uziq wrote:
Larssen wrote:
But fuck it. I already know whatever I'll write all of you will lose the plot, while dear uziq here will shed endless giant tears over the injustices of this world whilst accusing me of apologia because I'm not bending backwards in full unequivocal support of each new association decrying minority grievance. (Whilst of course opposing identity politics, but I wonder how that will work out)
european countries have not reckoned with their colonial legacies.
you thinking that ‘blacks were not systematically detained or slaughtered in europe’, when they were genocided by germany and put in concentration camps in kenya in 1907, might seem slightly academic to a descendant of those peoples, don’t you think? 'there was no segregation policy in europe' says the colonial scholar, about a system in which the non-whites were kept working on labour plantations 1000s of kilometres away from the imperial centres, which were full of fears and propaganda about race-mixing and miscegenation. and incredibly you say, 'of post-colonial migrants, there is no sense of a forgotten history' ... ok?!? so how are you drawing a fine fucking line between life in the colonies and a new life in europe?
i don’t see how answering calls for equal access and opportunity and for redress is falling into the trap of endless ‘identity politics’. the simple fact is that there’s a huge economic void in the UK’s history. when we abolished slavery, we paid compensation to the slave owners and made all of them into centuries-long millionaire dynasties. meanwhile the ‘free’ in our colonies, much like the freeholders in the defeated confederacy, continued very much in their economic role as wage slaves. the abolition of slavery in the UK, like the processes of post- and neo-colonialism, was a gigantic transfer of public wealth into the ruling class. you pretend it was the ushering in of a new era of 'equal citizens with work visas' and not, er, wholesale plunder and the moving in of multinationals to fresh and corruptible territories. did you even study the barebones of neo-colonial theory?
you and dilbert seem to think that a person getting off a boat in 1950 was effectively a ‘black middle-class’, as if several hundred years of an organised racist system hadn’t disadvantaged them at all. it’s really bizarre. ‘stop playing identity politics!’ ‘get over it!’ ‘it’s different!’
of course every nation has a separate history and context. well done. see above where i awarded you the nobel prize for this insight (you still haven’t RSVP’d). but BLM protesters in brussels or london aren’t protesting solely based off american affairs, are they? you are being disingenuous in the extreme. there are long histories of protest, including riots and hugely controversial slayings, right here.
BLM protests in britain frequently featured placards with the names of a dozen or so people killed in the U.K. in the same circumstances as george floyd. you making out that BLM’s EU protests are ignorant of ‘local history’ is funny. the only one sticking his head in the sand to local, particular and material realities is you. you seem to prefer it doesn’t exist. ‘we’ll all get along much better as soon as we can forget race’, says the white guy who thinks it’s negligible that germany genocided africans only a century ago. they all have nice jobs as train conductors and shoe smiths now! cant we forget about it!
Re; postcolonial dynamics in former colonial countries. That may be relevant to BLM in the USA as it is a postcolonial country, but not elsewhere. The movement and debates about colonial legacies & slavery is an entirely western dynamic among western populations with a migratory background and the rest of society in western countries. In the US and places like Brazil it's immediate history, though outside those places you'll find very few voices in any former colonial country who would still press others to 'reckon with their colonial past'. To decolonised countries and peoples independence was victory and the most important step to a closing of that chapter. Yes, economic, governmental, multinational pressures still had significant control and influence in many post-colonial states and defined their (immediate) future. But socially, in general, you'll be hard pressed to find Ghanaians, Kenyans, Congolese or anyone else still waiting for or being interested in profuse apologies and redress from western countries. Perhaps here and there among the very few who remain that actually lived the more harsh realities of colonialism or wars of independence, but the victim projection doesn't appeal even to them. A Somali born in the past forty or fifty years isn't much interested in what the British or Italian governments have to say about colonialism in 2021.
