White Privilege?
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The term BAME can be insulting and should be retired from use, a survey of UK sporting organisations has found.
BAME, which stands for Black Asian and Minority Ethnic, has become a default phrase to describe any non-white person or group. But the term “places recognition on some communities whilst ignoring others entirely” and does not allow for “ethnic and cultural complexities”
The findings come just days after the chair of the Football Association, Greg Clarke, was forced to resign over his use of the term “coloured people” during a parliamentary committee meeting.
Arun Kang, the chief executive of Sporting Equals, said “Gone are the days where we can use umbrella terminology to hide under-representation and a lack of effort to engage with varied ethnic communities. Racism cannot have a one-size-fits-all approach.”
Oh dear, History repeating itself.
There was a term used NESB (Non English Speaking Backgrounds) to describe ethnicity according to those who do not speak English as their first language.
Some called this out: what about those who have a minority culture: but their fist language is English?
So CALD (Culturally And Linguistically Diverse) superseded it.
The problem with considering cultural-gender minority in some intersectional studies, is that your culture is in some way is a vulnerability.
Our culture, our gender, our language, our sexuality, our class, our diverse ability is not a position of weakness: it is our strength.
It does not divide us- it makes our conversations with one another so more great.
One size fit all is usually based on mono studies speaking on behalf of others- nominal at best.
I listened to this programme on bbc radio 4 last week as I was driving. The one called Tom questions the usefulness of the concept of “white privilege” in the same sort of way as we would and also makes some other good points against the proposition under discussion:
If you are living in a Ghetto what kind of privilege do you have ? I have seen thousands of white peoples living in Ghettos and poor neighborhood and they do not have any privileges. The ones living in Beverly Hills and Encino they do have white privileges, and there are also blacks peoples who are part of the USA ruling elite and they are living in the same type of neighborhood. The only peoples with privileges in this society is the capitalist class, workers do not have any type of privileges, well, they have one, which is to sell their labour force to survive. It is similar to the so called human rights, how can you have right in a society where a minority group of human beings own everything and the rest own nothing ? It is just a pure legal illusion. Donald Trump was able to obtain 71 millions of votes based on the same shit, and that white peoples have been discriminated and left out from the society, but he never went deeply to the root of the problem which is capitalism
Michael Jackson attorney who is a black man was driving a Rolls Royce in Beverly Hills and he was stopped by the police because they thought that the was driving a stolen car, and he made millions of dollars representing rich peoples, and if you are driving a Rolls Royce in a poor neighborhood or in a Ghettos the police might think that you are a drug dealer even if you are a white man, or a black man. When you are living in the Ghetto you are a gangster, and when you comeback in a coffin from a capitalist war you have the privilege to be called a hero, or a national pride. The brother of Donald Trump died and he was treated like a hero in the White House, and many veterans ( white, black, latino, and asian ) who died from Covid 19, and they were not treated as hero, they were sent immediately to the cemetery without any heroic ceremonies, they did not have any privileges
Obama said part of the reason 73 million Americans voted to re-elect Donald Trump in the election was because of messaging from Republicans that the country, particularly white men, are under attack.
“What’s always interesting to me is the degree to which you’ve seen created in Republican politics the sense that white males are victims,” Obama said. “They are the ones who are under attack – which obviously doesn’t jive with both history and data and economics. But that’s a sincere belief, that’s been internalized, that’s a story that’s being told and how you unwind that is going to be not something that is done right away.”
Obama: Republicans portraying white men as ‘victims’ helped Trump win votes | US news | The Guardian
Several years ago there was a man who filed a lawsuit in court and the pleading says that it was reverse discrimination, he was being discriminated because he was a white man
https://employment.findlaw.com/employment-discrimination/reverse-discrimination.html,
Debate resurfaces in dispute with Tory MPs and the child charity Barnardos
Barnardo’s hits back at Tory MPs upset by talk of ‘white privilege’ | Race | The Guardian
My first reaction on reading this was to look up how much Barnados chief executive is paid. Three years ago in 2017 it was £180,000. What’s that? Charity boss privilege?
Tsk tsk, are we about to go down the rabbit holes of pay differentials and if they are justified. Is his pay really relevant to the topic?
I just had posted on Scottish blog the Marx quote
“In proportion as capital accumulates, the lot of the labourer, BE HIS PAYMENT HIGH OR LOW, must grow worse.”
It’s all very well being woke but if I was a non-white raking in £180,000 or more a year (nobody’s labour power is worth that — he must be getting a share of surplus value) I wouldn’t go on about whites being privileged.
