wow you sure do like a few keywords from your grad studies, don't you? 'reified views'? what ideological views are not reified? i think you need to read that book again. or at least elaborate whatever niche and idiosyncratic use you're making of it this time, again, as with episteme.
i am not likening the situation to the one in the US at all. but i am also not speaking for the experience of immigrant or subaltern peoples in europe, who may feel plenty of sympathies with BLM when it comes to encountering institutional racism. you, on the other hand, are sniffy when people express views you don't like outside of your liberal bienpensant mainstream. 'all is well and can be fixed by a little bit of policy'. 'if the little people will stop expressing themselves in such confused and contrary ways, and adopt my elevated perspective'. OK.
i don't doubt that you're well-educated but in a narrow way and it comes across increasingly, as you spread yourself across multiple discussions, as callow and jejune. 'why isn't the world like my education portrayed it?' see ken's remark to you above. so yeah, sure, explain patiently to an immigrant in belgium that their inflamed feelings and outrage are inappropriate because their views are 'hopelessly reified' and 'this is a different context requiring a different set of material analyses'. from their perspective i'm sure it's all just more official hypocrisy from people talking up how great liberal democracy is whilst defending and caviling and nuancing endlessly about its illiberality and non-democratic iniquities. ‘but american slavery was different to british slavery! the belgian colonies were nothing like the plantations in terms of political economy!’
i'm sorry but it looks like you're ignorant. the UK metropolitan police as an institution have been culpably racist. lots of people have died in custody under less than ideal circumstances. there is a history in london of race riots and racist policing. look up 'operation swamp 81' and the brixton riots. it's not a crude importing of specifically american race relations to an unsuitable context: it's the same shit, in a different place. disproportionately white police forces meting out the law disproportionately to black citizens.
Last edited by uziq (2020-05-31 03:55:54)