Harry's Place

The list of despicable bastards is just endless isn’t it?

Yasmine Alibaih-Brown is a stupid shrill nut who hasn’t the capacity to think in a straight line and depends, for her arguments to work, on her opponent saying something that she allow her to squeal, ‘ooooh racist!’

“She’s right about that, but one reason for this state of affairs, it would seem to me, is that it’s extraordinarily difficult to define any of these terms.”

You needn’t worry. She’ll define them for you. She’s so much better than everyone else, it’ll be no effort at all…

Surely definitive proof Affirmative Action is bad policy.

Although saying that’s probably a Hate Crime now.

“Although saying that’s probably a Hate Crime now.”

No, but it does sound envious and a bit pathetic.

Good article, Marcus. It’s the same with Israel’s enemies. The joy in their faces as they speak of any Palestinian death, because that serves their agenda.

I’m reading Ed Stourton’s “It’s a PC World”. Last month, it was “Culture of Complaint” by Robert Hughes. Both are good.

Is not the urge of some humans to regularly wash other people’s mouths out with soap is as old as the species? Some people are keen for us to express their Inner Child. People like Miss Brown give free rein, instead, to their Inner Totalitarian, oblivious to the possibility that, in their righteous ‘restraining’ of the political unacceptable, they have in fact increased the world’s stock of totalitarian sentiment.

Brown’s rant is based on “imaginative empathy”. Hence it isn’t hate speech according to the PC police.

Surely definitive proof Affirmative Action is bad policy.

My thoughts exactly!

Alibhai-Brown would seem to be a corporeal personification of the strange collaboration between the fascistic tendencies of Islam (Ismaili variant) and the fascistic tendencies of the politically-correct left.

I love the image of Ms Brown listening to the Voice of her Inner Totalitarian…
I have heard he speak. She’s delusional. ‘Nuff said.

“Yasmin Alibhai-Brown isn’t happy with the fact that people who hold political opinions different from hers are still allowed to publish them on the internet:”

Hilarious self-parody from HP given just two posts ago they supported the jailing of people for posting opinions they disagree with

http://www.hurryupharry.org/2009/07/11/upload-in-the-uk-obey-british-laws/

Presumably people like Tom Parker Bowles who advocate consumption of fatty foods will also be prosecuted since clearly their articles lead directly to death.

Similarly those magazine articles in lads mags encouraging drink competitions will be subject to legal restraint.

Now, now, Bob, that was under the heading of Your View. That is, not necessarily that of HP. Also, a hypocrite is an actor who wears a mask… HP hypocrite? You said it!

Someone told me my Wikipedia entry had quoted the NeoCon Doug Murray, who had attacked me in a book for writing: “There have been times when I have wanted more chaos, more shocks, more disorder to teach our side a lesson”. To put this in context, what I actually wrote was: “The past months have been disquieting and challenging for many of us in the antiwar camp. I know and am ashamed to admit this that there have been times when I have wanted more chaos, more shocks, more disorder to teach our side a lesson … The decent people of Iraq need optimism now not my distasteful ill-wishes for the only hope they have for the future.” If this attack has stayed in Murray’s book it would have passed but bloggers recently picked it up and it has been hell since.

Oh, good grief, did she really say this? Can someone confirm or refute before I go to tell people.

PS I don’t think she should be gaoled, just reviled.

“My thoughts exactly!”

Look, she is dim. No doubting it. But why do you need to use her race/gender to attack her?

Alec Im not Bob
I dont even know him
I know HP is a graveyard of freaks, Muslim haters and the extreme far right zionism but occasional other people visit and comment .
Much as people visited mental asylums in Victorian England
Doesnt mean they are part of some organisation you oppose.

Don’t see why not, Danny. Just as with Bernie Ecclestone, who’d ghave been a prime candidate for sterilization under Aktion T4 or who would have had his business interests appropriated by Nazi placemen, it’s the game she plays… using her Indie column to do everything from specifically attacking white working-class men to blaming the banking crisis on white men such as Fannie Mae’s Franklin Raines, Merrill Lynch’s Stan O’Neal, and Countrywide and Indy Mac’s Angelo Mozilo.

She’s a dreadful, over-indulged woman whose cache – written English – never is going to be challenged by the oiks she smears with her racist, sexist pompous lies. So, of course, she deserves it.

So you think an Asian woman “deserves” racism/misogyny. Classy.

There are so many other ways to criticise her than that. Perhaps if you could see that you’d have a column too and be less jealous.

Only, Danny, if you think that criticism of middle/upper-class non-European women is to be consider racist and sexist until proven otherwise.

I do think YAB, who makes a business out of judging European or working-class men negatively on the bases of their ethnic/social groups and sex, should be shown to be the purveyor of racist, sexist pompous lies on very thin ice that she is.

“Only, Danny, if you think that criticism of middle/upper-class non-European women is to be consider racist and sexist until proven otherwise.”

I don’t – plenty of people criticise her without being racist or sexist.

But by your own admission, you think it’s fine to be both of those things against her. I asked whether her race/gender should be used to attack her. You said “don’t see why not” and “of course she deserves it”.

Has something (ironically) been cut? I can’t follow the comments about what Alec said.

Did he write something offensive about YAB?

I find her very offensive in lots of different ways. But the colour of her skin is certainly not one.

One law for fellow Muslims Yasmin?

How little the world would look moral without forgetfulness. A poet might say that God made forgetfulness the guard he placed at the threshold of human dignity.

The Lyrical Terrorist…A 23-year-old British Muslim saleswoman, Samina Malik, was convicted last month under some of these draconian laws after downloading some jihadi material and for writing miserable and murderous poems fantasising about beheadings. I find what she did repellent, but hers were thought crimes, which should not lead to prosecutions in any democracy worth the name.

Libertarians and free expression campaigners were jubilant last week. An obscenity case was due to be heard against Darryn Walker, a 35-year-old civil servant who had posted an essay on a website, titled Girls (scream) Aloud, imagining the sexual torture and mutilation of the each of the women who make up the pop group.
The case was dropped and is celebrated as another important knock-back for censorship. Sadly I felt unable to join in with the good cheer. Something is deeply troubling about the validation given to Walker and those who think they have the right to say whatever they wish and excitedly share with others the thrills of extreme violence against women.

Then there’s this: “In a bid to stop Muslim extremists from becoming more militant, the UK Government is set to issue a guideline for police, directing them not to charge them in many hate crime cases, a move that has created outrage amongst critics.

Guidelines will tell forces to press for conviction only in cases of clear-cut criminal acts, and refrain from proceeding when evidence of lawbreaking is “borderline.”

Officers will be advised to turn a blind eye on crimes such as incitement to religious hatred or viewing extremist material on the Internet.

Guess it pays to let off a few bombs eh Yasmin.

Oh, Danny. Imagine if there was a world in which being pompous, dreary and outraged was a much sought after quality. How successful you’d be. How fulfilled. Sadly, in this world it makes you look like a git.

I don’t think so, Field.

Danny, just to make this clear, I am not using and do think think it appropriate to use an unnamed individual’s ethnic group or sex against them. When a named individual, however, does regularly use others’ ethnic/social groups and sex against them, I do think it apposite to demostrate just how thin the ice they’re on is.

Also, I laughed at the thought of her wetting herself when she expected to breeze through airport security without the correct papers.

HPhypocrite

Do us a great favour?

Fuck off back to MPACuk.

God, it’s even worse I thought – she actually hints that she wants to be able to sue people in Internet Court for quoting her “out of context”.

Jeez!

Danny is right though. The origin of the spat was “Surely definitive proof Affirmative Action is bad policy.” which is basically saying that she only got her job as a columnist because she is non-white or a woman, and also that if her job was taken by its rightful owner (a white man presumably) then this nonsense wouldn’t have been written.

Which is actually a pretty bad thing to say, and co-incidentally one of the mainstays of BNP grievance-mongering.

if you think that criticism of middle/upper-class non-European women is to be consider racist and sexist until proven otherwise.

But saying “Surely definitive proof Affirmative Action is bad policy.” is either racist or sexist (or both). It’s saying that she only got her job because she’s a woman/non-white, and that if a white man got the job, he wouldn’t spout as much rubbish. It’s also classic grievance-mongering, which people from HP should be able to recognise as much from the two above as from islamists or the BNP (or YAB for that matter).

Test

We don’t yet have a really effective way of restraining material promoting racism, sexism, violence (except against children), homophobia, and other group hatreds.

Which is true. I found some appalling material in a couple of books in a local library recently. The books were called the Bible and the Qur’an.

There was even violence against children!

O daughter Babylon, you devastator! Happy shall they be who pay you back what you have done to us! Happy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against the rock!

Psalm 137:8-9

Samaria shall bear her guilt,
because she has rebelled against her God;
they shall fall by the sword,
their little ones shall be dashed in pieces,
and their pregnant women ripped open.

Hosea 13:16

Heh, sorry, my comments have been disappearing into a black hole, but changing my email address seems to have worked.

On the “proof the affirmative action is bad policy”, first of all there’s absolutely no evidence either that YAB got her job because she’s a woman or not white, and secondly that the hypothetical white man who would’ve got her job would talk any less rubbish (look at Seamus Milne).

Which makes the statement a bit poor form, and classic grievance-mongering, and should be recognised as much in commenters here as from the BNP, islamists or YAB herself.

She’s right about that, but one reason for this state of affairs, it would seem to me, is that it’s extraordinarily difficult to define any of these terms. Is Sasha Baron Cohen’s latest film Bruno responsible for promoting homophobia or is its purpose to have a laugh at people who are uncomfortable with homosexuality? I’ve read reviews suggesting either. Should it be banned just in case? How many people would need to be offended first? Who knows.

I think you’ll find death surprisingly difficult to define. Somehow, murder, aggressive war and genocide are more or less prohibited. Disagreement isn’t proof that there aren’t any legally enforceable facts of the matter.

YAB’s ‘performance’ on the edition of Question Time following the attcks on the twin towers was quite chilling. For some reason, the BBC has either destroyed or not released the video for others to see, if they hadn’t seen it. YAB really is the totalitarian which she accuses others of being and PC is her -ism.

“Which makes the statement a bit poor form, and classic grievance-mongering.”