There is an intriguing mention in today’s Times in an article about a famous building there that collapsed the other day:
“Majid’s younger brother Bargash succeeded him in Zanzibar and built the Palace of Wonders for himself in 1883, ten years after he issued the decree that finally ended the African slave trade”
So the slave trade in East Africa did not end till 1873. I thought I’d check and found this:
https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/amp.dw.com/en/east-africas-forgotten-slave-trade/a-50126759
The wokies don’t say much about this, perhaps because they are afraid of being accused of “islamophobia”.
Slavery persisted legally in Mauritania until 1981, and keeping a slave was not declared a crime until 2007.
It is mostly based on colour, lighter-skinned Berber Moors being the slave-masters and the darker-skinned sub-Saharan Africans, the slaves. For centuries, Arabic-speaking Moors raided African villages, resulting in a rigid caste system that still exists to this day, with darker-skinned inhabitants beholden to their lighter-skinned “masters”.
In neighboring Mali slavery became a crime against humanity in the constitution only in 1960, but it remains deeply ingrained in the culture. For centuries, descent-based slavery – where slavery is passed down through the bloodline – has resulted in “black Tamasheq” (the Tuareg’s language) families in Mali’s north being used as slaves by nomadic Tuareg communities. Generations of children have been considered the property of the Tuaregs from birth making it difficult for anti-slavery groups to launch criminal prosecutions.
Basil Davidson, an accepted scholar of African history, in his book ‘The African Slave Trade’ explained, “The notion that Europe altogether imposed the slave trade on Africa is without any foundation in history…Those Africans who were involved in the trade were seldom the helpless victims of a commerce they did not understand: On the contrary, they responded to its challenge. They exploited its opportunities.”
Slave trading for export only ended in West Africa after slavery ended in the Spanish colonies of Brazil and Cuba in 1880. African rulers and traders there would have happily continued to sell humans for as long as there was demand for them.
In the Ghana region, the Asante accumulated their great wealth by abducting, capturing, and kidnapping Africans and selling them as slaves.
In 2000 officials from Benin publicised President Mathieu Kerekou’s apology for his country’s role in “selling fellow Africans by the millions to white slave traders…We cry for forgiveness and reconciliation,” said Luc Gnacadja, Benin’s minister of environment and housing.
Cyrille Oguin, Benin’s ambassador to the United States, acknowledged: “We share in the responsibility for this terrible human tragedy.”
The president of Senegal, Abdoulaye Wade, who is himself the descendant of generations of slave-owning and slave-trading African kings, urged Europeans, Americans, and Africans to acknowledge publicly and teach openly about their shared responsibility for the Atlantic slave trade.
Our African-themed Socialist Banner blog has many posts on the continent’s slave past, the above is only an example of them.
The head of the Runnymede Trust, a race equality thinktank, Halima Begum, has accused the government of pursuing a divisive “white nationalist” agenda, prioritising the white working class at the expense of ethnic minorities in an attempt to win votes.
“I think the government’s long-term plan is to work up white nationalism for the next elections,” said Begum. “What we should be saying is that working-class black and white communities have been left behind, because they’ve seen industries demolished in the north of this country. We haven’t seen the economies built back, we haven’t seen investment in our education system for years so that our black, white and Asian working-class children will thrive.
What I see instead is the Conservatives pushing through [a narrative of] a white working class that’s been left behind, which by the way is where Trump was at about six years ago.”“If you have white liberals pushing a white nationalist agenda, it’s very easy to challenge for other white liberals who don’t agree,” said Begum. “But if you can actually put in more black and minority leaders pushing hard on white nationalism, [it’s] much harder to challenge … It’s really important that we understand why these leaders are appointed. It is not to promote inclusiveness, it is actually to promote divisions.”
She said: “There’s nothing wrong with the values of the Conservative party, which is to create more wealth … What they don’t see is that when they talk about the level playing field, they think the level playing field is not level for white people. What they don’t see is that the playing field is not level for black people, it hasn’t been for years … What I’d like them to think about is a formula that brings black working-class people with them as well and then I think if they did win [the election] good on them, they’re actually taking the whole voter base with them.”
Begum said that while white working-class communities were disadvantaged, “they are not discriminated against because of the colour of their skin and that is what we mean by structural racism”.
“She said: “There’s nothing wrong with the values of the Conservative party, which is to create more wealth … ”
Ho-hum, that shows the limits of her politics. As if a level playing field would ever be reached, for black, white or anywhere in between, by any party creating more wealth, assuming they were capable of that.
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