out that the Barnum effect relies on the human pattern of confirmatory thinking: our brains identify the parts that match and ignore the rest.[25]
But from a socially emancipatory viewpoint, the biggest drawbacks to white fragility and its parent, CRT, are that its division of the world into tribes of oppressors and oppressed and uniform experiences of benefit and suffering in each respective tribe do not necessarily reflect diversity and complexity in individual lives. Indeed, in critical theory to focus on such invites condemnation for perpetuating racism and sexism. Focus on inter-group differences and power hierarchies rather than on human universals and shared humanity that informs traditional social liberalism further alienates those being asked to concede power. By assigning guilt to white people for being born into the dominant group, CRT operates in much the same way as original sin in Biblical Christianity. Failure to acknowledge progress such as the achievements of the Civil Rights Movement leads to scepticism about factual accuracy and, by extension, about any prospect for racial harmony.[26]
But the greatest defect of all in CRT is the essentialisation of race and racial differences which, unintended or not, is the practical outcome of the doctrines they preach. Ultimately, like its Anglo-Saxon or Anglo-European counterparts, white nationalist or identarian movements, they lead humanity into the cul-de-sac of identity politics by eschewing the possibilities of common emancipatory projects such as the Anti-Apartheid and antiracist struggles of not so yesteryear when “Even though we organised autonomously, we saw our struggles as one”.[27] The essential pessimism and default anti-Enlightenment, perversely Occidentalist positions of CRT discourse and the inter-group conflicts it encourages are aeons away from such common struggle.
[1] Kenan Malik, 2023, p.65. A History of Race from White Supremacy to Identity Politics. London; Hurst
[2] Malik, pp.66-70
[3] Ibid, p.71
[4] Ibid, pp.71-72
[5] Ibid, pp.73-74
[6] Ibid, p.74
[7] Ibid, p.73
[8] Malik, pp.76-77
[9] Ibid, pp.77-80
[10] Ibid, pp.92-93
[11] Ibid, p.82
[12] Ibid, p.92
[13] Kenan Malik “‘White Privilege Is a distraction, leaving racism and power untouched.” The Observer,14th June 2020.
[14] Ibid
[15] Ibid.
[16] Balazs Berkovitz (2018) “Critical Whiteness Studies and the “Jewish Problem” “Zeitschrift fur kritische Sozialtheorie und Philosophie pp.86-102
[17] Ibid, pp.90-91
[18] Ibid, p. 87
[19] Ibid, p.87
[20] Ibid, p.88
[21] Ibid, p.89
[22] Ibid, p.89
[23] Valerie Tarico, Racism is Real, but the Concept of White Fragility Could Use a Closer Look.
[24] Ibid
[26] Ibid
[27] Aditya Chakraborty “Never forget this. – if we fight racism in silos, we can’t win” The Guardian 27th April 2023.
⏩Barry Gilheany is a freelance writer, qualified counsellor and aspirant artist resident in Colchester where he took his PhD at the University of Essex. He is also a lifelong Leeds United supporter.
Kehinde Andrews on Tomiwa Owolade's 'This is Not America'
ReplyDelete"It is too easy, and seductive, to dub him Uncle Tomiwa, but it’s also inaccurate. Uncle Tom’s to have credibility, to be able to lead us down the wrong path. This is not a book meant for Black people. It exists solely to titillate racist White audiences. I actually feel a little sorry for Owolade. I have spent far too much time with Black conservatives to think he is putting on an act, he genuinely believes his delusions. The book is so spectacularly bad it should never have been published. It will no doubt be popular but he looks just as ridiculous as Lenny Henry when he performed on the Black and White Minstrel Show. Tap dancing for White people may give you a platform and pay the bills, but at some point, you realize that the color on your face is not boot polish and that your Black skin was never a mask."
Here, Andrews is going along with an ideology almost entirely believed by the white Western bourgeois and rejected by most black people. And yet he has the nerve to call others “Uncle Toms”.
That point for some reason is lost on me Christopher. Not really sure what it means.
DeleteAM,
Deletein Barry's last piece, he had mentioned reading 'This is Not America' and finding it a necessary riposte to the issues under discussion.
Thanks Christopher. What I am really asking I suppose is what is the 'ideology almost entirely believed by the white Western bourgeois and rejected by most black people'?
DeleteI never read the book but going from the reviews it looks to me that Owolade makes a lot of sense. Andrews seems to have just resorted to name calling.
AM,
DeleteCritical Race Theory.
It has proven to be very lucrative for people like Andrews to tell people of great wealth that their systems are inherently racist. The end result is that there are some people out there who genuinely think nothing has changed in America since Jim Crow. That is insane.
As Barry has stated, CRT is no different than original sin and the consequences for going along with it are vast.
Barry - another long piece with a lot of effort put into it. More than one read would be required to absorb it.
ReplyDeleteCRT is vulnerable to the charge of racism itself in that it attributes what you term original sin to the entire white population for no other reason than colour. It seems so like blaming all Jews for the death of Christ.
My respect for Andrews has diminished to zero. He plays the man and not the ball in the most vile way.
ReplyDeleteBarry,
DeleteAbsolutely. Disingenuous, racist and patronising, it is one of the worst hit pieces masquerading as a review that I've seen.
Anthony/Barry...........
ReplyDeleteThat point for some reason is lost on me Christopher. Not really sure what it means.
All you have to do is listen to the The Bourgeois Blues by Leadbelly...It might help you....
Barry.....
What is the deal with you and everything Jewish? Why can't you leave the Jews out of your arguments just for once....
Frankie, Jew hatred in its many forms has always been a core component of racism and conspiracist ideology although distinct from anti-black racism. That is why I write about it. What is your deal with Rothschilds, "Zionist bankers" etc?