Indeed. There is a lot of envy in the world. There are also lots of people who think that they can say things that are clearly racist and misogynistic without that making them racist and misogynistic, because they’re like groovy modern guys really.

“We don’t yet have a really effective way of restraining material promoting racism, sexism, violence”

Strewth. Violence is a crime. You get busted for that here. She knows that.

I have a pretty low tolerance for dishonest journalism, and that sentence is a good example. She is pretending that sexism is violence, or the same as violence, and should be illegal. We already have laws which punish those who seek to deprive others of their civil rights on grounds of race, sex, religion or sexual orientation.

What more does she want?

She wants to censor views. She wants to shut people up.

Short order cook – “On the “proof the affirmative action is bad policy”, first of all there’s absolutely no evidence either that YAB got her job because she’s a woman or not white, and secondly that the hypothetical white man who would’ve got her job would talk any less rubbish (look at Seamus Milne).”

Well Seamus Milne is a bad choice given the rather large pile of circumstantial evidence that he got his job precisely through affirmative action. Who was Seamus’ Daddy again?

There is no evidence that YAB got her job through her competence, clarity or quality of thought, ability to write or anything else that might otherwise apply to prospective journalists.

On the other hand we do know that liberal newspapers like to have a certain number of a certain type of person working for them and YAB ticks many of those boxes.

You don’t think it is a reasonable inference? Why not?

“Which makes the statement a bit poor form, and classic grievance-mongering, and should be recognised as much in commenters here as from the BNP, islamists or YAB herself.”

Poor form perhaps. But grievance mongering? I don’t mind the Indie pursuing whatever hiring policies they like. Just as it does not bother me that they hire Robert Fisk who I think is marginally deranged. It is their choice to hire who they like with their own money. Now if the BBC hired someone because they were a non-White non-male (and to be honest they probably do) that would be another matter. If there is no grievance, how can there be mongering?

I have a pretty low tolerance for dishonest journalism, and that sentence is a good example. She is pretending that sexism is violence, or the same as violence, and should be illegal.

Well, your say so is hardly a decisive reason for believing it, is it? And a reasonable reader would have to say your interpretation of that sentence is ex recto.

Danny – “Look, she is dim. No doubting it. But why do you need to use her race/gender to attack her?”

No one is using her race or her gender to attack her. So your complaint seems a little over-sensitive to me. Criticising Affirmative Action is not criticising opposing Racism. Nor is it an attack on someone’s race. Or gender.

You admit she is dim. So why does she work for the Indie in your opinion?

Someone else said she personifies the Left alliance with the Islamists. I don’t think that is fair. She has built a career on attacking Britain from the perspective of a non-White Muslim woman. What she has found is that she is being flanked by Islamists who are even better at attacking Britain and are being treated as more authentic by the Left. So her job is threatened. So she does attack them every now and then. In fact a long long time ago she wrote a great article on the Islamists and fairly recently she wrote a decent one on women in the Muslim world. But her main schtick is still attacking White Britain for the awful crime of taking her and her family in when Idi Amin expelled them. The fact that she is a minority Muslim may help. Isn’t she an Ahmadi or Ismaili?

Danny – “There are also lots of people who think that they can say things that are clearly racist and misogynistic without that making them racist and misogynistic, because they’re like groovy modern guys really.”

I am neither groovy or modern. But would you care to point to a single racist or misogynistic comment made in this thread?

I said: “But why do you need to use her race/gender to attack her?”

Alec said: “She deserves it.”

If there’s a clearer case of racism and misogyny I can’t remember it.

On the other hand we do know that liberal newspapers like to have a certain number of a certain type of person working for them and YAB ticks many of those boxes.

You don’t think it is a reasonable inference? Why not?

Well, either it isn’t a reasonable inference or you’re as unselfaware as you seem. There’s no evidence that you’re a reliable judge of what makes a good journalist. On the other hand, we do know that Yasmin Alibhai-Brown is often attacked, crudely, via the suggestion that she’s an affirmative action hire (who didn’t deserve the job). By your own reasoning, therefore, it’s a reasonable to infer that you’re one of the classic grievance mongers.

On the other hand we do know that liberal newspapers like to have a certain number of a certain type of person working for them and YAB ticks many of those boxes.

You don’t think it is a reasonable inference? Why not?

Well, either it isn’t a reasonable inference or you’re as unselfaware as you seem. There’s no evidence that you’re a reliable judge of what makes a good journalist. On the other hand, we do know that Yasmin Alibhai-Brown is often attacked, crudely, via the suggestion that she’s an affirmative action hire (who didn’t deserve the job). By your own reasoning, therefore, it’s a reasonable to infer that you’re one of the classic grievance mongers.

emmanuelgoldstein – “Well, either it isn’t a reasonable inference or you’re as unselfaware as you seem.”

Well it is almost certainly the latter but as arguments go, I don’t think that calling me names works well past the First Form. Things may be different where you’re from.

“There’s no evidence that you’re a reliable judge of what makes a good journalist.”

Nor is there any evidence that anyone else here is either. What we all seem to be agreed on is that Ms Alibhai-Brown is stupid. Most of us also seem convinced she writes stupid and sometimes disgusting things. Now intelligence and the ability to engage in a sensible manner with her audience would, in my opinion, seem to be two really quite important criteria for judging what makes a good journalist. Perhaps I am wrong. Would you care to look at her comments quoted above and explain to me how these demonstrate her fitness to be a journalist?

“On the other hand, we do know that Yasmin Alibhai-Brown is often attacked, crudely, via the suggestion that she’s an affirmative action hire (who didn’t deserve the job). By your own reasoning, therefore, it’s a reasonable to infer that you’re one of the classic grievance mongers.”

Except for the small fact there is still no grievance. That would require me to think it is wrong to hire someone on affirmative action grounds. And I have clearly said that there is nothing wrong with the Independent doing so. Which makes your clever little insinuation that I don’t think she deserved the job (which you assign to unnamed others before going over to comment specifically on me) dishonest.

“That would require me to think it is wrong to hire someone on affirmative action grounds…Which makes your clever little insinuation that I don’t think she deserved the job…dishonest.”

No, Emmanuel was spot on because as you said:

“Surely definitive proof Affirmative Action is bad policy.”

It is you that is dishonest. At least Alec had the dignity to stop wriggling over his unintentionally revealed bigotry.

Look, she is dim. No doubting it. But why do you need to use her race/gender to attack her?

I didn’t, I used it to attack those that give her a platform.

Danny – “It is you that is dishonest. At least Alec had the dignity to stop wriggling over his unintentionally revealed bigotry.”

It is bad policy. That does not make it wrong. If someone stuffs their face with cheeseburgers all day, they are probably harming their health. But it is their choice. They are free to do so. In the same way I can’t believe that YAB or Robert Fisk contribute as much to the Independent as they drive away. A few moonbats do not make up for the intelligent middle class audience they used to have. But they have made their choice and they are free to do so.

This is the difference between me and YAB. Just because I don’t approve of something doesn’t mean I want it banned. Perhaps if you did not have such an illiberal mind set you would see the difference.

Incidentally, I would just like to quote another poster:

angrysoba – “Yasmine Alibaih-Brown is a stupid shrill nut who hasn’t the capacity to think in a straight line and depends, for her arguments to work, on her opponent saying something that she allow her to squeal, ‘ooooh racist!’”

Without further comment.

Most of her opponents are not racists. But those who are should be big enough to admit it.

Nor is there any evidence that anyone else here is either. What we all seem to be agreed on is that Ms Alibhai-Brown is stupid.

Most of us also seem convinced she writes stupid and sometimes disgusting things. Now intelligence and the ability to engage in a sensible manner with her audience would, in my opinion, seem to be two really quite important criteria for judging what makes a good journalist. Perhaps I am wrong. Would you care to look at her comments quoted above and explain to me how these demonstrate her fitness to be a journalist?

Your argument was pretty simple: you couldn’t discern any evidence that the lady deserved her job; you determined that there were newspapers willing to employ her despite her lack of qualifications. So, she must be an undeserving affirmative action hire.

Appealing to her stupidity doesn’t help, since your judgement is what’s at stake. First, just as you’re willing to discount the lady’s judgement for no good reason, I’m willing to discount yours: I’m just going to stipulate that you’re unable to distinguish stupid from not-stupid. Don’t like unfairly-personalized arguments? Then don’t unfairly personalize. There’s the other obvious point: stupidity is no bar to being a good journalist — Charles Moore is living proof.

Basically, your argument is more or self-destructing. You can’t see any evidence that she was meritoriously hired. You think there’s a class of people who are willing to forego merit in hiring. Therefore she was not meritoriously hired. It’s really easy to make that argument back at you. I can’t see any evidence that you’re in a position to judge her merit. There’s a class of people who are willing to say nasty things about Yasmin. So, you’re one of them. Go hang out on BiasedBBC or whatever it is you do of a Sunday.

I used to watch the politics program on news24 in Britain, where journalists are quized about the news for an hour.

YAB was a regular, one week they were discussing economics and someone began talking about the “Anglo-Saxon model”
YAB retorted

“I’m not Anglo-Saxon; Thank God”.

Racist too.

Why does Danny think he has won some sort of point here? By cutting and pasting some unrelated statements he has merely made himself look a fool.

Here is a tip Danny: If you find that the only person agreeing with you is E Goldstein you are on the wrong side of the argument.

“I can’t believe that YAB or Robert Fisk contribute as much to the Independent as they drive away.”

I don’t like either of them.

But how come YAB’s appointment is automatically the result of “affirmative action” but Robert Fisk’s isn’t? Why only leap to bring race/gender into it when it’s a non-white female?

“By cutting and pasting some unrelated statements he has merely made himself look a fool.”

They are not unrelated. Alec is bang to rights.

As I recall Danny is an Englishman living in Essex who has an Asian wife. He sees racism everywhere and feels the need to bring his skills in discerning racism to HP. I for one think he provides a marvellous service.

(If I have the wrong Danny, I unreservedly apologise)

Whoo, Alec is bang to rights. Go and tell everyone you know. Tell them Alec is bang to rights. “What?” they’ll say. “Well there’s this guy on this blog, and I technically defeated him about some minor point or other that you couldn’t give a toss about.” “Oh.”

Racism (thinly veiled or not) is not “some minor point.”

