Streets protests in the USA
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An ever present danger is the possibility of infiltration of these protests.
Just read that France has a law banning those annoying, divisive and unscientific questionnaires about “ethnic origin” that we are always been asked to fill in (but which I never do). In fact it is Party policy not to answer such questions on the Census except by “human”.
In France it is:
”forbidden to collect or to treat data of a personal nature that reveals directly or indirectly the racial or ethnic origin, the political, philosophical or religious opinions or union membership of people, or which concern their health or sexual life.”
Pity such a law doesn’t exist here too. There is only one working class and only one human species.
True. I wrote “human” too, and immediately got rejected for jobs.
Rough, when needing a wage to live!
How’d you do?
The same with having to put a sexual category. Ticking “prefer not to say” sounds really dubious. How about “immaculately pure”?
Often i have heard that socialists are colour-blind but is that a virtue?
Should we not be aware of racism and its pervasive influences such as “hidden” institutional racism rather than blatant prejudice. How can it be detected unless by collating statistics? By asking questions. How do we know whether US police have been targeting minorities and they are being singled out disproportionately to their numbers other than anecdotal evidence, if race details isn’t insisted upon.
Regards ALB’s post on France, isn’t it important particularly during this pandemic that we know about its affect on BAME whether it is physiological or because of their socio-economic status. Many states in the US declined, at first, to produce infection and mortality rates based on ethnic origin to disguise which communities were more vulnerable yet neglected.
For example https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-53065306
We got an annual employee survey and i regularly put my racial/ethnic origin as Native North American and urged others to do the same for it meant if 5% of employees were, the employer had to devise a human resources policy for such. I wanted life for management to be more difficult.
I’m assuming the French new law permits anonymous collection of data such as opinion polls on voting intentions, and wider political and social beliefs. I’m guessing its aimed at tracking individuals – and i bet its related to stuff like Google profiles built from from my search patterns which are then traded commercially. But i’m guessing as i said
Not heard it reported here, but U.S. National Public Radio says two black men have been found hanging from trees in California. Officially it’s suicide, but who hangs himself outdoors?
The French law is not new. It has always been French government policy not to distinguish French citizens by so-called race. For them these are all French full stop just like for us all humans are humans full stop or all workers are workers.
The whole concept of “ethnic origin” (“ethnic” is just a less contentious word for “racial”) is absurd and politically motivated. In apartheid South Africa everybody was “racially” classified. Not a good idea.
In SA too you could be racially demoted or promoted.
The book Black Beauty was banned.
Japanese were “whites” but Chinese were “coloureds.”
Not all football fans are right wing hooligans. These aren’t.
St Pauli have a similar reputation. Here.
Did a quick check
France sees itself as the promoter of the universal and colorblind philosophy that was supposed to protect us from racial tensions. French people are raised to believe that there is only one race: The human race. Race is understood as biological, so mentioning it is to assert that there are hierarchies between human beings.
Due to a law dating from 1872, the French Republic prohibits performing census by making distinction between its citizens regarding their race or their beliefs…
Article 1 of the French constitution (1958) says that “France shall be an indivisible, secular, democratic and social republic. It shall ensure the equality of all citizens before the law, without distinction of origin, race or religion. It shall respect all beliefs.” Delvainquière (2007, 20) interprets this as an affirmation that “France does not recognise minorities, whether they be ethnic, religious, linguistic or other. Under French law, all citizens have equal rights, and the law is not intended to accord specific rights to given “groups” defined by their community of origin, culture, beliefs, language or ethnicity.”…there exists no French version of affirmative action based on racial or ethnic characteristics” . Further, even where there are policies that could be considered positive action measures targeting immigrants or minorities (including, for example, the designation of several spots at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques for students from particularly disadvantaged school districts), the initiatives are framed in terms of “merit” not on the basis of any socially relevant group characteristic. French law also prohibits the collection of data on race or ethnic origin this would render it difficult to implement or effectively monitor an affirmative action policy.
https://www.queensu.ca/mcp/immigrant-minorities/evidence/france
During his 2012 presidential campaign, François Hollande promised to remove the word race from the constitution. From his point of view, race does not exist and, therefore, should not be mentioned in any official text…a commission of lawmakers working on the revision of the constitution unanimously agreed to remove the word from the founding text of our republic. On Thursday, the alteration was unanimously adopted by the National Assembly. Former prime minister Manuel Valls, now a National Assembly deputy affiliated with President Emmanuel Macron’s party, promptly said he was “proud to vote with emotion for the removal of the word race from our Constitution.”
