Hello, loyal readers!
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So why bother writing it?
My friend Emma Burnell has a fabulous newsletter called “Hard Thinking on the Soft Left” which is dedicated to tackling the problems facing the UK Labour Party – chiefly, how to get bloody elected. It’s very good. Even though she’s going on a hiatus, I encourage you to subscribe.
I mention Emma’s newsletter for two reasons: 1. I have been wanting to give her credit for the “What I’m up to…” section of this newsletter, which I realized a few weeks ago that I unconsciously cribbed from her. 2. She said something in her latest newsletter, which landed in my inbox this morning, that resonated with me. “I enjoy the space it gives me to work through a longer argument than I might do in an opinion column and be a bit more nuanced,” she wrote. I realized that’s why I enjoy writing this newsletter every week.
I hope that is what I accomplished this week. The issue I am talking about is one of deep complexity. It is also one of high emotions because it deals with identities, and as I have previously discussed, when talking about the politics of identities (as opposed to identity politics), emotions understandably run high. No decent person thinks they are a racist (well, unless they read a book by Robin DiAngelo, but we’ll get to that) so of course no decent person wants to be called racist. On the other hand, no person who has encountered racism wants to have that experience denied – and those people and those experiences are far more common than many of us white folks seem willing to acknowledge.
The first section of this week’s newsletter deals with racism in the UK. The second deals with racism in the US. Both are about grappling with complicated histories and about what people living in 2021 should and should not feel ashamed about. I don’t pretend I have addressed every issue affecting people of color in either country. But I hope I open a conversation. I have a few right-wing readers, and for them, this may be the first time they’re being presented with this point of view in anything beyond a soundbite. I hope they’ll engage with an open mind and open heart.
And I hope my leftwing readers will realize that soundbites and slogans are not enough. That reducing people down to caricatures is counterproductive. That there is humanity in even those you disagree with.
A note before we begin: I realize that the term “Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic” or “BME” or “BAME” are being retired. However, I have not seen what we are using in place of this term, so I have continued to employ it.
Right. Here we go.
On British racism…
For those of you who don’t know, either because you’re American or you’re not a football fan, the Euros ended on Sunday. England came a hair away from winning its first major international title since 1966. There is so much to be proud of, even if our boys didn’t quite bring football home. I am so glad that I – a casual football fan at best – tuned in to watch. I am disheartened, though, by what I witnessed afterward.
And that is what this week’s newsletter is about. Racism. Specifically, racism in the UK.
The tournament began with England players taking a knee, an act which Home Secretary Priti Patel dismissed as “gesture politics.” She even appeared to tacitly approve booing players who did take a knee. Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, was a little more circumspect, saying he “disapproves” booing England players days after his spokesperson said it was “people’s right to peacefully protest – in this case, England’s footballers.” Of course, the Prime Minister has his own sordid history with racist remarks, including calling Black people “piccaninnies” with “watermelon smiles.” So, expectations are low with him.
Of course, as we all now know, the tournament ended in heartbreak for England. This is not only because of the loss (in penalties, to add insult to injury). Rather, the abhorrent acts of racism and xenophobia, including attacking Italian supporters at Wembley, where the final was played, and against Black England players on social media, was a blight on an otherwise brilliant performance by the Three Lions. It is something the nation should rightly be ashamed of.
Like here in the USA, the UK has been having a “racial reckoning” of its own since the murder of George Floyd last year. Famously, a statue of a slaver was thrown into Bristol Bay. This is not exactly a new debate, though. Ever since the Brexit referendum in 2016 – and before, even, as we’ll see – racism in the UK has been a hotly contested topic. That debate has hit a boiling point this week, as the abuse witnessed against Marcus Rashford, Bukayo Saka, and Jadon Sancho has been impossible to ignore.
Another story caught my attention this week too, one that hasn’t gotten as much attention as the overt abuse experienced by the footballers. Writing for The Independent, the actor Ricardo P Lloyd explained why he was leaving the UK for the US: “As a young, Black actor in Britain, I am nothing more than a drug fiend or a gangbanger,” Lloyd writes. “In the US, I hope and expect to be seen as something more.”