More of an obsession…

More in racism news:

Hardeep Singh Kohli has been sacked for being “inappropriate”. He should have been sacked for being pompous and boring.

I would;

a) Like to thank all my supporters at HP, the rank and file of us commenters, whose decent outrage got me promptly unbanned on Fiday.

I received e-mails speaking of my many ‘fans’. Well I don’t do fandom, thus I prefer anonymity.

I see my support as coming from the ‘fellow travellers’ of HP who are not united by a ‘kinship’ of ideology but by a ‘Kithship’ of respect for the open forum of debate at HP that seems increasingly under attack.

I am glad to say that my defenders include people who often strongly disagree with me or even think I am an arse (thank you Alec:)

b) I consider that this virtual Agora is under siege far more from those who would silence unpleasant speech that offends them than by the purveyors of unpleasant and bigoted speach who can be argued down or chased off by the commonweal.

c) I would like to point out that this thread is entirely devoted to false accusations of racism made against HP commenters because they object to a Journalist whose modus operandi is that of making false accusations of racism.

d) As far as I can tell from prior knowledge of these commenters (but one must be careful to never assume the ethnicity of any virtual person) those making accusations of racism (to my mind utterly false) are white and they are accusing other white people of a ‘thought crime’ that they obviously consider themselves incapable of.

e) get a grip for goodness sake just hear yourself and take a look at yourself and the world.

Throw away your Edward Said and Franz Fanon derivative nonsense.

The irony of the fact that this literary Colonialism and Imperialist discourse of negritude was the product of decolonisation written by members of the notionally and very late and very lightly colonised ‘other’.

Two seriously flawed intellectuals who were offered direct entry to the sanctum sanctorum of the ‘high culture’ of the liberal decolonising societies who replaced the former Colonial powers, yet for reasons part structural and part, psychological chose only to see a heart of darkness where others saw the light of change, have bizarrely become the deities for White wannabe torch bearers of the black and brown torch bearers of the fantastically imagined imperialistically oppressed of the Earth.

f) For all you deluded, who for the least attractive of reasons insist on maintaining your self appointed positions as the final arbiters of what and who is racist, and what the correct punishment should be; I have news for you;

1) Noone elected you so shut up. You are annoying and intelectually stunted. As witch finders who admit to no self doubt or error in your accusations, you never apologise or express remorse for the smears and slights you so freely dispense. You are enablers of the very racism you claim to oppose.

2) Racism or Sexism are not psychological conditions or attitudes or even if they are it is actions not thoughts or intentions that harm.

3) For all you latter day worshippers of the inherently racist cult of negritude (that at best can be said to have been a necessary intermediate stage of intellectual emancipation) I have news for you.

4) That was then this is now.

Now the world is not only decolonised it is threatened by the imperialist revivalism of three Empires only marginally colonised.

Last week the last vestige of the economic ‘neo-colonialism’ of the post WWII post Cold War world was wound up.

The G8 met its end as the talking shop of the great powers. Goodbye to all that and hello to the new powers Mexico, India, China and Brazil.

Don’t you endless echoes of a bye gone era ever read what is happening now?

Brazil already a major economic power has discovered major oil reserves greater than that of Venezuela and Saudi Arabia.

The reserves are deep and expensive initially to extract from. In a world of restricted Capital, Brazil has gone to China who are funding the oil exploration and extraction cutting out the middlemen the notionally US Enron and Haliburton.

Dont you boring jerks get it that in a multi-plural world power system that we now inhabit race and racism takes on an entirely new meaning.

You’re tired anti-white slogans of negritude are the new racism.

As a sometime resident of Brazil I have just been reduced to a reviled minority by Lula’s racist rant about the evils of blue eyed white people and its you dim wits and the likes of YAB who feed this poisonous and dangerous rubbish.

Just wake up and smell the new World order white people will have only a modest influence, if that on the course of this century, enough already.

Oh god he’s back…

A friend of mine in New Orleans has a parrot called Stuart I’ll teach him that.

So far he says ‘You go girl’, ‘come out with your hands up’ ‘uh huh’ ‘I’m done here’ and he makes random noises imitating the answer machine and trucks reversing.

Edmund Standing, I share your horror at those quatoations from the Bible, but they should remain untouched. The Bible is an historical document, and reveals the truth about ancient societies. Better not to cover them up. The fact that those realiteies found expression in words takes a step out of the literal realities. We have to face barabarism rather than sweep it under a carpet. Lady Macbeth was prepared to smash the head of a new born babe on the rocks; that was the kind of person she was.

God save us from censhorship and political correctness with regard to gays and women. Part of their struggle is too perceive how they are sometimes still seen. I saw a police thriller yesterday in which the intention was to be politically correct about gays but it misfired. I’d rather see this than a hunky-dory story in which everything is O.K. and normal.

Gayness is far from being normalised in the cinema. Special films on the subject are special films, they provide a frisson, in particular for special cineaste evenings and are hardly reflected in the majority of films. In a regular straight film for the most part the subject is portrayed awkwardly. (See Crocodile Dundee). Gays are often associated, like ‘classical music,’ with criminality. Farley Granger in Hitchcocks Rope. (Mozart is specialty with very, very evil criminals).

We are far from gays appearing quite naturally in run of the mill filns. In some Italian serials they rarely appear, but purely as token gays. Bokeback Mountain was imitated by the Italians with the handsome Raoul Bova, but Bova felt obliged in interviews to say that the naked fucking bum in the film was not his. Why could he not just shut up and leave us with our illusions? Prejudice lurking around very corner. Bova acts the part of a policeman quite often and in those films it would be quite taboo for him to fall in love with a colleague. This is not political but conventional correctness.

Once the women’s movement were contemptous of literary figures like Anna Bovary, Anna Karenina, Hedda Gabler and others. My sister poured scorn on me when I mentioned them. It was more than one’s life was worth to answer. But to myself I said, “Well, if those women don’t represent you, they definitely represent ME.”

They were politically incorrect and therin lay their correctness.

Racism (thinly veiled or not) is not “some minor point.”

Actually, it is. It’s not enormously important. And you are still boring as hell.

Its nice to se that Metta has set himself up as the arbiter of who can be “the final arbiters of what and who is racist”. I have a horrible feeling that he cannot see the irony in that… But to quote from an arbiter:

Noone elected you so shut up. You are annoying and intelectually stunted (sic)

Anybody out there understand Chinese or Urdu? I sometimes think the comments of staff in Indian or Chinese restaurants sound as though they are insults to the big-nosed foreign infidel round-eyed sea monsters they are serving so attentively.

Metta is lovely. Odd, but lovely.

Welsome back Mettaculture. And you’ve announced your return magnificently!!!! I remember reading that geneticists are predicting that the ‘whiteness’ will disappear in a couple of hundred years time. It’s not the colour that’s important though, it’s the social being and morality.

Welcome back Metta; the M(I)LF was good while it lasted

Welcome back Metta –

At least I assume it is you. You do sound rather hyped up! It’s probably back up!!

The circumstances of your disappearance were to say the least odd. Rather like ordering off someone from the pitch for complaining about Maradonna’s hand ball.

As for your post I agree with some of your perspective. Of course things are changing. In 50 years’ time the USA and the EU are unlikely to have the dominant economies in the world. China, India, and Brazil are also going to be key players. Some parts of Africa – Gabon, Ghana, Botswana – appear to be getting their act together. Any country likely to create a proper democratic system is not going to go into reverse. Reasons for optimism.

However I think you underestimate the inter-connected legacy of slavery, colonialism, imperialism and racism. The world of images is still very Eurocentric. You say you are sometimes resident in Brazil – isn’t that one of the most colour-coded societies on Earth?

Opposition to free speech seems to be common to many on the left – whether Alibhai-Brown or the Obama administration:

http://ibloga.blogspot.com/
http://www.nypost.com/seven/07112009/postopinion/opedcolumnists/gag_the_internet__178749.htm

Hey heeere’s Metta. Enjoyed your comeback volley very much.

Nobody’s views should be banned or suppressed in any society that aspires to be free and domcratic, not even Alibhai Brown’s unfortunately.

emmanuelgoldstein – “Your argument was pretty simple: you couldn’t discern any evidence that the lady deserved her job; you determined that there were newspapers willing to employ her despite her lack of qualifications. So, she must be an undeserving affirmative action hire.”

Sounds reasonable.

“Appealing to her stupidity doesn’t help, since your judgement is what’s at stake. First, just as you’re willing to discount the lady’s judgement for no good reason, I’m willing to discount yours: I’m just going to stipulate that you’re unable to distinguish stupid from not-stupid. Don’t like unfairly-personalized arguments? Then don’t unfairly personalize. There’s the other obvious point: stupidity is no bar to being a good journalist — Charles Moore is living proof.”

Except you have missed that bit where I said “we are all agreed”. It is not my personal judgement. It is a consensus as far as I can see. Backed up by ample evidence. She writes on a regular basis. Stupid things by and large. So that would be two good reasons to accept the notion she is dim – everyone who reads her seems to think so and she writes a lot of stupid things.

Now please feel free to discount whatever you like. That won’t make YAB’s arguments intelligent, nor will it change the basis on which she was hired, whatever that was.

Charles Moore is many things but he is not stupid. But even if he were, the fact that there is another stupid journalist would not prove that YAB is a missing Mensa member.

“Basically, your argument is more or self-destructing. You can’t see any evidence that she was meritoriously hired. You think there’s a class of people who are willing to forego merit in hiring. Therefore she was not meritoriously hired.”

It must be self-destruction in a very real concrete sense only visible to the dwindling band of Marxist-Leninist saddos who seem to like to hang out on Harry’s Place. Because I have yet to see a coherent argument against it. By the way, I don’t think there are, there are. This is not an issue open for dispute.

“It’s really easy to make that argument back at you. I can’t see any evidence that you’re in a position to judge her merit. There’s a class of people who are willing to say nasty things about Yasmin. So, you’re one of them. Go hang out on BiasedBBC or whatever it is you do of a Sunday.”

I am sorry but that’s an argument? Come on. Go watch Monty Python. It is a lame excuse for an insult.

Danny – “Racism (thinly veiled or not) is not “some minor point.””

And yet as far as I can see all Alec did was express some satisfaction in the idea that someone who judges everyone on racial and gender grounds should be so judged herself. I don’t recall him actually endorsing racism or sexism. I can enjoy the idea of a vicious dog being bit without endorsing biting.