The fear and propaganda of race mixing and miscegenation wasn't solely about the colonial populations. 95%+ of Europeans had no interaction with colonial subjects whatsoever. Ideas of ethnic/racial purity were close enough that many families would've considered it problematic for a spaniard to marry an italian, or for a frenchman to fall in love with a german. Since the rise of nationalism and even before, symbolisms and regional cultural differentiation + exclusion was common practice among all European populations, save perhaps for the powerful aristocratic families, though they had their own particular cross-border culture & society. Again, this is not to say 'there was no racism', but that the social dynamic of ethnic/cultural exclusion was a central part of identity formation (and often still is by the way). Racism and racial exclusion is just a cherry on top, and an even easier belief to hold if the subject of your racist ideas is 1000s of kms away. An interesting aside is that in most colonising empires which had strong aristocratic governance, colonial subjects part of local elites were treated very well & given more land & subjects than they had before the colonisers came, which is generally how colonies were controlled. They were to an extent part of the aristocrat in-group.
Now as for dynamics in Europe. Yeah, the 50s and 60s were racist and exclusionary in many ways and there's plenty examples. But as I've stated before, Europe already went through/was going through the moral evolution that deemed colonialism and slavery wrong. A more backwards Europe would've never even considered the invitation of gastarbeiter, or offering decolonised subjects the choice to travel to the former imperial heartland and start a new life there. The government was not of entirely ill intent. That segregation did happen in places was I believe primarily both an economic consequence and due to social stigmatisation. Economic because migration was specifically promoted for low-skill work that needed no education. And even if the person who entered was educated, it's unlikely his/her credentials would be accepted here (and often that's justified, but there's a consequence). As a result almost all migrant populations are low-income households and concentrated in the same low cost urban areas. Then there was social stigmatisation; in many cases by both native populations and the migrants themselves. This is esp. visible in Belgium where in urban areas there's an extreme contrast between white neighbourhoods and immigrant neighbourhoods. Where migrants settled in, white populations left. But mixing proved problematic on both ends as well - it's a notorious stereotype that the daughters of migrant families will provoke the ire and wrath of their parents if they date or marry with natives, the other way around white families would disapprove of foreign boyfriends/girlfriends. The controlling attitude towards daughters is still very prevalent, by the way.
So you end up with a migrant population where the parents worked low income jobs, were themselves uneducated and often from conservative rural backgrounds, who settled in low-cost housing with other migrants. Interaction with natives was superficial, both due to economic circumstance and purposefully because of mutual social segregation. It's an understatement to say the children of these people will be underprivileged. They grow up in poorer neighbourhoods that might be entirely made up of migrant populations & are not stimulated to go through the western education system. This causes a host of issues, and the poverty also breeds crime. To make matters worse: poor, criminal areas get bad reputations & more policing. And in this case it's an area made up of mostly migrants.
It would've taken conscious policy efforts to avoid all this from happening in the first place. And now there's several movements being born that focus almost exclusively on individual or systematic racism as a primary cause. The complexity along multiple angles evaporates, and the debate is to most people reduced entirely to identity and our superficial judgments of one another. We talk only about how skin colour is a determinant for social class. How a different last name makes getting a job harder. That police only seem to be active in migrant neighbourhoods and excessively arrest migrants. We'll tear down statues and symbols lining society that may be reminiscent of colonial times. NGOs that 'counter racism' are made every second. On the other hand the far right will tell you the black/middle eastern/north african populations figure more strongly in crime statistics. That 'their neighbourhoods' are criminal. That none of them seem to be going to university. That they can't speak the language well. That they're tearing down culturally important symbols and attacking 'our' society.
The worst part is that it is charged more by media and events coming from the USA, where there are far deeper lines of racial conflict still. That's where cities were literally designed to isolate black populations for example, and where there's a local history of slavery, which you still don't recognise as a differential. It's like every other day there's a new book or netflix series aimed at the woke among us, or a video of the usual extremely excessive police violence of invariably a white person against some poor black guy. It's transposed into the debate here, the terms of division are imported, the analytical lenses developed in the US contexts are adopted too.
What you end up with is a shit-show and a cycle of social conflict that I really don't see as solveable. Not in the least because of underlying systemic causes & pressures, but also because the public debate at large misidentifies the issues in preference of shit-slinging over superficial identifiers. Tell me again though how this will all lead to redress and equal opportunity. The 0.1% of supporters that may have a holistic approach and which you cling to are not at all the ones really shaping this whole debate/conflict.
