Looking at the experience of black Britons through an American lens
persuasion.community
Looking at the experience of black Britons through an American lens
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Re: Looking at the experience of black Britons through an American lens
#2+1 from Australia. Our police kill more white people in custody per capita than black.
I'm so over hearing about this bullshit here. The aboriginal people of Australia face real problems. The police isn't one of them.
PS, keep your debates to yourselves too. Nobody cares and your media cutting Trump out of context is obvious and gross. You are literally becoming the fake news he always said you were.
Re: Looking at the experience of black Britons through an American lens
#3In addition to the entirety of the author's examples and experiences, we need to recall that the UK/British view of race is heavily influenced by the fact that skin color is not the only way in which folks in the UK experience racial discrimination. For centuries, the Scottish and Irish natives have been variously oppressed by the British, creating a racial context which is distinct from one wholly concerned with skin tone.
Not less racist, not more racist, just differently racist.
Re: Looking at the experience of black Britons through an American lens
#4I have a strong feeling (though no data to back it up) that this holds at least as much for debate and polarisation around feminism, gender equality, trans rights and LGBT(Q+) issues.
Re: Looking at the experience of black Britons through an American lens
#5American culture in general overrides local news. The debates are front-page news despite me having no vote or influence. Same with Trump's impeachment.
Re: Looking at the experience of black Britons through an American lens
#6The problem exists elsewhere too, because of the extremely widespread proliferation of American media - I see the Polish media taking american talking points about race, sexuality, religion, and just transplanting them wholesale into the Polish frame of reference as if they were equally important here - more often than not, they simply aren't. While racism is a problem in Poland, it's not a systematic racism like in the US, and treating it as if it was does more harm than good - we have to do better, but suddenly Polish people watching American news and for instance adopting "all cops are bastards" attitude is just dumb in so many ways I could probably write a whole article about it.
In general I lament the americanization of worldwide media, as if America is some kind of paragon of behaviour that everyone should emulate, and whatever social phenomenon is happening there it must be valid elsewhere. That's simply not true.
Re: Looking at the experience of black Britons through an American lens
#7I never even heard of anyone being as racist as americans are when trying not to be.
Re: Looking at the experience of black Britons through an American lens
#8And I think probably Americans could sometimes do well to stop imposing American views about Race on themselves.
Re: Looking at the experience of black Britons through an American lens
#9I think one of the reasons this simplification is happening, is that nuance generally has failed to gain traction in the past. A large part of why the far right / racist movement has grown a lot the past 20 years or so is that their narrative is so simple: "Immigrants have higher crime rates and we're taking in more immigrants, which is bad." Fighting this with nuance and trying to say that statistics is more complicated than that hasn't worked. I would say that the public education system needs a complete overhaul to fix this (critical thinking, media literacy and such), but even if that were to happen, it would take 20-30 years.
Also, in the end, I don't think these type of views causes that much harm. Okay, so a group of people end up being "fake" anti-racists, but it's still raising awareness and it might cause people to make slightly different choices in their day-to-day lives. This isn't comparable to Kony 2012 where people changed their profile picture on Facebook for literally no effect.
Re: Looking at the experience of black Britons through an American lens
#10In addition to the entirety of the author's examples and experiences, we need to recall that the UK/British view of race is heavily influenced by the fact that skin color is not the only way in which folks in the UK experience racial discrimination. For centuries, the Scottish and Irish natives have been variously oppressed by the British, creating a racial context which is distinct from one wholly concerned with ski…
Americans also conveniently forget that Irish people have been discriminated against there nearly as badly as black people, despite being the whitest shade of white. From the outside perspective, it seems like that kind of discrimination just doesn't fit the narrative so of course isn't mentioned.