But so what if he did? That would not be nice. Nor would it be a decent thing to do. But it does not make his argument wrong by definition. Nor does it make YAB intelligent or a decent journalist. She is not, after all. So it is irrelevant.

By the way, while we are squabbling over triffles, everyone noticed that Azad Ali is back at work at the Treasury?

I guess calling for British soldiers to die is not a political statement.

Welsome back Metta old bean.

Welcome back Metta old bean.

Is s/he a human bean?

Stuart

Yes you spell better than me, or at least use the spell checker and/or go over your little missives repeatedly until, they are word perfect.

It still will not help you with your poor grasp of logic however and hence the ability to construct an argument.

The people I want to be silent are the ones who wish to silence others because they feel their speech to be unacceptably racist, sexist or some other category of forbidden speech.

I have asked them to be quiet because no free society can begin to police thought crimes and the concept of racism, being charitable, that informs the understanding of those who would restrict speech, alleged to be racist, is at best, a psychological one that sees certain kinds of speech as revealing of an underlying racist attitude.

In fact even such a flawed concept is generally absent from the would be restricters of speech, often the accusation of racism is generated seemingly reflexively by mentioning the skin colour, ethnic origin or gender of a person or persons, that the would-be censor deems to be deserving of protection.

At no point, and this is the point that requires comprehension and the application of logic, so please pay attention, did I suggest that I am an arbiter of what legitimately constitutes racism (though I did imply that the racism that is actually outlawed is a form of behaviour not thought) or that I am an arbiter of who should be an arbiter, nor is this, as a matter of fact, implied in my words despite your quixotic gloss placed upon the words you have chosen to lever from their irridescently clear context.

You may have noticed that I do not spend an awful lot of time accusing people of racism on the basis of their words or what i presume to be their underlying attitudes.

I have, I feel, more important things to do, such as being an arbiter of my daily toiletry needs and so forth.

I am many things but telepathy is not one of my skills.

In fact telepathy, you might not yet realise, does not exist, and therefore it would be wise for people to abstain from its attempt.

Another succinct way of putting my argument is to say;

‘Negritude gets on my tits’.

Unfortunately this will immediately trigger a Pavlovian reflex in the mind sof the ’snipperati ‘because they are likely to misunderstand the provenance of the term negritude and they are unlikely to be sufficiently in touch with their own nipples to realise that men too have tits.

field

Points taken.

The interesting thing about Brazil (and Spanish speaking Latin America though this is significantly different from Brazil and varies greatly between different countries again) is that race is constituted quite differently.

To simplify greatly as a starting point (complexity and divergence from these types of course exist) it is worth stating that the major difference between the slave societies of North vs South America is this;

North American Slavery was based from on a prohibition of miscegenation central and South American slave societies were not.

Louisiana of course was first a Spanish then a French ‘creole’ slave owning society. (though creole which came to mean mixed race actually refers originally to native French, Spanish or Portuguese born in the new World Colonies.

Now the most important historical fact about Brazil is that from the beginning a mixed race society occurred and encouraged despite slavery continuing until 1888 (I have met people whose mothers were born slaves).

Mixed race children were classed as white and permitted social, educational and employment opportunities that were denied even to Spanish born in the new world in the Spanish Empire.

Black (freed slaves) and mixed race people (as in Louisiana and Belize) were also fairly commonly slave owners.

In the period leading up to and following the ending of slavery in 1888 (it was actually a stepwise emancipation over decades rather than a suddenly one day)
There was an official policy of ‘embrancamento’ or whiteisation.

This occurred after the period of the Portuguese monarch Dom Pedro deciding that he preferred his mulatto Brazil and shifted the Empire there.

The fact that from the early 19th C without independence brazil ceased to be colonised is also a tremendously important shaping factor on the meaning of race in Brazil.

Becoming white was seen as a consequence of a social and behavioural conformity to a bourgeois conservative catholic culture.

The legacy of this is that you can be sitting at a table and eves drop on the people at the next table complaining about ‘os pretos’ the blacks, only to turn and see a family all of whom would be seen as black in the UK (where Black is a catch all non White category much to the anger of many Latin Americans here).

At the same time of course as this whiteisation policy was continuing and the creation of a largely brown society was being made slavery with all its social and sexual abuse continued.

Black women were always eroticised from the outset in Brazil (and the Portuguese colonies generally), and so were black men.

The legacy of this is that the blacker a women is then the more sexually available she is seen as being and that a white man with her may be assumed to be her pimp or client rather than her partner (happened to me with one friend quite a lot).

But Brazil is nothing if not sexually complex so this configuration is often equalised, as is the plot in every telenovella, where the upperclass woman with a philandering husband is having an affair with the black or mulatto mechanic.

The biggest difference however is that colour itself is not a taboo subject and colour and hair types are part of the common vocabulary of people.

In themselves (independent of context) these have no negative connotations. There is nothing racist in Brazil per se in talking of skin colour gradations or hair type.

This is somewhat different in Venezuela where the official ideology is that there is no racism in society (a small minority of people are either ‘white’ or ‘black’) .

My guide book annoyed me by its insistence in trying to impose Anglos-American racial categories onto Venezuela.

On the other hand I was rendered speechless by a man (this is a rare event for me even in Spanish and Portuguese) not a Chavista, who assured me that America was the most racist society on earth whereas Venezuela had no racism.

He then told me to be extremely careful of armed robbery and that the easiest way to avoid it was to avoid black people!

The affirmative action comment was nasty and uncalled for. Can we move on from this now?

Some interesting points there Metta.

A few I would make:

1. Slaves are ALWAYS sexualised by slave owning societies and it is because they are rendered powerless to resist the master’s (or mistress’s for that matter) sexual advances. I am sure in Arab societies both the very white and the very black woman are perceived as sexualised as a result of slavery.

2. I think we have something approaching Victorian prudery in the UK as regards observable “racial” differences in outward appearance such as skin tone, eye, nose and lip shapes, hair texture and colour, build of body etc. And just as there was a great deal of sexual ignorance as a consequence of Victorian prudery, so it is with people’s appearance. A lot of Europeans think African hair is thicker and coarser than European hair, whereas it is actually finer – but of course tightly curled.

field

But again in Brazil things were far more complicated there is an archetypal Black female power. Chica da Silva a slave who won her freedom through ‘enslaving’ her slave owners is still an iconic figure in Brazilian culture

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chica_da_Silva_(person)

The Portuguese Empire remained in many ways a pre-modern pre-enlightenment one.

In it slavery was an institution closer to that of the ancient or Islamic world were many slaves were able to achieve social status.

Until the Portuguese revolution of 1974 the dream of most peasant Portuguese was still to go to Angola or Mozambique and get a farm and an African wife.

A Portuguese friend of mine in Brazil was routinely teased for being ‘crazy about the blackest skin like all the Portuguese’.

Brazil is one of the places I feel most at home on Earth. ones friends are always of every imaginable human colour range and ethnic type and it is considered rude to pretend that these differences do not exist, rather they are embraced and positively enjoyed.

There is no shame to be attracted to or in a relationship with contrasting ethnicities.

Most Brazilians are morreno (brown) but can be pinky or bluey white through to navy black.

I am considered to be from Sao Paulo in Rio or Salvador. In Sao Paolo they think I am from curitiba.

My accent is not exactly not Brazilian its just ‘de ninguna lugar’ from no place (and everywhere at the same time).

My teachers were from all over and it appears I picked up characteristic forms from all of them.

I miss the place and will be going there and to Vn in 2or 3 weeks.

The people I want to be silent are the ones who wish to silence others

……….Irony overload……..

He is truly beyond parody. In the mean time, Metta, please please tell me about how marvellous you are.

Until the Portuguese revolution of 1974 the dream of most peasant Portuguese was still to go to Angola or Mozambique and get a farm and an African wife.

Any evidence to support this bizarre statement? Statistics?

Thought not.

Metta -good to see you back; you were missed.

Whether you agree with them or not (and I do not know enough about Latin America to have a contrary view) mettaculture’s last 2 posts characteristically provide much food for thought, and enjoyment of the mode of expression, whereas with a typical Benji comment, (although he is capable of better) reading it merely vacates a place in the brain, a la Homer S, for an image of a mug of beer.

Mettaculture
I enjoyed your fascinatingly informative mails. This was my favourite bit:

“Brazil is one of the places I feel most at home on Earth. ones friends are always of every imaginable human colour range and ethnic type and it is considered rude to pretend that these differences do not exist, rather they are embraced and positively enjoyed.”

I once lived with a an American couple in Paris. They were wonderful to me. He was black or mulatto, according to your view, and she was Jewish. She was not very happy when I told her I had originally thought she was an American Indian. They were not at all happy either if I made the distinction between them to other people.

In a strangely inverted form of racism I got the impression that one had to pretend everyone was white. You couldn’t say, “Look at that handsome black man across the street,” when one was simply trying to distinguish him from the people around him.

I had a black American friend in Verona called Rhonda. When I talked to others about Rhonda and they looked puzzled, I’d say, “You know that beautiful black woman who is a dancer,” and they’d reply, “Oh yes, of course!” It is a question of identification as well as a celebration of diversity.

I find it amazing that Metta has such a gang of fangirls as he always reminds me of a pompous snug room bore droning on inaccurately on his favorite subject (himself). Also his arguments are circular and based on facts he pulls out of his ass.

You are right, Amie. Welcome back, Metta.

I have boundless respect and admiration for the official HP posters, but the erudition of so many of HP’s commenters and the plurality of voices is what makes this site so unique and special.

Life on the funny farm with people from alien cultures becoming our spiritual mentors. Brown was on about the very real problem of teenage sex UK, style recently. If we had a situation like in India were 10-15% of indian girls and women are fifty pence sex workers neatly compartmentalised from mainstream society we would be ok then!

The sublime spectacle of YAB fulminating against a book she hasn’t even read. Nick Cohen reacts with admirable restraint.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IjK-RQvSJE

Oh, good grief, the HP database readiness takes another dive as Metta’s posts return.

Danny, dude, what are you talking about? I maintained the same line throughout. It was you who thought mentioning anyone’s sex or ethnicity was, ipso facto, sexist and racist.