Lloyd is not the first Black British actor to express this frustration. He quotes the actress and former Game of Thrones star Nathalie Emmanuel in his piece, but actors from David Oyelowo to Thandie Newton have lamented the lack of roles for Black actors in the UK. Like Oyelowo and Newton, Ricardo P Lloyd thinks he’ll have a better chance in the United States, a fact which may surprise many Americans and even many Brits, who themselves think their society is far more advanced than that of their American cousins.
The truth is, though, Britain has a long way to come on race relations, and that racism is still very much a reality in so many aspects of British life. It is not just the overt, nasty, hateful racism that we saw directed at the England players and which is widely and rightly condemned by people around the country and across the political spectrum. It is also endemic to the nation, found throughout its institutions and stretching back through its history. Denying this reality is not only no longer possible, but also does nothing to root out the systemic racism holding back so many Black and Minority Ethnic British people.
To be clear, I am not saying “Britain is a racist country” or that “the British are racist.” I find broad statements like that to be unhelpful, as they immediately put people on the defensive. I am not here to call you a racist. I don’t know you, and if I do know you, I wouldn’t be friends with you if I thought you were racist. So, there’s that.
I also think it is helpful to explain what I mean by “racism.” One of the biggest problems those of us on the left have when we talk about “systemic racism” is that we are using an overly academic definition of the word “racism.” To most people, “racism” means prejudice or hate towards another race. Colloquially, that is how racism is understood.
“Systemic racism” and “institutional racism,” however, are more abstract terms. They do not necessarily mean that the people who populate those systems or institutions are consciously racist. Rather, these terms are meant to reflect policies and patterns of discrimination across systems and across institutions, intended or unintended. They may include policies which appear race-neutral on the surface but have a disparate impact on one or more racial or ethnic groups.
I am going to be talking a lot more about systemic and institutional racism than I am racism as it is widely understood. That’s because – as the past week has shown – I think the vast majority of British people condemn the sort of overt, hateful racism that manifests itself in slurs and violence against BME people. The journalist Hannah al-Othman (one of my favorite people on Twitter) went to the Marcus Rashford mural in Manchester after it had been cruelly defaced earlier this week. What she found shows, I think, the true spirit of the British people:
This outpouring of love and support – even the Sun had the backs of the England players! – has filled me with hope and pride in the country that isn’t mine but that I claim anyway. The British people are vastly kind and fair-minded, something I have long known from firsthand experience. This is the England I know and love.
This whole incident has brought to mind a conversation I had several years ago. Shortly after the 2016 US general election, I was sat at a pub in Walthamstow with two Black sisters, immigrants from the Ivory Coast. We had met a few days before at the same pub, so there was a familiarity between us that comes when strangers become acquaintances become drinking buddies. Given the circumstances – Donald Trump had just been elected the week before, and here we were, two Black women and a white man win gin-soaked brains – the topic of race came up.
I don’t remember who brought it up or how we got on the subject, but I remember the sisters having a very heated disagreement over whether the UK is a racist country. No, one maintained, it absolutely is not. There is a lot of opportunity, and most people are welcoming and inviting. It is, the other one insisted; look at Brexit and the rhetoric of Tommy Robinson and Nigel Farage and the deportations of migrants.
What did I think, they asked? I told them from my vantagepoint as a white American, the answer was somewhere in the middle. We, three people from abroad, were sat in the middle of one of the most diverse boroughs of one of the most diverse cities on the planet. Most British people, I contended, would celebrate that. They relish diversity. They are open-minded and big-hearted. They believe strongly in fair play and treating people with respect. They are decent, honest, and have a strong desire to help neighbors and strangers alike. That is the Britain I know.
