George Floyd might not have been the best guy, that doesn’t excuse what happened to him, or what happens to many persons from his community, and far too often. The police that harmed him felt justified in what they were doing, it was not a mistake, it’s likely a behaviour they’ve displayed before. If it’s not a behaviour they would have used consistently, regardless of who they were dealing with, black or white, then it’s racism, since they differentiated, i.e. they modified their act based on the colour of Mr Floyd. If people get angry about that, then their anger is justified, but the reaction they choose, their actions in response, is that reasonable? Some say no, the looting and smashing is unreasonable. If we look at the issues in a micro sense, it seems intuitive to say the one thing does not justify the other, but if we look at the macro picture of race inequality in the US over a period of time, in financial terms, in incarceration numbers, in educational chances, in inherited wealth, in terms of the economy, then smashing the system that continues the oppression of an earlier part of history, one that has never been repaired sufficiently, becomes much more understandable. The descendants of freed slaves inherited the poverty of those slaves, because, when freed, the slaves had nothing, the land owners kept the land and the paid skilled and unskilled white labour kept the jobs. The descendants of those white people who owned the economy to various degrees inherited that economy to the larger extent, and this is not ancient history, the last American person who had been a slave died in the late 1930s, so only a few generations ago.
There’s a lot on FB at the mo about racism, I thought I might be brave enough to weigh in on it too, as some of the commentary is a little confusing, and some of it is unmentionably dumb, and actually racist. Racism is (here comes the argument, let’s all try to stay calm) where a person from a differing ethnic background is treated unfairly because of that difference. What it is not is the manifest resistance, or ideological opposition, to a culture or set of cultural practices that are unacceptable to a majority of the people. So not liking the way a person acts because of their culture, if it is abhorrent to you, is not racism. That’s not to say a majority is always correct, or moral, or reasonable; many majorities have been wrong historically (Adolf Hitler was elected with a strong majority in the 30s, I don’t think there’s an argument for moral correctness to be made there). I am ideologically opposed to the teachings of all the major religions that I am aware of, mainly because they quite obviously come from a time of great human ignorance, and I got there by reading their books (before anyone might accuse me of being unreasonable, or uninformed). That does not mean that I am opposed to brown, black, white, or even yellow peoples, I couldn’t give a fig what colour anyone is, in truth we’re all mongrels in the UK anyway (Anglo-Saxon, Viking, Roman, Celtic, Pict, Visigoth, Frank), I prefer to think that you are what you do. I don’t believe that people can be separated from their manifest acts, so if you act as your preacher man says you should, then I think you’re a maybe a moron that should read about the enlightenment instead and figure out for yourself who you are and how you’re supposed to conduct yourself. The Bible is a large print crayon children’s colouring book in comparison to the works of John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, Immanuel Kant, or Friedrich Nietzsche, but we can go back a lot further to find works that predate the ignorance of the 1st century. Mozi, an ancient Chinese philosopher, created Mohism, a series of ethical teachings, 800 years before Emperor Constantine decided the Roman empire should adhere to the teachings of a minor Middle Eastern cult named Christianity; which was a slave religion full of guilt, self loathing, self punishment, stoicism, and miserablism, one that preached the opposite (and still does) of the self actualisation and progress. The modern church tries to be friendly, warm, accepting, wise, but we should not forget the sixteen centuries of its power that preceded this one, when in it’s prominence, it oppressed and persecuted homosexuals, women that wished to read and think, and anyone that wished to do science. And Christianity is not alone in the dock here, the other descendants of Abraham are no different, positioning themselves in modernity as woolly and nice, while ignoring their own maladies, even racism at times.
Do we pull down statues, attempt to erase history? Certainly not, the people who think they are acting for the good of all peoples by doing so are a small mob, they haven’t polled the outcome of their actions, they haven’t the popular support for this. I get their anger, I get that it’s directed towards an historical injustice that must be repaired in some way, but battles must be picked, it can’t all change at once and the action by some will not change others in its wider appeal, in fact it might have the opposite effect. The occupy movement achieved nothing because it was too tame, the Panama papers, the cash for peerages, the MPs expenses scandals, all went nowhere because the media kept us from getting upset enough through distraction, Prince Andrew gave a terrible account of himself on TV and few thought it was more than funny, Epstein managed to kill himself while on suicide watch just at the perfect moment when the cameras stopped working (which he wouldn’t have known) and the guards weren’t there, and we bought it, that this guy who had potentially a network of very powerful people he could have exposed just topped himself instead of making a deal? Up to a certain point they had us all onboard, but too far and the centre backs off, that’s democracy, it’s a slow moving thing and it won’t get there via this movement because they’ve gone too far now. Had they stuck to riots we might have changed, but they handed the media, and the system they want to change, the legitimate right to criticise; a mistake MLK, Mandela, or Gandhi never made…
Nothing will now come of GFs death….
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