However, we don’t have ethnic statistics in the national census, but the law allows researchers and statisticians to collect such data for the purpose of studies as long as the subjects remain anonymous.
“I came to understand race as not just a biological difference but as a social construct producing social effects. Of course, blacks, Arabs, whites, Asians, Roma — we all belong to the human race. But history has created racial categories that still have an impact on the lives of those who descend from people who were enslaved and colonized…But the reality of the country of enlightenment is different from the claimed ideal…Racism is not addressed in a structural way in France. And that is because race is not addressed as something tangible. How can a country seriously fight racism, if race is not handled even as a fictional category? If race does not exist, racists do, and they act based on the belief of the existence of categories. So getting rid of the word will not work as a magic trick that would suddenly make racism disappear. Making the word race taboo will not change anything in the lives of people who are affected by racism. It will deprive scholars and activists of a powerful tool to study the implications of racism. And it may lead to the criminalization of those who dare use that word; attempting to classify someone by race can be grounds for a lawsuit. Denying the existence of race means denying the reality of racial discrimination…”
Some organizations, such as the Representative Council of Black Associations of France (French: Conseil représentatif des associations noires de France, CRAN), have argued in favour of the introduction of data collection on minority groups…
…However, that law does not concern surveys and polls, which are free to ask those questions if they wish. The law also allows for an exception for public institutions such as the INED or the INSEE whose job it is to collect data on demographics, social trends and other related subjects,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_France
It is not simply all black and white (pun intended)
Yes France seems to have the right idea, on paper and of course what they are saying is that the only identity politics that is acceptable is French identity.
It has also been suggested that we remove the word “race” from our constitution for the same (correct) reasons that some want to remove it from the French constitution. I suspect though that in 1900 the word meant more like “nation” than “race” in its later meaning. In fact isn’t it taken from the statutes of the First International that were drawn up in 1864 when “race” would have meant “nation” even more?
Walter Scott and writers of his time use the word race as we do, the human race.
Under the modern flag of PC, people are compartmentalising each other as never before.
Children as young as four are being taught “LGBT-whatever”, where classifications of individuals are neatly being made. Children evincing “gender-unhappiness” are being operated on, so that capitalist society as in fact the root of early misery and neurosis is not, of course, questioned instead. (The same children will continue, as we all do, to change in character and desires as they grow – but will have had impulsive surgery in the meantime!)… Their elders and parents foist their sexual and gender obsessions on children who should just be being children.
We compartmentalize more than ever and misuse the word “race” more than ever. Even Serbs and Croats, French and Germans, are different “races.” We talk of “mixed race” relationships and “mixed race” schools; “multiracial” societies, etc. All of this is, in fact, racism. Just as the rest is sexism (obsession).
The obsessive need to separate people into racist and sexist compartments, and hence to foist this compartmentalisation on the children too, as soon as we can.
No wonder a black student I knew wouldn’t attend an SPGB meeting unless I could assure her the speaker would be black!
No wonder a student was expelled from class for saying there are only two sexes!
Reply doesn’t work atm?
Matt thanks for that link.
Two people on Facebook, bitching me for posting this, saying it was the US, and doesn’t happen here, I shouldn’t tarnish police here……words of the ilk. In reply I haven’t heard from them? Probably undercover cops? I blocked them.
U.K. police infiltrated animal rights groups. We know this because an activist had a relationship at the time, who she discovered was a policeman.
She made a complaint.US cops infiltrated Occupy demonstrations…..which is news to me, they seem to have disappeared?
Nothing Is Certain But Death, Taxes, And Police Infiltration Of US Protests
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