There is another side to Britain, though, one I would write about just months later. “Racism and classism killed the residents of Grenfell Tower,” I wrote the day after a fire tore through the tower block. Though council housing hosting a diverse working-class and poor population, Grenfell Tower was located in one of the whitest and poshest parts of London. You could not separate race and class from the discourse:
…studies have shown that whilst 20% of white people are low income, this number increases for ethnic minorities. Across the board, BME people are twice as likely to be low income than white people.
Kensington and Chelsea is 71% white. It has a higher proportion of high earners than anywhere else in the country. More people work in banking there than anywhere else in Britain, whilst fewer people work in retail than anywhere else. The poor and BME community in Kensington and Chelsea, including those in Grenfell Tower, simply aren't the core constituency of the local council and, evidence suggests, KCTMO - who should have been putting their interest above everyone else's but clearly were not.
I’ve been thinking a lot about those two sisters, and about the article I wrote about Grenfell, since Sunday. Over the past year, I have seen on social media and amongst my British friends a discussion about whether the Black Lives Matter movement has any place in British political life. The most common opposition to it I have personally seen is that BLM is an imported movement, a product of American cultural imperialism. It has no relevance to the UK because the UK does not have the same history of systemic discrimination that the US has, and Black people in the UK are treated much better than Black people in the US.
There’s a kernel of truth here. It is true that the UK proper never had Jim Crow or de jure segregation. There was no apartheid in England. But as anyone who is honest about British history will tell you, that is only part of the story. Sure, the British Empire outlawed slavery before the US, but the operative phrase here isn’t “outlawed slavery;” it’s “British Empire.” Britain was just as brutal and authoritarian and racist as the United States ever was. The only difference is they committed their atrocities abroad.
Yet because of this, many on the modern British right want to pretend that there is no institutional or structural racism within the United Kingdom itself. That there is no history of racial oppression. That Enoch Powell and his “Rivers of Blood” speech was either an aberration or, as one right-wing acquaintance once argued, that he was talking about culture and was on the whole right about that.
This is, if I may be blunt, complete and utter bollocks.
It is not lost on me that this latest episode of British racism is happening ten years on from the killing of Mark Duggan, a 29-year-old Black man was shot by Metropolitan Police in Tottenham, North London. Following Duggan’s killing, which many felt was unjust and an example of institutional racism within the police department, the country was convulsed in the worst riots in modern history.
Ever since, the killing of Duggan has been pointed to by activists as proof of institutional racism within the British police. In 2014, an inquiry ruled that the killing was lawful even though Duggan was unarmed when shot. Last year, a review of the evidence by a human rights group cast doubt on the official report, calling into question whether officers truly saw Duggan with a weapon or whether he disposed of it before confronted on the street.
It is easy to dismiss Duggan as an isolated incident from a decade ago. But it was a pivotal moment in modern British history, not just because of the riots but because it awakened interest in how the police treat Black and Asian citizens. Since last summer, a series of startling statistics have come to light to show the problem goes deeper than many in Britain care to admit.
According to the BBC, Metropolitan Police are four times more likely to use force against Black British people than white British people. Last year, ABC news reported that Black people were seven times more likely to be targeted under “stop-and-search” than white people are. The Guardian found that despite making up only 3% of the population, Black British people account for 8% of deaths in police custody. More than a quarter of the prison population is Black or minority ethnic, and Black men are 26% more likely to be remanded into custody according to the Prison Reform Trust.
It is not just in policing that Black and Minority Ethnic people experience discrimination. I mentioned in my article on the Grenfell tragedy, “BME people are twice as likely to be low income than white people.” Last year, the Social Metrics Commission “found that nearly half of Black African Caribbean households were in poverty, compared with just under one in five white families, while BAME families as a whole were between two and three times as likely to be in persistent poverty than white households” according to The Guardian. A 2019 study found that BAME people had to send 80% more applications to get a job.
