Grilling Machine wrote: ↑07 Jun 2020, 18:02
Ali's behaviour was often terrible, becoming anti-white, misogynistic and disrespecting many, but that doesn't change his early life experiences, nor his less frequent moments of grace. Similarly I don't like AJ much, but since I'm no racist I support his right to protest against inequality that spans hundreds of years without redress. Some people look at MLK as the end of this inequality rather than green shoots of real change.
Nothing wrong with that. If white people refuse to buy from an Asian-owned shop, encouraging them to rethink and maybe support that person is fine. Likewise, Mickey, if people refuse to hire GRT workers then there's nothing wrong with encouraging them to rethink their position on that.
It's only a problem if it's encouragement to use one group exclusively, i.e. stop buying anything from white people. But good luck trying that anyway, when 99% of the things we buy are from rich white men.
C19 creation aside, I'd much rather have China's daily infection rate right now than ours. China does have some serious political problems, but that's taking an outside-in view that doesn't question the US and UK. We've been taught to hate China and Russia for decades, when the reality is that we're all shared victims of propaganda. I know someone in China and it's a harsh government, but they're not the evil monsters the West paint them as. I'd say their worst practice is worker exploitation, with many recruited from countryside poverty to work in factories with anti-suicide nets around them. But then we recruit Romanians on the cheap to work our fields...
The current Tories would bring back workhouses if they could. It's crazy that Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson and Rees-Mogg (whose Somerset Capital is currently earning him millions for nowt) are regarded as 'men of the people'. We live in a culture where working-class men are made to feel like failures if they can't provide for themselves/their families, it's still Boys from the Blackstuff to this day, and the likes of Johnson prey on this macho bullshit to keep us grafting for them.
Corbyn wanted to raise corp tax to a level that would've been lower than it was in Thatcher's day, and he was demonised by all of our media, TV and paper. He listened to the IRA because he wanted peace in Ireland and was branded a terrorist sympathiser, despite always condemning violence, and so on. To vote for Corbyn was seen as unmanly — as something for the snowflakes. Hating these 'woke snowflakes' is what you're supposed to do — what you've been instructed to do, because it divides us. And sure, there are lots of prime tossers on the left as well. But the point is that we shouldn't be living in a culture where some men consider killing themselves (and some do) for losing a job.
We're always saying how losing a fight shouldn't be such a big deal in boxing, but then voting with the idea that all unemployed are scroungers, hence how hard it is to come to terms with unemployment if you've grown accustomed to bashing others for it. We actually argue in favour of a more positive view to boxing losses because we can relate to how likely they'd be for us! We can imagine being in that position so we're much less hard on those fighters, respecting what they *have* done.
They're trying to disallow it with horses and kettling, Peterloo-style, and causing way more tension as a result. I personally agree with social distancing taking precedence over demonstrations, but as a demonstrator you have to get out there when the opportunity arises. If protestors could somehow collectively agree to gather later in the year that'd be grand, but their motivation might've fizzled out by then, and since the US are going hard it's currently the best time to get the attention of those in power.
It won't bring about any change in the short term, it just feels good to throw a few back at the racists in charge, not just in politics but big business. Especially in big business.
Obama was a huge disappointment to many black people, and his popularity dropped throughout his terms. I think in some ways his era was even worse, because you expect a white man to support the status quo.
Mayweather and Jordan were outstanding athletes, who've always been fine as entertainment for white people. Black singers were employed by rich whites in Edwardian times, but never treated as equals for it. Recall how Jesse Owens was hated by Hitler at the same time as the White House refused an invite after he'd won Gold for them.
Oprah's chatshow was the product of corporate white America, who saw the burgeoning profit in appealing to an untapped socially conscious viewership in the '80s. Oprah landed the job because she was articulate and likely the best candidate, but hers is a chatshow that would've been created to capitalise on that emerging market anyway. She's now massively rich, and the whites who gave her that platform even more so, but for all she's talked about over the years, very little's changed. Oprah's presented as a catalyst for change — a decades-long voice for equality, but it's been cemented beyond doubt in recent weeks that the US police are still incredibly racist.
As someone else said (I don't have their name): “If you've 10 bad cops to 1000 good and the latter do nothing, you've 1010 bad cops.”
Apologies for the essay, but let's please try and sympathise with people who've suffered things that most of us haven't, and not just point out that so-and-so was a wrong 'un anyway. Overlooking injustice because we don't care about those it's affected leaves those that we'd care about vulnerable. Unless of course you don't care about any black people, in which case you know what you are and you should confront that for your own and everyone else's good.
There's no we're-better-than-you sentiment in any of this — there's no judgement on my part for any history of racist thinking because if you go back far enough I'd be guilty too. But surely, seeing all this poo going on, we can try and be better people when asked to review our collective history.
Eddie Colston had nothing to do with me, but when I see his statue getting dunked I ain't in nobody's way!
Tell you what, though, I really miss our days of Wilder's armour bants (or indeed Mitchell's cockfeeding). At least we're all united in hating Covid, eh.