ReplyDeleteAnd furthermore Frankie, it was Diane Abbott's claim that only blacks face racism while Jews, Irish and Travellers only face mere prejudice that motivated my two pieces.
ReplyDeleteBarry,
ReplyDeleteFrankie, Jew hatred in its many forms has always been a core component of racism and conspiracist ideology.
On February 2015 (TPQ link), I said to my oldest daughter ....."It isn't anti jew ... It is anti Zionist, not the same. Do you understand the difference?...." (Today she understands the difference). My take is most people conflate Jews and Zionist's and that's how conspiracy theories about Jews get passed of as fact. Thats why I only say 'Zionist's'---not Christian, Jewish or Rothschild Zionism. Brendan Hughes said "Belfast is rotten to the core...". So is Zionism.
What is your deal with Rothschilds, "Zionist bankers" etc?....
Read my 3 comments on Murder Incorporated (TPQ link) and you will find your answer why I don't like bankers (Zionist or other). As for the Rothschild family I have little to no respect for them. Once again open the link and not only watch the video, but this time put your prejudices to one side and actually listen to what is being said......And how the Balfour declaration in 1917 means Palestinian's today are living in refugee camps and not on a Reservation......
One of you favourite lines and the base line to all your arguments about race and racism boils down to ....."and, of course, the greatest crime in human history - the Shoah/Holocaust . ....." ( TPQ link (<----Barry, 'Frankie fact check' the comments)....Even a boy named Sue knows that what you 'urban myth as fact' is not only a bull-shit version of history but a distortion of fact. In November 2018on TPQ you had a piece published called The Crime of Genocide and it was all about the Jews. Within the first few comments myself and Marty Flynn had the same kinda thought.... ( "Barry leave the Jews alone for once and add to your equation Native American Indians")....I'm going to dispel the urban legend about how "the greatest crime in human history - the Shoah/Holocaust" is a myth.
No one is disputing that the Nazi's brutally murdered between 6-7 million innocent people (mostly Jews) in death camps. What most people forget is that only a few hundred years before, white Europeans went to North America and tried you wipe out a proud Indian nation. Depending on what source you believe somewhere between 15 million/a> (Hist. Chan.) to somewhere close to 56 million (Guardian) 'Red Skins' lost their lives to racist 'Pale Faces'....Also what isn't in dispute, (you don't like to pay lip service to) is once the genocide stopped there was less than 300,000 Apache, Black Foot, Crow......left. and this rock got a few degrees cooler (CNN) because of the Pale Face....Palestinians get almost the same kinda deal, only today it's Pale Face's from mostly Eastern Europe with no connection to Palestine being allowed to settle in a land and round the indigenous people and instead of putting them onto a reservation, they are put into refugee canps. (TBC)....
Barry,....
ReplyDeleteSome reading about racism...... Native Americans: 500 years of Racism and Oppression ........ Invisibility is the Modern Form of Racism Against Native Americans ........ Discrimination continues to affect indigenous population
And furthermore Frankie, it was Diane Abbott's claim that.......motivated my two pieces.
Diane, like all of your poster girls is a plank. A classic example is Hillary the racist joke teller Clinton. Diane and a host of others want everyone to think that a '9 year old black kid being called a "black bastard" by a white racist is worse than a '9 year old kid (me) being called a "fenian bastard" by a BA/UDR patrol. To me the only difference between both examples is our sun tans.
Three famous people who understood 'The race question'.... take 10mis and listen to a former President of Uruguay and to what makes him human He understands 'the race question'......
Another was The Chairman of the Board. Barry take a skim and read what Frank Sinatra thought about 'the race question'....or listen to Frank jr . He understands 'the race question'.....
Frankie, no problem condemning and commemorating the genocide of the Native Americans in the US, First Nations in Canada and the Aboriginals in Australia and their lasting effects in the institutional racism in these countries. Far greater atrocities than anything Palestinian Arabs suffered at the hands of Israel. But no BDS campaign against US, Australia, Canada (nor come to think of it China, India, Saudi Arabia etc).
ReplyDeleteZionism is at base a nationalist movement for Jews which came into being at the end of the 19th century for Jews who wished to escape the pogroms in Eastern Europe and create a utopia on what they regard as their ancestral land. If you wish to condemn Zionism, then condemn all ethnic based nationalism. Zionism is conceptually different from the myriad versions of Judaism and the socialist Bundist movement of the 20th century which disappeared in the flames of the Shoah. It is an expression of Jewish identity and antizionism does not automatically equate to antisemitism. But the two cannot be that easily separated as any exploration into the online sewers of the far right and far left will show. For example the Zionist Occupation Government trope is a staple of Nick Griffin and David Duke and elimination of the "Zionist entity" is a foreign policy objective of the clerical fascist regime in Tehran. I have no problem identifying and condemning the Jewish supremacism of the settler movement on the West Bank and its allies in the most far right government in Israel's history.
But Frankie you fall into the racist's trap of essentialising what is entirely a neutral and inert property - one's skin pigmentation. The Eastern Europe "Palefaces" that you talk about who inhabit Israel/Palestine are the survivors or descendents of survivors who were consumed in the flames and pits of the Holocaust because they were deemed to be insufficiently "Pale" by the Nazis. Similarly the Eastern European immigrants told to "go home" in the aftermath of the UK's vote for Brexit (which you supported) were insufficiently "pale" for the racists who got permission to come out of the woodwork after the vote.
But for someone who deals in stereotypes like "Abdul and his prayer mat" and who is not averse to spitting out quasi-racial slurs like
"More British than Finchley"; this is probably a hard lesson to learn. Btw, it was wrong for you to be subjected to such sectarian abuse from the UDR/British Army.