A 2019 study found that 71% of BME people reported experiencing discrimination. Kick It Out, a charity fighting racism in sport, found that in the 2017-18 season, racist abuse in football rose 43%, a figure that feels germane given the impetus of this newsletter is racism directed at football players. Even more startling, though, is that 95% of Black British schoolchildren have “witnessed racist language” according to the YMCA’s Young and Black report, issued at the end of last year.
Clearly, there is work to be done.
This Tory government does not think so, though. A government report released earlier this year found no institutional or systemic racism in the United Kingdom. If, after all the evidence I have just presented, that sounds too good to be true, that is because it is, in fact, too good to be true. Writing for The Guardian – who yes, I realize, I am relying on for a lot of my data in this piece, but is one of the best sources for reporting on racism in the UK – Aditya Chakrabortty explained some of the reports many, many, many shortcomings:
Some indication of its shoddiness comes from the number of experts cited in the report who are now rushing away from it. The “stakeholders” who deny any stake; the providers of supposedly bespoke work who did no such thing; the professors quoted who feel misused, from leading public health expert Michael Marmot to Oxford psychiatry professor Kamaldeep Bhui, who damns the reportas “really poor scholarship”. And those commission members who now claim they don’t recognise the report published in their name.
That is damning. What is even more damning is a statement from one of the reports own commissioners, Kunle Olulode of the charity Voice4Change England. “The report does not give enough to show its understanding of institutional or structural discrimination,” Olulode told The Observer, claiming that “…evidence in sections, that assertive conclusions are based on, is selective.” Again, this is from someone who worked on the report. Another commissioner, speaking anonymously to The Observer, stated that the commissioners “did not deny institutional racism or play that down as the final document did.” The report was widely seen as manipulated by the government, and is so universally discredited that even the United Nations condemned it, saying the report “repackages racist tropes and stereotypes into fact, twisting data and misapplying statistics and studies into conclusory findings and ad hominem attacks on people of African descent.”
Blimey.
This brings me back to Priti Patel. “You don’t get to stoke the fire at the beginning of the tournament by labelling our anti-racism message as ‘Gesture Politics’ & then pretend to be disgusted when the very thing we’re campaigning against happens,” England defender Tyrone Mings tweeted after Patel expressed outrage at the racism she helped foment. He’s bang on the money, too.
This government cannot have it both ways, condemning overt acts of racism while deriding protests against racism and doctoring reports so that they say the exact opposite of what the report found to be true. It is hard to see how anyone can trust Boris Johnson and this Conservative government to do anything to tackle the issue of racism on or off the football pitch.
But they must do something. The reluctance of this Tory Government to acknowledge reality is as staggering as it is obscene. Ostriching over racism does not one any good. Except maybe racists.
Acknowledging that racism exists, be it systemic or on an interpersonal basis, also does not mean that Britain is some terrible place. While the statistics speak for themselves, there is also much to be proud of in modern Britain, including on race relations. A 2019 survey found that Britain is among the most tolerant nations in Europe, with discrimination against immigrants and BME people relatively rare. That is in keeping with my own perceptions of the UK as a white American, and I think reflective of the heart of the British people.
But the evidence also shows there are a lot of instances where the UK can improve, where it is failing to live up to its ethos as a pluralistic, open, fair-minded society. I hope the British people – and crucially, this Conservative government – will start to do just that.
I love the UK and I think it is among the fairest, most open-minded and big-hearted nations this world has ever known. If I had it my way, I would move there right now. But loving your nation (or in my case, my pretend adopted nation) does not mean denying its faults. It means believing it is strong enough, bold enough, good enough to correct them.
This week we have seen the ugliest side of Britain. We have also seen the best side – much more of it, in fact, than we have the ugly side. I trust in the goodness of the British people. There is no shame in admitting the failures of the past, no sin in acknowledging the sins of our forefathers. The shame is in failing to address the injustices of the present, in refusing to reckon with one’s own history.
On American racism…
After I wrote the above section on British racism, I came across this article in the Tennessean, the paper of record here in the Volunteer State. It talks about Philadelphia, Mississippi’s efforts to reckon with the murder of three civil rights workers in the 1960s. The incident is one of the most infamous of the Civil Rights Movement, immortalized in the film Mississippi Burning and seen by historians as a turning point in national support for the movement. It dovetails nicely with the themes presented above.
