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dawning of the reality that your dreams will not come true, that you will most likely be just as unhappy as your parents and that fifty years of dead-end work awaits you – that kills most working-class kids’ confidence.
the police never were the police of the whole people but a mechanism set up to protect the affluent from what the Victorians described as the dangerous classes.
enforcers for the state and for the state of things as they are.
police are there to protect the state, not ‘the people’. When viewed in the historical
It is inconceivable that if the race roles in South Africa had been reversed Britain and the US would have supported a black government committing such outrages on its white population.
the British government having its own citizens arrested for protesting a foreign racist settler regime.
the only non-African nation to send its troops to actually fight the apartheid regime was Cuba.
The debts incurred by the apartheid regime had to be paid off by the newly elected ANC and the ANC essentially accepted the IMF/World Bank neocolonial model that has been such a disaster for other poor countries. A newly elected black government paying back loans taken out with international creditors by a white supremacist regime; it would be laughable if its effects were not so sickening.
in 1965 Cuba had one physician for every 1,200 people, but by 2005, Cuba boasted one physician for every 167 people – a number unequalled anywhere in the world. In 2014, the island had 83,000 doctors, some 5,000 more than Canada, a wealthy country that has a population that is over three times larger.
Cuban people elect to do this work out of genuine revolutionary solidarity with other, overwhelmingly poor black and brown people in the global south.
the mainstream loves to worship a supposedly non-racist country as long as it leaves the accepted class hierarchies in place, but hates a society that has revolutionised some of its class relationships despite its actual material contribution to global anti-racist struggle. Either way, genuine anti-racism cannot be what motivates such favouritism.
entertain the idea that white supremacy might not be a given.
It is one of history’s great ironies that the most extreme incarnation of white supremacy, the Nazis, did more to undermine white dominance, damage Western prestige and make space for ‘third world’ freedom struggles than any other force in the previous three centuries.
white people’s hurt feelings are conceptually equivalent to black humans’ actual lives.
If whiteness is used to legitimise slavery, genocide and colonialism, is it really a surprise that at least a minority of people victimised in this way would turn around and argue that white people were inherently evil?
‘The 13,000 young people excluded from school each year might as well be given a date by which to join the prison service some time later down the line.’
the exclusion gap is caused by largely unwitting, but systematic, racial discrimination in the application of disciplinary and exclusions policies.
teachers’ assessments underestimate the academic potential of black students.
literally mathematically impossible for above a certain percentage of black students to get top-grade GSCEs,
it’s fine for working class white kids to fail relations to the white middle-classes – but they should never fall behind the darkies.
our overseas family who were articulating to the world what we felt we were going through too.
Naturally the British media and law enforcement took ample opportunity to racialise the gangster minority as a general black problem in a way they never did with the drug overdoses and sexual assaults that remain a common issue throughout the UK rave and festival culture.
The nigger; a fictional subhuman creation of the white racist imagination; a fiction that could justify actual humans being worked like beasts of burden, redlined,1 segregated, executed by law enforcement, experimented on by medical science,2 exhibited in zoos, bombed by their own government,3 having their towns torched by terrorists and having to fight for almost a century to earn the right to shit in the same toilets as white people. All of that vanishes from view with the way nigger is now used in hip hop.
niggerish-ness can be a multi-billion-dollar commodity as long as it makes no mention of its relationship to whiteness.
People who have experienced niggerisation or lifelong racism often walk as if they are apologising for their existence; it was only when I saw black people that did not walk that way that this became clear to me.
for much of Britain, America is where racism happens, and Britain is then by definition not racist because, you know, ‘it’s not as racist as America’.
American exceptionalism in blackface.
That black people are not like the rest of humanity, and that they do not kill as a complex result of political, historical, economic, cultural, religious and psychological factors, they kill simply because of their skin: their excessive melanin syndrome.
the young man will be arrested. If the person he stabbed died, with such convincing photo evidence he will almost certainly go to prison for murder. But no matter how many police in America get caught on camera shooting people or how many police in Britain have verdicts of unlawful killing returned against them, almost none of them will go to prison, or even so much as lose their jobs.
Can we, the Caribbean and black-American descendants of racist chattel slavery who have been made ‘black’, tell the Yoruba people, of whom there are almost fifty million, that they must simply forgo their specific ethnic history of over 2000 years in favour of simplified black solidarity, simply because racism exists? Should Jamaican Rastas ignore the history of religious persecution, police brutality and class snobbery they have suffered in Jamaica, simply because ‘we are all black’?
I think whiteness has functioned quite similarly to divine kingship, paralysing those who are intensely invested, trapping them into a resentment of the reality that they are obviously not superior.
‘to accept that whiteness brought us Donald Trump is to accept whiteness as an existential danger to the country and the world.’
If the British government were serious about wanting to engage for the first time in a mutually beneficial relationship with the non-white parts of the Commonwealth, this is a strange way to go about it.
Leave voters among the elite and middle classes were crucial to the final outcome,
That England, a country not properly invaded since 1066 but which has invaded almost every nation on the planet, can have a party named the UK Independence Party win 13 per cent of the national vote in 2015 speaks volumes about collective amnesia and ability to distort the facts.
British’ population obviously asserts just how clearly we see whiteness and Britishness as being synonymous,
it is only the threat of a continued reduction in white privilege – a potential sharing of global power and the spread of equality before the law and the institutions of the state to people not racialised as white.
demonising the undeserving ethnic other with whom poor whites have more materially in common, the upper classes can use a racial solidarity rooted in the history of dominating the other to mask a history and reality of exploitation.
The answers to these questions, and the shape of the world children born now will inhabit, will be determined not just by politicians and billionaires, but by millions of supposedly ordinary people like you and me who choose whether or not to engage with difficult issues, to try and grasp history, to find their place in it, and who choose whether to act or to do nothing when faced with the mundane and mammoth conflicts of everyday life.
