Britain's politics of race

Political updates and debates...
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mikesiva
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It is extremely hard for a black man to ever captain the England football team for a long period of time....

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/football/26383249" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

'Sol Campbell has claimed he would have been "England captain for more than 10 years" if he had been born white. The former England defender makes the claims in an authorised biography serialised by the Sunday Times. "I believe if I was white, I would have been England captain for more than 10 years - it's as simple as that," said the 39-year-old, who won 73 full caps, including three as captain.'
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mikesiva
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"'Match of the Day' has too many white men on its lineup and needs to become more diverse. That is the criticism of the BBC's director of television, Danny Cohen, who has made it clear he expects to see sports shows shaking up their quotas. This pronouncement comes days after the BBC announced that its dramas would be including more black and gay actors to reflect British society more accurately."

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2014/03 ... 79350.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

I totally agree with Danny Cohen...MOTD has shown a reluctance to hire black pundits, which is disgraceful, seeing how many black footballers there are in the Premier League. At least BT Sport has David James, and ITV has Clarke Carlisle...and both are excellent!
Gils
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I believe the Football association has 72 members on it's board and approximately one of those members may have African/Indian heritage. Chris Powell having been sacked as manager of Charlton Athletic last week leaves Chris Hughton as the only manager, of colour, among all 92 leagues clubs.

So both the management and administrative side of English football are proven to be predominantly of a white composition, unlike the demographics on the playing field.

Along this line of reasoning Sol Campbell's claim becomes very difficult to dismiss out of hand, as has subsequently been attempted by the media, at least not without further investigation, which of course is always absent from discussions of this nature.

A sharper picture emerges when this incident from less than a year ago is included in the conversation. Http://www.windiesfans.com/forums/viewt ... f=4&t=7240" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;"
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mikesiva
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Gils wrote:I believe the Football association has 72 members on it's board and approximately one of those members may have African/Indian heritage. Chris Powell having been sacked as manager of Charlton Athletic last week leaves Chris Hughton as the only manager, of colour, among all 92 leagues clubs.
"They sit one place above the drop zone but face Fulham, five points behind in 18th, on Saturday before Liverpool at home, Manchester United and Chelsea away then Arsenal at home. Assistant manager Colin Calderwood and coach Paul Trollope followed Hughton out of the exit door. There are now no black managers in the top four divisions of English football."


Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/footba ... z2yB02LhiE" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
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And then there were none....
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mikesiva
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'The Home Office has reversed its controversial decision to refuse a visa to a woman who wanted to come to Britain to donate a kidney to her seriously ill brother. Politicians, religious leaders, migrants’ groups and journalists had urged the department to allow the potentially life-saving visit to take place. Oliver Cameron, from north London, has been unable to work since suffering a near-fatal renal failure in 2012 and needs a kidney transplant to avoid daily dialysis. After his older sister, Keisha Rushton, was found to be compatible, the operation was arranged to take place last October. But when Ms Rushton, who lives in Jamaica, applied for a visa, it was rejected by the Home Office on the grounds that she might not return home.'

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/ho ... 72345.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

“I’m grateful to those, including The Independent, who brought my case to light. But I’m left wondering how many others like me are out there. Why did it require me to go to the media and say my sister wants to give me her kidney but they won’t let her into the country? There is a fault if a system can’t allow compassion. I'm grateful the authorities have seen sense, but it’s been a long road to reach this decision.”

Absolutely appalling behaviour from the Home Office....
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mikesiva
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UKIP's hate-filled politics....

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-27176803" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
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mikesiva
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"Nearly a third of people in Britain admit being racially prejudiced, research has suggested. Social research organisation NatCen said the proportion had increased since the start of the century, returning to the level of 30 years ago."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-27599401" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

This tallies with my experiences over the past decade too....
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mikesiva
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In 1845, Frederick Douglass, a fugitive from slavery, joined dozens of white passengers on the British ship Cambria in New York harbor. Somewhere out on the Atlantic, the other passengers discovered that the African American activist in their midst had just published a sensational autobiography. They convinced the captain to host a sort of salon, wherein Douglass would tell them his life story. But when the young black man stood up to talk, a group of Southern slaveholders, on their way to Britain for vacation or business or both, confronted him. Every time Douglass said something about what it was like to be enslaved, they shouted him down: Lies! Lies! Slaves were treated well, insisted the slaveholders; after all, they said, the masters remained financially interested in the health of their human “property”.