One of the things that struck me was a quote from Ty Martin, the 16-year-old chair of the Neshoba County Teenage Republicans. “I don’t feel shame,” in what happened, he said. “That’s part of Mississippi’s history… I don’t think they need an apology from me. I didn’t have any part in that.”
I actually agree with Ty on this. No one should be expected to apologize for the sins of their father, or in this case their grandfathers and great-grandfathers. It’s part of why I recoil at the notion of “white guilt” and the Robin DiAngelo approach to anti-racism which tries to make white people feel guilty for being white. That’s stupid. I wasn’t alive in the 1860s or even the 1960s, and whatever sins my ancestors may or may not have committed – as far as I’m aware they didn’t do anything worse than moonshining – I am not responsible for.
But then, Ty said something else that gave away the game. He was having lunch with David Carter, the chair of the Neshoba County Republican Party. Per The Tennessean:
Carter proudly offers up a tidbit about an infamous Confederate general. “My great grandfather held Robert E. Lee’s horse at Appomattox,” Carter said.
Then Martin says he is part of a “direct line” to Lee on his mother's side.
“I had no part in Lee's campaign across the South,” Martin said. “Why should I apologize? I'm not going to say I'm sorry for what my ancestors did.”
No one should ask nor expect Ty Martin or anyone to apologize for what his ancestors did. That’s ridiculous. But the pride these two, one a grown man and one a teenage boy, show in their ancestral connections to Robert E. Lee – who, let’s not mince words here, fought to keep Black people in bondage – is problematic. It is one thing not to apologize for the crimes of your forefathers. It is another thing entirely to take pride in them.
A few years back, I wrote an article for The Independent about Confederate iconography, like the statues and memorials which litter the South:
Germany remembers everything the Nazis did without erecting statues to Erwin Rommel. Nazi paraphernalia and iconography, when displayed, is done so in museums where historians can provide context to the atrocities committed by Hitler’s regime. Concentration camps are considered sacred ground, where reverence for those who perished is incumbent upon anyone who visits.
In America we have weddings on plantations. We celebrate the antebellum south as though it was some chivalrous, charming, sophisticated culture instead of acknowledging it for what it was – a brutal slave-holding fiefdom where violence was all that kept its majority black population from rebelling.
The average German is horrified by the crimes of the Nazi regime. They don’t go around apologizing for being German. They have pride in their nation. But they also accept the past and have collectively gone a long way to atone for their national sins and reckon with the brutal reality of their history. The United States… has not.
Instead, as I wrote, we have weddings on plantations. Fraternities and sororities hold Old South dances, like the one that got that contestant from the Bachelorette in trouble and ended the nearly 20-year hosting/presenting gig for Chris Harrison. And folks like Ty are proud to be direct descendants of a man who rebelled against the United States and fought to preserve chattel slavery.
This is the problem. We glorify this brutal past. We always have. I think of all the Westerns my grandfather watches, many of which involve battles between the cowboys and the Indians. These films dominated the mid-20th century, shaping how we viewed the colonization and conquest of the North American continent. Indians were almost always the bad guys in these stories, but there’s another side to this history, one of people defending their homeland against an invading force. We don’t like to admit it, but we were the invading force.
White Americans somehow think that if we acknowledge the truth of our history – that much of it was brutal and bloody and even genocidal – that somehow that will turn people against their own country. It’s why there’s a rush to ban “critical race theory” (which is a specific body of knowledge around law, not being taught in public schools) and to prohibit any mention of America’s historic moral failings.
The feeling among many white Americans seems to be that if we talk about it, it might upset… who, exactly? Presumably Black and brown students are being taught the truth about their past at home by families who lived through it, and those who aren’t will form their own opinions based on their lived experiences as people of color in America. So really, this is being done to protect white students and white sensibilities at the expense of an honest reflection on our history.