Danny, d’you think EmmanuelGoldstein is another racist?

mettaculture/

I haven’t been around much lately, so didn’t know you were banned. Glad to see you back. You have alwaus been–for several reasons–one of my “favs” here at HP mainly for both the force of your logic and ability to marshal an argument as well as your fairly wide ranging knowledge and interests. Didn’t know you had friends in New Orleans, from that I take it you must get down fairly often or at least intermittently. We should get together. Better yet, I’ll contact the powers that be here and give them permission to give you my email address. If we can’t get together right away at least you might introduce me to the owners of the parrot. We could be neighbors for all I (or you) know. :)

As I am married to a Louisiana Creole from Opelousas (home of Jim Bowie as it’s claim to historical fame) I am quite familiar with the various racial delineations and categorizations you talk about.
You have done a fine and accurate job of analysis about which I would not quibble one whit. As you are probably well aware, there is a growing Brazilian presence in New Orleans now–especially post-Katrina as N.O. is, of all cities in the US, a perfect “fit” culturally in so many ways. Perhaps the only thing I would ad to your comparison of race relations in the US and Brazil is to simply say that, as a rule, in Brazil if one is not absolutely “black”, one is considered “white” socially; in the US by contrast the obverse is true regarding strictly “black-white” relations–unless one is totally “white” the old “one-drop” rule is still unofficially in effect, one is considered black by the majority of whites.

Of course there are many exceptions to this rule–all of them involving Louisiana Creoles. During the great depression, many of the fairest did (and still do ) migrate to Calif. where they could (and can) “passe blanque.” Many are they in Calif who consider themselves white who are not even aware of their Creole roots.
Louisiana Creoles are far different from simply being a mixed-race people–indeed, they would meet most criteria for being considered a totally separate race–and many of them view themselves as such–as neither black nor white, but especially neither. And they meet all the tests for a separate race. They have their own language, (French) religion, (Catholicism) historical culture (Creole) and geographical borders (SW Louisiana.) It is no accident that Xavier Univ. in New Orleans is considered to be simultaneously the only black univ. in the nation that is Catholic (most blacks are Protestant) and the only Catholic univ in the nation that is black. That is because Xavier WAS NOT founded as a “black” university, but by Creoles for Creoles. It is only because of the post-Civil War trend race relations took that “Creoles” came to be considered “black.” (Young Creoles, for example, in general were taught classical music; American blacks played jazz. Creoles are highly conservative and tend to vote Republican–Blacks Democrat.)

Go into any little town in South Louisiana and there’s three of everything–the black barber, the white barber and the Creole Barber. Same for undertaker, schools (Creole-Catholic, White Catholic & public, Black-public) night-clubs, churches, (Black-Protestent, White-Catholic, Creole-their own Catholic) etc.

If Swedes, Danes, Norwegians and Finns may each be considered a separate race, despite the fact that no one can discern which is which by photo alone, than surely Creoles which plainly look neither like Whoopie Goldberg nor Marylin Monoroe and may be differentiated from either by any third-grader, should be considered a separate race as well.

Blacks fight such ideas like crazy, however. First, blacks love to “claim” the fair-skinned, soft-haired Creoles as it makes them seem more socially nearer to “whites” in many ways and to consider Creole female “beauties” standards of “black” beauty. Secondly, they see the designation of Creoles as a separate race or category of people (and separate designations for multi-racials in general which is why they have fought so fiercely to keep such a designation as a separate cat. off the census forms) as a dilution of their political power. The “Black Power” movement of the early 70s brought many Creoles into the black ambit where heretofore thay had not been previously and blacks don’t want to “lose” these people now–especially as they are also under assault/pressure by Hispanic numbers. Every single “Black ” Mayor of New Oleans until Ray Nagin has not come from the “Black” community, but was Creole. The first “Black” Mayor of New Orleans, “Dutch” Morial,
wasn’t called “Dutch” because he wore wooden shoes. And even Nagin himsefg has part of his roots in the Creole community.

You are probably familiar, mettaculture, of the NAACP backed legal movement in Brazil to raise the “consciousness” of people “of color” that normally are considered white socially by forcing them, through legal challenges to univ. admissions practices, to be declared “black” for purposes of preferential treatment. Teams of black lawyers from the US have descended on Brazil to aid in this effort. And of course the thinking behind all of this is that, with an increasing numbers of people in the US who consider themselves to be “multi-racial” as opposed to “black” and with increasing numbers of Brazilians migrating to the US, (as in N.O.) the NAACP can ill afford to have the specter of Brazil and their social attitudes about race hovering over the scene as an alternative to the US model that sees blacks “claim” everyone who is not “white”
even if whites also are in collusion with blacks on this score. This is why, incidentally, Louisiana Creoles have always been regarded by blacks outside Louisiana as being “uppity,” as they generally strenuously resist being lumped in with the black community. In general, since there are Creoles at either end of the color spectrum, as a group they tend to move in society seamlessly between the black and white worlds as a nebulous, amorphous amoeba-like undifferentiated mass in which unspoken codes allow those with blue eyes and blond hair, but are firmly in the Creole. family by birth and blood, to pass in the white community if they desire w.o being “called” on it; while others whose connection is more tenuous and distant, but still for all that very real, don’t even know of their Creole relatives and heritage–but you can be sure their Creole relatives know them, even if they refrain from bringing it to public attention out of respect for their privacy.

Addendum: Apologizes for the spelling, etc. I am out on the West Coast in Calif where it is 3:30 am and I am bleary eyed but still mucking about.

One additional point, also. The Portuguese had an officially government backed program of “assimalado” that actively encouraged inter-marriage between blacks, natives, etc., and whites as a way to cement the cultural ties between Portugal and her colonies in order the more to tightly bind them to her. No other Colonial nation officially, formally, sanctioned the mixing of the races through marriage–although the French came close in the all-encompassing way they propagandized their culture by the Government helped by the liberal attitudes held by her troops, civil-servants, etc., towards race relations. But even the French did not have a formally-backed government policy of encouraging inter-marriage with colonial natives in the manner of Portugal–who was alone unique in this regard.

Fascinating posts, virgil xenophon and metta. The essentializing and politicisation of something as arbitrary as skin pigmentation is highly corrosive.

Metta’s post reminded me of an article Ben Goldacre wrote a few years back, responding to a strange essay by Dr Oliver Curry. Goldacre noted (in response to Curry’s claim that, “. . . racial differences will be ironed out by interbreeding, producing a uniform race of coffee-coloured people.”):

“Dr Oliver Curry seems to think that geographical and social mobility is a new thing, and that this will produce uniformly coffee coloured humans in 1,000 years. Oliver has perhaps not been to Brazil, where black African, white European, and Amerindian have lived side by side and bred together for many centuries. The Brazilians have not gone coffee coloured, they in fact still show a wide range of skin pigmentation, from black to tan. This is because skin pigmentation seems to be coded for by a fairly small number of genes and probably doesn’t blend and even out as Oliver – a political theorist, not a scientist – suggests.”
http://www.badscience.net/2006/10/“all-men-will-have-big-willies”/

The 1959 film by Douglas Sirk, ‘Imitation Of Life’ was a fascinating insight into the phenomenon of ‘passing’ as white.

amie

Oh please put your contrary view as i am sure that your argument will be well founded.

I am not arguing for a unified position on race in Latin America far from it but I do think the actual cultural and historical contexts rather than imposing a model of race that derives from post colonial discourse and the Black American experience.

Brazil is very different from all Spanish speaking Latin American countries in many ways.

The Wiki article I cite above on Chica da Silva is an example of the attempt to shoe horn the cultural reality into ‘contemporary scholarship’ on race ie the ideology of ‘Blackness’ (negritude).

It shows that Blackness studies are racist in assuming a unified black experience (if not prevented by ‘miscegenation’).

Black American culture’s opposition to miscegenation is the mirror image of the ideology of the late Southern slaveocracy.

Now obviously a society Brazil, where mixed race children and the children of slaves could reach high office (as a historical fact) before emancipation is going to be a radically different society from one (the US) where mixed race children are officially black nd the children of slaves were slaves until one sixteenth part ‘black’.

As I say in the Spanish new World ‘los criollos’ children of Spaniards born in the new World were not allowed to hold office (which led of course inexorably to the middle class liberal revolutionary wars of Independence) and mixed race children were non -white.

Again there are great differences between the countries in their demography and social and political freighting of race.

The Vice Royalty of Peru (Peru, Bolivia, part of Ecuador and Paraguay) New Spain had a very small population of ‘White’ Spaniards and owing to the fact that Spanish women rarely survived pregnancy and childbirth in the Andes there was an official blind spot over ‘miscegenation’ and the population of these areas today is largely mestizo and Aymara and Quechua Indian culture has a strong cultural continuity though thee is a great deal of social and political prejudice.

Nueva Grenada (Venezuela, Colombia , Panama and part of Ecuador) on the other hand had a far higher reliance on African slaves and most people are neither mestizo nor mullato but a mixing of both (Chaves looks the way most Venezuelans look).

There are very few pre-columbian cultures extent in Venezuela or Colombia notwithstanding the fact that genetically obviously their descendents are a part of the majoity (there are of course many indigenous tribes in the interior the Orinocco delta and the orinocco and amazon river basins).

Mexico and Central America had a relatively small population of African slaves and are largely mestizo societies with many indigenous peoples such as the Maya still inhabiting the areas of their great historical civilisation.

There are English speaking black (and Garifuna) populations on the Caribbean coast from Belize to Nicaragua.

Interestingly Belize is the only example I know from the British Empire where a creole mixed race society developed, the founders being Pirates aaaargh and their slaves.

This was another society with the South American pattern of slaveholding where a mixed race society emerged and free blacks were often slave owners.

After the US civil war some defeated confederates left the US for Belize. Most did not stay when they encountered a mixed race ruling class.

Now one of the reasons for the differing social systems North vs South either opposing or embracing miscegenation was the incredibly high death rates, from epidemic disease, and the harsh conditions of sugar cane cultivation.

The demand for labour was met by the continual importation of slaves until the transatlantic trade was stopped by the British Navy (though Brazil seemed to be better at evading the British frigates than the US a feature of the tradewinds as much as anything).

The end or severe restriction on the supply of new slaves was a furhter impetus to reproductive mixing.

