so-treu:

leonineantiheroine:

ANTI-BLACK RACISM IN THE UK. Using anti-black racist language to have a go at white, working class people! Black cultureS are always under attack!

“The historian and broadcaster David Starkey has provoked a storm of criticism after claiming during a televised discussion about the riots that “the problem is that the whites have become black”.

In an appearance on BBC2’s Newsnight, Starkey spoke of “a profound cultural change” and said he had been re-reading Enoch Powell’s rivers of blood speech.

“His prophesy was absolutely right in one sense. The Tiber did not foam with blood but flames lambent, they wrapped around Tottenham and wrapped around Clapham,” he said.

“But it wasn’t inter-community violence. This is where he was absolutely wrong.” Gesturing towards one of the other guests, Owen Jones, who wrote Chavs: the Demonisation of the Working Classes, Starkey said: “What has happened is that a substantial section of the chavs that you wrote about have become black.”

…

On the programme, Starkey said: “The whites have become black. A particular sort of violent destructive, nihilistic gangster culture has become the fashion and black and white boys and girls operate in this language together.

“This language which is wholly false, which is this Jamaican patois that has been intruded in England and that is why so many of us have this sense of literally of a foreign country.”

The historian and broadcaster, whose historical documentaries on Channel 4 about the Tudors established him as a household name, went on to name-check Tottenham’s Labour MP: “Listen to David Lammy, an archetypal successful black man. If you turn the screen off so that you are listening to him on radio you would think he was white.”

what the EVER loving fuck.

What?

OK I have to read this Chav book, cos everyone here I respect a bit is like “yeah, this is what’s going wtf with liberal machinations of white class to sustain racist, classist wtfuckery while maintining liberal concern face”

Like, coding underclassness as default Black with reference to Enoch Powell, ‘white’ enunciation and Jamacia is just, how much is this guy nostalgic for empire?

Has he just realized that coding class riots as Black and alien/colonial is all the better to eat you with

-undermine any white workingclass allegience with Black rioters and alienate them from all other class conscious whites, while actively encouraging living down to stereotypes of political apathy, white nationalism and dependence on racist/classist conservatives patronage as ‘deserving poor’ social markers.

-escalate violence against underclass Blacks to an extent that could drain and overshadow the validity of their protest with white nationlist hysteria- where it doesn’t actually kill them - and discourage empathy for them from all POC middle class conservatives and whites of any class location. With bonus reiteration of Blackness as THE race politics benchmark demographic, whose visibility is bait/switch tied to coding as poorer and more criminal than any other Racially Othered groups.

Epic hegemon identified reflex there. Blackness = code for persons whose presence in public space - physical or cultural - relates to strong [dis]comfort levels for ruling elities in the imperial center.  

Corrally - this is what unsettles me about much USA based liberal defenses of ‘ghetto’ violence, and the behaviour of ‘poor Blacks’. What’s presented as very liberal, by some middle class POC and totally knee jerk righteous by white anti-racists, is waaaaaay to close to how the more ‘benevolent’ British talked about colonial violence centers during their dominant era.

Like, leaping to defend stories and assumptions about resident behaviour in the ‘poor POC suburbs’ as a default liberal anti-racist stance - with less attention to  first questioning whether the caricature is based on enough fact to defend instead of rejecting outright. Even the dominance of ‘checklist’ level talk about still Black and Brown persons, and the need of such ‘allies’ to feel emotionally in control of the conversation, to acheive the removal of conflict from debate, rather than better standards for facing inbuilt conflicts responsibly, compared to the attention given to original scholarship, art, debate, anything about what else matters to residents about those spaces.

- Unformed thoughts on the conceptualization of public space in UK vs. USA media and continuing imperial language values. 

- because London never burned before.

Roland Barthes, a Fabric Flower, and a Freedom Rider « threadbared

Originally published in the photo collection Breach of Peace: Portraits of the 1961 Mississippi Freed Riders, this archival police photograph of then 19 year-old Freedom Rider Joan Trumpauer Mulholland has been making the rounds. There is much debate about what troubling discourses of race and beauty might be operating in its reception right now, as there should be — the manifold dangers in conflating beauty with truth, or in attributing to whiteness a special heroism, are real and run deep.

But I admit that I keep looking too.

The Child: How come civil rights people are so good looking? Do you have to be good looking, to be a leader?

Me: Well no, anyone can do civil rights. You only have to be good looking to be the one activist newspapers keep picking for cover stories. 

[I used to wonder that too, when I was a kid and magazine lists of women role models usually included Cindy Crawford, Elle Macpherson, a pretty white civil rights lawyer and Mother Theresa. Girls can do anything! So long as you conform to heirarchal beauty norms or live like a saint!]