In a review of my book about slavery and capitalism published the other day, the Economist treated it the same way that the tourist enslavers treated the testimony of Frederick Douglass on that slave-era ship long ago. In doing so, the Economist revealed just how many white people remain reluctant to believe black people about the experience of being black.

Apparently, I shouldn’t have focused my historical research on how some people lived off the uncompensated sweat of their “valuable property”, the magazine’s anonymous reviewer wrote: “Almost all the blacks in his book are victims, almost all the whites villains.” Worst of all, this book reviewer went on, I had, by putting the testimony of “a few slaves” at the heart of book about slavery, somehow abandoned “objectivity”’ for “advocacy”.

Of course, the reviewer wasn’t treating me like the slaveowners on the Cambria treated Douglass. They threatened to kidnap him and send him to New Orleans – the largest slave market in North America. No, a single nameless reviewer from a single stodgy magazine couldn’t do much to me.

Still, the review enraged a significant number of people. Within a few hours, Twitterstorians scorched the earth of the magazine’s comments page with radioactive reviews of the review. The parodies and viral disdain forced the Economist to retract the review and issue a partial apology.

But the Economist didn’t apologize for dismissing what slaves said about slavery. That kind of arrogance remains part of a wider, more subtle pattern in how black testimony often gets treated – sometimes unknowingly – as less reliable than white. The Economist reviewer was saying that the key sources of my book, African Americans – black people – cannot be believed.

As the historian Jelani Cobb pointed out to MSNBC’s Chris Hayes on Friday night, the reviewer’s ideas about slavery’s history are not actually as uncommon as many of us would like to believe. He’s right: All across the American south, you can go to historic plantation sites still pushing the idea that slaves who had a “good” master were happy, and “faithful”.

If you write about the history of slavery, you become used to the pattern: No matter how many accounts you cite from ex-slaves, people often say they need more information before they can accept what former cotton pickers say about how cotton picking worked. And when we’re talking about contemporary events, the presumptive doubt is just as bad.

For instance: white people have had numerous opportunities, especially after Ferguson, to hear what African Americans think about how policing takes place when white civilians aren’t around. Yet twice as many white Americans as black Americans still think that police treat African Americans fairly.

Perhaps this is because, according to a recent survey, 75% of white Americans have zero black American friends. Surely if more white people knew more black people on a personal level, some would be more ready to accept the accounts from African Americans about how white privilege affects their own lives.

Instead, we’ve still got white magazine writers refusing to believe first-person accounts of history, which re-enforces white privilege at the very time when we should be revoking it. In the meantime, both historians and advocates of contemporary change often have to turn to the strategy of getting white people to vet black testimony before other white people will believe it.

Back in 1845 on the Cambria, as the attackers surrounded Douglass, threatening to throw him overboard, he told the other white passengers that if they didn’t believe his words, he would speak the words of the enslavers. Straight from the book of state law in the south, Douglas read aloud those punishments allotted to slaves, then – “lashings on the back, the cropping of ears and other revolting disfigurements” – as now: “for the most venial crimes, and even frequently when no crime whatever had been committed”.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfre ... ok-slavery" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
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mikesiva
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'Serena Williams beat Lucie Safarova to win the French Open Saturday. Her reward, at least on social media, came in the form of some of the same racist and sexist comments that have followed her for her entire career. In the moments surrounding her win, Williams was compared to an animal, likened to a man, and deemed frightening and horrifyingly unattractive. One Twitter user who wrote that Williams "looks like a gorilla, and sounds like a gorilla when she grunts while hitting the ball. In conclusion, she is a gorilla." And another described her as "so unbelievably dominant...and manly".'

http://www.vox.com/2015/3/11/8189679/se ... lls-racism" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Gils
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