In the US the living standards of Southern state slaves were such that by the mid 19thC there was a high fertility rate which due to the laws on the children of slaves remaining slaves was both the source of the continuing domestic slave trade and also a strong disincentive to any male who might have been remotely concerned about the fate of his children to have mixed race children that were legally slaves.

There is racism everywhere in Latin America but its character is very different from the experience of the US and from the post colonial societies of Europe and the recent attempts to understand this complex and diverse phenomenon in terms of an academic and popular Anglo-American model of race, blackness and whiteness, does more harm than good.

Indeed the terms of this discourse are often deeply offensive suggesting that by assimilating through ‘miscegenation’ into a white ideal the vast majority of the population of particularly say Brazil and Venezuela are in effect ‘Uncle Toms’ who have sold out their blacker bretheren and so ensured their social position at the cost of greater racial prejudice for the Blackest.

This is a nasty poisonous and socially divisive discourse ignorant of actual history.

On the other hand the failure of the Anglo-American discourse of Blackness to fit Latin American society at all well exposes it for the destabilising essentialist (and thus racist) grievance mongering discourse that it really is.

The ‘failure’ of the US Black community activist model in Brazil is only surprising if you forget that unlike in the US, African culture in terms of religion , music and other art forms, even the Yoruba language, is a vibrant living tradition not a dangerously fantasised one of Black Athena and the nation of Islam.

virgil

I had not read your comments before I submitted by last. it is eerily as if i was anticipating your comments, including the harmful influence of American black concsiouness ‘Imperialism’ in Brazil.

My flight to Caraccas may well be via Mami in which case I will make a detour via NO to teach Stuart to say ‘oh my God he’s back’.

My friend is a Pohlman and a child of the ante-bellum plantation home ‘the myrtles’ if you know it.

My e-mail address is mettaculture@gmail.com

Stuart

>>>>>’Until the Portuguese revolution of 1974 the dream of most peasant Portuguese was still to go to Angola or Mozambique and get a farm and an African wife.
Any evidence to support this bizarre statement? Statistics?
Thought not.’…………

Have you read Virgil’s comments on the Portuguese policy of ‘asimilado’ which corroborate my point yet ?

”’Thought not””

—————————————————
‘I find it amazing that Metta has such a gang of fangirls’

ooooh bitter and a frustrated male chauvinist!

I have fanboys and fanmen and fan…. well I am far too polite to ask.

And I am also a fan of my fans its not fandom at all really, its called mutual respect and regard.

Try it and you might spend less time in the snug nursing your Lager Shandy (you have to drive and have no-one to pool the car with) in the corner simmering over the person you think is a bore because like all Telegraph readers you hate and despise those who acquire knowledge and freely share it.

You secretly want that knowledge so that you can abuse it in order to cock your leg against someone and piss over them.

Of course you must believe that anyone who has acquired knowledge and the means to sort and share it freely must be a charlatan and the knowledge invented.

As someone who dispenses opinion but does not put forward an argument based on evidence, you obviously don’t realise how in a forum like this you get shot down in flames for posting invented evidence.

Try it it will sharpen your wits and improve your attention to detail and accuracy.

metta, sorry to disappoint, but I have no contrary view on the continent, having visited briefly and read little.

My visits were confined to 2 cut price cruises from SA as child in mid and late 60s. A man called Max Wilson, the Freddie Lakier de son jour promoted these cruises which stopped at Rio, Buenos Aires, Montivideo and Sao Paulo. £40 all in paid for a tiny bunk cabin for my parents and us two kids for a 3 week cruise. The crew were all Liverpudlians who claimed to be friends with this new band called the Beatles. I had never met anyone from the UK and asked one if he were Irish and I was taken aback with the force with which he exploded “I’m not bloody Irish.”

At Rio my little sister was bought a cloth doll, a bit like a girl golly, with a pitch black face, and we were told by the tour guides this was a Carioca doll, which was the word for a black inhabitant of Rio. I have just looked up carioca and it says nothing about being related to blackness.

Hey, Marcus. I just finished reading Goldacre’s book last month and thought of the Brazil thing too. Just finished reading Malik’s Strange Fruit this month and think that the blending of races thing needs to be qualified. Skin colour can’t equal ‘race’ or we seem to end up grouping people purely on levels of melanin which would result in highly non-intuitive ideas about race.

Amie –

I know for a fact many Scousers tire of being told they “must be Irish” because they are from Liverpool. There were indeed plenty of Irish in Liverpool but also Scots, English, Welsh and – a few of African or Euro-African heritage (cf Heathcliffe from Wuthering Heights).

field: that’s interesting. I thought it was just me not having a clue.

Hello Metta

You seem to be treating history as different “discourses” (of which of course, the white European one would have been the most “priveliged” until very recently) and suggesting that there is now a black anglo-American discourse which sweeps away (or attempts to sweep away) more problematical local and mixed-race “discourses” in attempt to acheive hegemony. Am I right in thinking that you see this (at least when taken out of the lecture hall and put forward as a political programme) as the danger?

Should it be the case that history is merely different discourses (none of which should be privileged) then surely the answer for South and central American peoples who do not fit the anglo-American categories of “black” and “white” is to evolve historical writers who cleave closer to the “realist” model of history (I generalise completely here but I find that S Americans tend to be drawn towards the writing of “magic realist” novels and not towards the European conception of (fast evaporating) “scientific” history. To use Barthes’ terms (and I can hear David T laughing as I type): written history ossiclates between two poles: one is the metaphorical form which borders upon the lyrical and symbolic the other (closely associated with a fucntional form of history) takes on a metonymic form and becomes a close relation of the epic. Given that (if I am understanding you rightly) we now have an Anglo-American “black” discourse struggling for world hegemony with an Anglo-American “white” discourse isn’t the only answer for smaller voices to unite and form their own semi-epic discourse? Or do you think that the enormous “metanarratives” (in this case symbolised by the black Athena/Fanon functional narratives that you have mentioned) be smashed into their constituent parts – and would a world without such over-arching narratives really be such a good thing anyway?

a few of African or Euro-African heritage (cf Heathcliffe from Wuthering Heights).

Old Emily B doesn’t give much background on Heathcliff though does she? Although he is “found” on Liverpool dockfront and is described as Swarthy, Mr Earnshaw always refers to him as a “gypsy brat”.

I once lived with a an American couple in Paris. They were wonderful to me. He was black or mulatto, according to your view, and she was Jewish. She was not very happy when I told her I had originally thought she was an American Indian. They were not at all happy either if I made the distinction between them to other people.

In a strangely inverted form of racism I got the impression that one had to pretend everyone was white. You couldn’t say, “Look at that handsome black man across the street,” when one was simply trying to distinguish him from the people around him.

Beautiful, beautiful. Such concentrated aggressive ignorance, in only a couple of paragraphs.

I know a nice girl who went to America for her American studies degree, and two people who’ve recently returned from Africa. The American-studies girl was genuinely shocked — and rather annoyed — to hear herself described as a WASP by well-meaning American strangers at a subway station. The two Africa-travellers were equally annoyed when strangers continually referred to them by race, and both of them eventually took to telling people up front that they preferred not to be addressed by race. Across races, it appears, folk strongly prefer not to be called out on their racial identity by strangers.

I’m particularly enjoying the remark about having to pretend everyone is white. Basically, you’re objecting to treating people as though they’re racially invisible: as though their race doesn’t matter. You appear incapable of distinguishing that from treating them as white. But invisibility is generally a natural property of anyone who looks like the majority race in a given area: it follows that in China, racial invisibility is a property of all those who look Chinese.

Your underlying assumption is that since your friends don’t look white, there’s no point treating them as white. The obverse of that is the intensely amusing thought that if they did white, then that would be enough to justify treating them as white. But whiteness is probably the only major racial identity in which looking white is insufficient for racial invisibility. Whiteness is a genuinely bad candidate for racial invisibility precisely because it’s such an ideological identity. Arabs or Muslims, even those who do look white, are almost certainly not white. Indeed, Arabs used to be white — Lisa Halaby’s dad — but now mostly aren’t. Observant Jews, even those of significant white descent, were not white in most places with white populations — modern racism was born in anti-Semitism — but are now white for everyone except BNP purists. Folk of known black descent — even if they’re indistinguishable from white folk — are also not white: Walter White and Anatole Broyard most certainly weren’t. Just to round it out, folk of known white descent — white parents both sides — who look black never count as white, and are almost always classified as black (or coloured in South Africa): there’s a famous instance of just this situation, about which a film was made, but it just won’t come to mind. The assumption that looking white is sufficient to get you treated as white, is just that.

Graham

Well a phrase I often use (usually resulting in a resounding silence) is ‘the relations of political hegemony are not purely discursive’.

History is clearly something that happens, like the tree in the forest falling anyway whether or not there is anyone there to construct a narrative about it and what kind of tree it might be and what led it to fall.

I do see discourse as a virtual construct upon an empirical actuality, so no I do not see history as merely the result of different discourses.

I see the hegemonic global discourse as a filter laid over history by virtue of the social and cultural institutions of the post WWII world order that being post colonial reflected the core-periphery modelling of late Imperialism.

And I still have an attachment to theory over grand narrative, perhaps because I studied Archeology before history and therefore was trained to at least attempt a reconstruction of a society without, written texts, (though socio-spatial arrangements can be ‘read’)

Now you mention magic realism. It would be wrong to see this as pure fantasy and to elide the realism part.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez said something very interesting about magic realism; that it was a necessary history for the people written out of history.

So magic realism is that construction of a unified semi-epic discourse of which you speak.

However this construction of alternate mini discourses or even an attempt to cleave closer to the realist model of history runs into a number of rather mundane structural obstacles, that inevitably reproduce a hegemonic global discourse.

i can give you a real ethnographic social consstr5uction of science example of this.

When I was in Brazil a friend a Portuguese Anthropologist Christiana Bastos researched the social and cultural construction of scientific AIDS knowledge in Brazil.

There were many many elements of society and culture that led her to hypothesise that there would be a unique indigenous discourse that would successfully contest the global hegemonic discourse.