That’s a shame, because an honest look at American history also provides much to be proud of. Yes, America is a colonial juggernaut which conquered a continent by decimating the Native population. Yes, we enslaved Black people and treated them as chattel for centuries before subjecting them to another 100+ years of brutality. That’s awful.
But the story of America is also the story of the Abolitionists. The story of Nat Turner and the slave revolt. The story of the Grimke Sisters. The story of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman and John Brown and William Lloyd Garrison. It is the story of Mother Jones and Jane Addams and Upton Sinclair and the Haymarket Martyrs. The story of Albert Einstein, who fled Nazi persecution to come to our country, and of Neil Armstrong who took the first steps on the Moon. It is the story of everyday folks, like you and like me, just trying to make a living as best they could under often oppressive conditions. It is the story of those who never lost faith in the promise of freedom nor the hope of a better tomorrow. It is the story of those who saw an unjust society and thought we, the people, could and should do better.
And again, like in the UK, the shame is not in the injustices of the past. It is in refusing to acknowledge them and to fight the injustices of the present. No one country is perfect. Every nation has its skeletons in the closet. Only the truly great nations exhume those skeletons and reckon with them. So far, America hasn’t done that.
What I’ve been up to…
For The Independent, I wrote about Kristi Noem’s CPAC speech and why it frightened me so. Noem is underestimated by many on the left, but she’s an effective communicator with a compelling story and a reasonableness about her that can appeal beyond the Red Hat base of the Republican Party. I think she’s the one to watch for 2024, presuming Trump doesn’t run (or his primary campaign crashes and burns, which while unlikely is still more likely than many people realize, I think).
I wrote a blog at Medium about how Democrats can do a better job explaining why Republican voting laws are unfair. I’ve been disappointed at the messaging around this issue, with too many Democrats shouting “these laws are racist” without explaining how they are racist.
What I’ve been reading…
I finally read Hillbilly Elegyby JD Vance, who is now a Republican candidate for Senate in Ohio. I will save my thoughts on the book for a later time, but I will say I’m surprised at how much JD and I have in common. I don’t want to say too much right now as I will explore this topic in more depth later on.
This piece on how Tucker Carlson became “the voice of white grievance” ran in the Washington Post this week, and it is very insightful. Worth reading if you’re interested in how Tucker became Tucker.
Workers at a Topeka, Kansas Frito-Lay plant are striking for better working conditions, something I did not know until The Independent reported it on Thursday.
At LabourList, Andrew Harrop – the general secretary of the Fabian Society – had an excellent piece on how Labour needs to end culture wars, not win them. It’s a good strategy for the left going forward, one that could equally apply here in the United States.
This interview Janice Turner did with Jess Phillips is fantastic. I bloody love Jess Phillips. I backed her short-lived leadership campaign and I’ve followed her on social media for years. She once promised to have a pint with me the next time I’m in the UK, something I plan to hold her to (well, I don’t drink anymore so maybe a cuppa), as I think she’s one of the most compelling and refreshing politicians on either side of the Atlantic.
This isn’t something I have been reading, but I watched Ken Burns’ 2019 documentary on the history of country music, aptly called Country Music, this week. It was a fascinating look at how the music developed out of the blues of the Mississippi delta and the folk music of Appalachia. The first episodes, about the very early years of country music (say, before 1950), were to me the most fascinating, as much of what happened after Hank Williams I knew from growing up in a family that almost exclusively listens to country. The entire series was phenomenal though, and I am glad Burns acknowledged the integral contributions of Black artists to the genre. Country wouldn’t exist without them. In America, I know you can watch on Amazon Prime if you have a subscription to PBS Documentaries, which I do. (I’m unsure how much a month it is off the top of my head, but I think an additional $5?) In the UK, I’m not sure where it is streaming. I checked iPlayer but it doesn’t seem to be available. You might want to try Amazon Prime as well.
A picture of the puppy…