Social and cultural factors ranged from the existence of the 1st world parallel to the 3rd that is characteristic of Brazil (what a Belgian anthropologist has termed BelIndia) ranging from the unique complex of overlapping risk groups with an ambiguous sexual culture that does not fit western models of sexual identity, the religious pluralism and syncretism of Brazil and perhaps most importantly a robust national scientific culture that had researched and characterised an indigenous and not dissimilar disease Chagas disease and produced a complex immunological model of the disease as opposed to a simplistic germ theory model of disease which was used to characterise Aids in the US CDC framed global response to the epidemic.

Well to cut a long story short her results were a rather heavy blow for post modern notions of fragmentary narratives and indigenous resistance to hegemony.

Absolutely everything was shoehorned into the dominant paradigm at the core pushing its way out because that is the way the cash flows and the traderoutes of experts and narative spinners radiate out from the centre.

A similar ethnographically observable and thus empirically documentable example comes from the NAACP backed black legal activists decending missionary like on Brazil, arrogant in their restrictive view of a shared blackness that they then impose on people in return for real material rewards such as university entrance.

I f I was poor and approached with an offer of a stipend and a place at a university when all i had to do was change my ethnicity, i would wouldn’t you.

It is not a black discourse that is imposed as much as a black political praxis.

And no I do not think it a positive or valuable thing to place on the lives of millions of people who are the products of a history in important ways the complete mirror image of that of their new Black brothers.

I see it as not dissimilar in fact to the intelectual and religious Imperialism of Islamism, placing itself over a superficially similar ‘Islamic’ cultural form (say Sufi Bangladeshi immigrants in the UK) calling itself the same while subverting it from within to its transcendental theo-political agenda.

It does not see the subversion because it does not see the difference other than as a form of ‘false consciousness’ so black American activists see black Brazilians (according to their one drop essentialism) who are in error seeing themselves and being seen by millions of Brazilians as ‘white’.

As for the fracturing of a grand global narrative of race, well i think that is no bad thing.

Surely the onus is on those who persist in a global narrative of blackness and black liberation to state how exactly a whole society (as opposed to a newly fractionalised entity) like Brazil or Venezuela would benefit from such a fiction rather than the arguably more liberating contemporary fiction of a racially prejudice free society.

Venezuela is one of the most graphic examples of the uselessness of an Anglo black White discourse.

Probably less than five per cent of Venezuela are white in US or European term and a similar proportion are ‘Black’.

I find it , well ironic to say the least that those who most dispute any biological substrate to race, who insist it is entirely socially constructed, find themselves quite unable to say or do anything without relying on a category that tehy are always reinforcing rather than deconstructing.

Equally if race is socially constructed ( I believe it is but upon something not as pure narrative out of the social imagination so to speak) then it well behoves those who believe it to be so to be humble in the face of a socially alternate constructed racial reality.

History is clearly something that happens, like the tree in the forest falling anyway whether or not there is anyone there to construct a narrative about it and what kind of tree it might be and what led it to fall.

Well literally the first thing I was taught on my historiography course was that the word history had both this meaning and the meaning of something constructed by a historian (and it was made pretty clear that you should indicate which meaning you had in mind in order to save a lot of confusion later!) As the word “history” comes originally from the Greek “to know” I suppose I have (not uncommonly) mainly dismissed the meaning that you give – thinking that if a tree falls in the forest and nobody notices it then it has little meaning for human history.

I see your point about the “black praxis” however. It is surely analogous to the doings of the unelected community leaders often mentioned at HP and so your philosophy is broadly one of liberation despite the inevitable protests we shall hear from the Leninist elites and other self-serving “leaders”. The big question to me still though is how the poor organise themselves without coming under (to grossly simplify) an umbrella marked “Chavez” or one marked “Western values”.

But I may of course be missing the point entirely!

emmanuelgoldstein

The simpler meaning to give to Felix’s words is to understand it as ‘why the hell do some people insist against that people should pretend not to see what is plainly visible.

The fact that you can see the way the human eye and brain evolved to see, is shown by the fact that you note some arabs and muslims look white.

The fact that you then proceed with your hideous and pretentious discourse of blackness to rule them non White according to fuck knows what particular caclulus (when Arabs from within their own culture do not see themselves in such terms and might be very upset by your presumptive labelling) is just excruciating.

The fact that you at some latent level do understand that scientific racialism in Europe was almost totally uninterested in blackness and far more obsessed with white races merely makes your determination to subordinate Jews to Whiteness because of the aggressive militancy of negritude just makes it all the more weird and nasty.

Perhaps those of us who belong to subordinated and stigmatised non dominant ethnicities who gained fuck all from colonialism and imperialism get very upset at being relabelled white by negritudenous fools.

You know most labels come with a price tag.

White at what price and black at what price is the question not what label you decide to stick people with.

I’m glad Metta is back.

Just a word on those oil discoveries in brazil. Can they really be all that crucial seeings more than half of Brazi’s motor vehicles are now powered by domestically produced ethanol?

Metta;’Well,to cut a long story short…..’ Er, when was that exactly?

Graham

aaahgh

Well of course class there is the rub. I have of course highly artificially avoided bringing into the discussion how class transects race in order not to lose sight of the social construction of race in LA independently of race.

In fact an independent segregation of race from class is not possible.

The very same person will be seen as black or non black depending on their secondary socio-economic indicators (dress, manner, bling location etc )

But remember there is also a phenomenal degree of oil wealth that touches all aspects of society and there are so many mestizo-mulato faces (the majority) that ‘Chavez’ only appears exceptional from the West.

I was in the northeast for six weeks earlier in the year and I only saw a couple of Venezuelan people whiter than me.

The poor live in unprotected barrios everyone else lives in gated appartment complexes of varying degrees of material comfort.

In fact most people i met who were not the ‘oligarchy’ said we want Lula not Chavez.

Many consumer goods are now produced in Brazil and Lula is seen as having successfully charted a real ‘third way’ 9though in fact much is a cementing of the reforms Cardoso put in place.

Curiously how people often express a non western identity is via ‘la raza latina’ the ‘latin race’. latinidad is actually a relatively new concept that seems to be a pan-latin american political consciousness born from mass migrations to the US in the last 3 decades.

The Bolivarian or revolutionary new world Spanish/mestizo identity beloved of Chaves fell apart (if it ever existed) soon after independence.

I think its fair to say that most latin americans define themselves to quite a large degree against the US and as non Gringo while just as many wish to emigrate there.

i really found little evidence of a racial or ethnic self identification other than as the non uniform ‘latino’

Latino is as i say a US inflected construction and the further south one goes in LA the less of an organising concept it becomes

Metta,

The simpler meaning to give to Felix’s words is to understand it as ‘why the hell do some people insist against that people should pretend not to see what is plainly visible.

Neh. Classifying treating people as though racial distinctness doesn’t matter under treating people as white is not the simple option. Also, it’s not very clever, it’s quite old — I was just reading a book in which the exclusion of Sikh officers from a regimental mess was justified on the ground that that would be to treat them as white — and it’s symptomatic of some confusion about whiteness.

The fact that you can see the way the human eye and brain evolved to see, is shown by the fact that you note some arabs and muslims look white.

Indeed. And, it appears, Arabs and Muslims were once more or less uncontroversially white. Now, not so much.

The fact that you then proceed with your hideous and pretentious discourse of blackness to rule them non White according to fuck knows what particular caclulus (when Arabs from within their own culture do not see themselves in such terms and might be very upset by your presumptive labelling) is just excruciating.

I’m not sure I see your point. The facts are what they are: there are folk who are now white, who look white, but who were not white in the past. And there are folk, even now, who look white but aren’t white. It follows that looking white is insufficient for being white, and therefore — assuming that you’ve got to be white to be treated as white — being treated as white.

AFAICT, you’re wanting to say that because Arabs don’t have the category white, they’re not white (or not eligible for being judged in that way). That’s pretty much straightforwardly false. A white baby lacks the concept of whiteness too, but there’s no difficulty assigning it a race. Lacking the category doesn’t mean it fails to apply.

The fact that you at some latent level do understand that scientific racialism in Europe was almost totally uninterested in blackness and far more obsessed with white races merely makes your determination to subordinate Jews to Whiteness because of the aggressive militancy of negritude just makes it all the more weird and nasty.

I simply can’t see the relevance of the first bit — the bit about scientific racism — to the second. Since you don’t mention dates, it’s hard to assess the claim. But it looks false. There was pretty intense in blacks by scientific racists through to the 20th century, for obvious ideological and scientific reasons. My guess is that you’re looking at the relative absence of pre-Darwinian scientific racism. That’ll give you a deceptive picture because quite a lot of the pre-Darwin scientific racism appears to have been in French; even there, there’s a fair bit of interest in blacks.

emmanuelgoldstein: Some time ago I narrated a routine in these threads I heard from an African American standup.
He said when he does his gig on campuses in the USA this typical liberal student came up to him and gushed: Oh my mother is so color blind, I have 2 friends called Laura and one is black but when one came by to see me, she couldn’t tell me which one. Standup: I said to the student: I have three questions for your mother: One: Is she stupid? Two: Is she hard of seeing? I know that’s only 2 questions, but from what you tell me, she is probably hard of numbering as well.
Of course, emanuelg, as this was an audience of varying colours, he could have just been uncle tomming.

Graham

Sshshs please don’t out me as a Liberationist of course I am (I even learned Portuguese in a convent stuffed with liberation theologians) I just don’t see myself or those people who turn up at Latin American solidarity events wearing those Peruvian pointy hats leading the vanguard that’s all.

I do think there is something tremendously insightful in an pedagogical approach to oppression, starting with and embedding the framing of this liberation within the direct and immediate lived experience of people (though interestingly a friend of mine who tried to apply Freirian pedagogical techniques in Mozambique said they were culturally inappropriate and seen as an alien imposition)

I was just reading a book in which the exclusion of Sikh officers from a regimental mess was justified on the ground that that would be to treat them as white

This was racism at a comparatively low level. Indian Maharajah’s were constantly in and out of Queen Vic’s court and were treated as the equals of European royalty – no Prince Phillip-like comments about skin colour are reported as far as I know… (but there I go on about class and ornamentalism again…) I’ll be mentioning Jade Goody in connection with the statement: “Folk of known black descent — even if they’re indistinguishable from white folk — are also not white” next!

It is a much more general theory of liberation than the liberation-theologists that I was getting at Metta! I noted that somebody online was referring to you as a dumbed-down right-wing populist and just wanted to tease out the underlying quest for justice in what you have been saying.

Graham

‘I noted that somebody online was referring to you as a dumbed-down right-wing populist ‘

Must have been a liberal misappropriating a radical mantel, as no establisment right winger has ever, liked anything much I have to say.

As for Populist well surely my disregard for simplistic soundbites would disqualify me from that.

Perhaps someone who spends their time looking and talking down the social hierarchy might mistake what I say as a talking down to reactionaries who resist the emancipation and freedom of others.

My concern has always been rather to conduct an ethnography of the centre of social and political power in order to breach its flanks permitting a diffusion in from the margins.

Or more prosaically because I was given a bunk up over the wall of the lords estate by my mates, I feel it my obligation to find the ‘traitors’ gate and let the Roundheads and peasants in

As for alternate discourses to show that I am not entirely closed to the liberatory possibilities such a form as venerated by post modernists (actually it is the i look in the mirror and chose whatever i want to be performativity types I have little time for)

I would stress a close attention to , as I pointed out, the religious syncretic movements of Latin America.

These mini but deep narratives belonging to oral history seem to speak to magic realism and to scientific history, to utter both metaphor, and metonym (which after all are often merely long repeated metaphors).

Syncretic religions speak in lyrical and epic terms telling the ‘big tell’ of a people as well as its transcendence.

Here is a great example of the strongest syncretic indigenous religion from Venezuela, the cult of Maria Lionza

http://www.google.co.uk/search?source=ig&hl=en&rlz=1G1GGLQ_ENUK336&q=Maria+Lionza&btnG=Google+Search&meta=lr%3D&aq=f&oq=

yes that’s a whole google return (a bilingual one at that I give it because there are also some fantastic images of Maria)

Though this is the Girardian analysis that you called down from the heavens by invoking Roland Barthes, that i would recommend if you are only going to read one thing on Maria Lionza (you can also listen to the Ruben Blades song)
http://anthrobase.net/Txt/A/Andrade_G_E_01.htm

Alternatively go on a pilgim to her mountain in Western Venezuela its an ethereal and extraordinary place (if after the divinatorary rituals through cigar smoke the cult mountains guardian spirits let you pass or you forge on tempting the fates)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/María_Lionza

Hey, mettaculture, I izz a right-winger, and I likes what you izz got to say… (’Course I izz not exactly an establishment type :) )

Graham,

I was just reading a book in which the exclusion of Sikh officers from a regimental mess was justified on the ground that that would be to treat them as white

This was racism at a comparatively low level. Indian Maharajah’s were constantly in and out of Queen Vic’s court and were treated as the equals of European royalty – no Prince Phillip-like comments about skin colour are reported as far as I know… (but there I go on about class and ornamentalism again…) I’ll be mentioning Jade Goody in connection with the statement: “Folk of known black descent — even if they’re indistinguishable from white folk — are also not white” next!

Jade’s mother and grandmother identified her as mixed race. She herself identified as mixed race. The Guardian had a piece as long ago as 2002 identifying her as mixed race: the line in it about her not being an English rose is your first clue that mixed race and white are exclusive. The semi-serious argument around the time of the Shilpa episode — that Jade’s bullying couldn’t have been racially motivated because she was an ethnic minority herself — is your second.

I thought (feared, actually) that you were going to call me out on the obvious hard case: folk who look white and are also of known but very distant black ancestry — like that guy who was profiled in the Telegraph magazine a while ago.

Hitler had generals of recent and well-known known Jewish descent, as well as Japanese allies. From which it really doesn’t follow that race wasn’t the organizing hierarchical principle. That’s the facile answer to your Ornamentalism thingy. The slightly less facile answer is that Ornamentalism is trivial or false: if the claim is that the Empire had non-racial hierarchies, it’s trivial; if the claim is that the racial hierarchy didn’t matter most, it’s false.

Jade’s mother and grandmother identified her as mixed race. She herself identified as mixed race.

Alas for her when the shit started flying the public identified her as white – that’s the problem with an apporach that identifies a power logos at the top from which emanates all cultural distinctions (it just does not exist.) Your white officers excluding Sikh officers from the mess are much more likely to have been motivated by rank and whether they were Viceroy’s commisioned officers (with authority over Indian troops) or King’s commisioned officers (who had full authority over English troops.) Likewise the idea that because Hitler had Jewish generals (that he quite obviously did not know about) is not analogous to the British Empire having allies (given full aristocratic honours) Members of parliament and fully commisioned officers of Indian descent. The claim is that quite obviously the racial heirachy did not matter as much in the British empire as the class heirachy as no Indians (or British for that matter) of less than noble descent were ever recieved with full honours at court or even made officers in the army. I would have thought that unless you were ideologically wed to racial categories as an explanation for everything that this was fairly obvious.

Graham

Indeed you only have to travel the routes of the British empire to see clearly that the issue was hierarchy not race.

Britain was also responsible for the transshipment of ethnic groups across its Empire.

Indians as browns or as Indoaryans may have had a higher status in scientific racalist theories over aboriginal peoples but not when the aboriniginals in question had a good class hierachy with a nobility and Royalty.

Thus the first Governer of Fiji (not that bothered about cannibalism) believed the Fijians (ethnically mixed Polynesian and very ‘Black’ melanesian) a ‘martial race’ (and of course martial race was another very important non colour coded class/race british imperial construct) who should never be alienated from their land (80% is still Fijian clan owned) so he transhipped south Indian indentured labourers (aka non free labour) to work the land, thus creating the race conflict dmaging Fiji to this day.

The contrast between Australia and New Zealand in the treatment of its aboriginal population couldn’t be greater.

Australia’s population was ‘acephalous’ literally without a head or monarchy considered ‘anarchic’ and’asocial’ and therefore incapable of being domesticated and incorporated into the Empire, they were hunted down in shooting party’s like vermin.

New Zealand on the other hand encountering a martial aboriginal people with slaves (blacker and so named by an indigenous light ‘Polynesian’ vs dark ‘Melanesian’ ‘colour/class’ hierarchy) commoners, nobility and Royalty, immediately concluded extensive treaties, incorporating chiefs into parliament as MPs, sent cannibal Kings to meet Queen Victoria and their children to sandhurst.

There are no appreciable institutional differences between Australia and NZ to explain this differential treatment in fact it is a provision of the australian federative constitution that NZ can join it did not do so in the early 20thC ss this would have meant disenfranchising the Maori.

While it is currently fashionable to talk of the iniquities of Waitangi this is an agenda pushed by ‘white’ Maori with names like O’Higgins who speak ‘Maori’ (essentially a dead language) while further disenfranchising the gheto Maori (much darker and the descendants of maori slaves) in auckland.

See the film ‘once were Warriors’ for a fairly realistic brutally graphic portrayal of the lives of the inner city Auckland maori.

Class not race say after me emmanuel Class not Race

Alas for her when the shit started flying the public identified her as white – that’s the problem with an apporach that identifies a power logos at the top from which emanates all cultural distinctions (it just does not exist.)

Her mixed-race identification wasn’t well known until the Shilpa incident. After it, she was clearly identified as mixed race: cue lots of loose comment about full lips. There’s a delightful Jade thread from 2007 on a well-known white-supremacist website: some commenters strive to prove that they had always known all along that she wasn’t white; others are simply relieved she’s no longer considered white.

Of itself, public opinion of her racial identity after the Shilpa thingy wouldn’t matter for my claim about racial identity; it matters only because it was the occasion for wide public attention about her recent biracial ancestry. Given my earlier claim, the prediction has to be that if there wide public knowledge of her recent biracial ancestry then she would be classified as white, not mixed race. Once it became widely known that she had recent nonwhite ancestry, she was identified as mixed-race. Give over: this was a genuinely terrible attempted example for your argument.

The stuff about power escapes me completely.

Your white officers excluding Sikh officers from the mess are much more likely to have been motivated by rank and whether they were Viceroy’s commisioned officers (with authority over Indian troops) or King’s commisioned officers (who had full authority over English troops.) Likewise the idea that because Hitler had Jewish generals (that he quite obviously did not know about) is not analogous to the British Empire having allies (given full aristocratic honours) Members of parliament and fully commisioned officers of Indian descent. The claim is that quite obviously the racial heirachy did not matter as much in the British empire as the class heirachy as no Indians (or British for that matter) of less than noble descent were ever recieved with full honours at court or even made officers in the army. I would have thought that unless you were ideologically wed to racial categories as an explanation for everything that this was fairly obvious.

Erhard Milch is your man: his exemption from the racial laws was issued by Göring himself. The example is directly analogous. Cannadine’s story is that there were hierarchies other than race, so race wasn’t the dominant hierarchical principle. He wavers, but that’s his conclusion — and yours too. It’s hardly unknown that Germany allied with Japan, despite Hitler’s views about Japanese. Nor is it unknown that once the General Government realised that the Wehrmacht had killed too many Poles for comfort, racial classifications were eased, to let count as Germans Poles who previously wouldn’t have qualified. Non-racial principles trumped racial ones; it doesn’t follow that race wasn’t the central organising principle of the German Empire. AFAICR, Cannadine doesn’t do any historical comparisons whatever in the book, so the reader is left completely unaware that there’s pretty strong evidence against his claim.

Erhard Milch is your man: his exemption from the racial laws was issued by Göring himself.

Many exemptions were signed by Hitler himself – it doesn’t follow however that he wasn’t still interested in the complete elimination of the Jews. The third reich lasted 12 years, was founded on racial ideas and had (theoretically at least) one single all powerful leader whose crazy views trumped all. The British empire lasted at least 400 years, had constantly changing leaders with different ideas about who was “worthy”- from the familiar “christendom in, non-christendom out” to the rise of the middle-classes. That (very simply is why the two are not analogous.) Cannadine certainly does not attempt the crazy historical comparison of matching up the British Empire with nazi Germany and let’s face it why would anyone?

Once it became widely known that she had recent nonwhite ancestry, she was identified as mixed-race. Give over: this was a genuinely terrible attempted example for your argument.

I’m sorry but that is just complete nonsense – the crowds who turned out to follow Jade Goody’s coffin from Bermondsey to Essex identified Jade Goody as one of their own. The newspapers who covered the event identified the crowds as white. As your examples confirm she was overwhelmingly only identified as “mixed-race” by those for whom the term was a derogatory one.