White Beard
Active member
It occurs to me that the New World importation of Africans FOR ENSLAVEMENT may have colored the American experience in ways that Britain didn’t get. Britain have for generations depended on the *virtual* enslavement of the poor bastards dumb enough to be born on some lordling’s estate, so slavery in Britain was more “genteel” and of course, all-white.
We spent generations seeing brown people and thinking ‘slaves’, but in the New Britain, you can’t tell who’s emancipated from the old servitude just by looking, but you *can* tell who isn’t white. They’re all ‘citizens of the Empire/Commonwealth’ so by British law they have the right to be there(?)...but they’re also chickens that have come ‘home’ to roost, as we say here.
All those years of kicking the shit out of other countries, stealing their stuff and enslaving their people did a great job of wrecking those countries. So the time and effort y’all put into being imperial world-owning assholes doesn’t want to be turned to making amends of any decent sort to those who endured the kickings; instead you get Nigel Farrago, UKIP, BREXIT, and Mosley’s leftovers.
It leave significant sectors of both nations *bothered* by so many apparently not-from-here folks who insist on acting like it’s *their* free country, too.
(
The problem is not their presence, or even their ideology unless their ideology sets them against public order and the well-being of the populace), but our inability to accept them as ‘us’.
The friction, sadly, seems unavoidable so far, based on the fact of it staying at a simmer here and there. Perhaps y’all have not yet passed through the ‘respectability’ phase, but we have, and one of the hard lessons is that efforts by a dominant population to police - not the behavior but the presentation - of non-dominant groups *must fail* because of recognized principles of justice at work in society at large. Basic issues of parity in citizenship, equality before the law, and fairness in the public sphere. We have been through that, may still BE going through it -it’s just another form of exclusion to be identified, worked through, and moved beyond.
While I can’t approve of animus for its own sake, I believe I understand the fear that one’s tenuous hold on the necessities and a few pleasures of life is threatened by ‘others’ who ‘don’t belong’ and ‘don’t deserve’ - when you feel like you’re just hanging on, and all the nice accents are predicting doom and worse, it’s the easiest thing in the world to see one’s multicolored neighborhood as harboring existential threats. The process of integration here was far more violent, threatening, and racially-charged than anything I’ve seen happening in Britain - and as a white child, newly-baptized, the discrepancies between the two sides made it a real horrorshow to witness. Even with these years branded into my memory, it was many years before I was able to get past the conditioning that had been instilled in me - the black citizen as terrifying threat to peace and order.
That still remains in the USA after all these years and all that has gone down, because it’s hard for people to see room and reason for change IN THEMSELVES. It’s why the continued reassertion that black lives DO matter, that black citizens are CITIZENS and not to be gunned down in the street, not to be set on fire in their homes, not to be dragged with chains by a pickup truck, not to find nooses in their desk drawers at work....
At the risk of sounding like a joke, the struggle is real, and it continues.
We spent generations seeing brown people and thinking ‘slaves’, but in the New Britain, you can’t tell who’s emancipated from the old servitude just by looking, but you *can* tell who isn’t white. They’re all ‘citizens of the Empire/Commonwealth’ so by British law they have the right to be there(?)...but they’re also chickens that have come ‘home’ to roost, as we say here.
All those years of kicking the shit out of other countries, stealing their stuff and enslaving their people did a great job of wrecking those countries. So the time and effort y’all put into being imperial world-owning assholes doesn’t want to be turned to making amends of any decent sort to those who endured the kickings; instead you get Nigel Farrago, UKIP, BREXIT, and Mosley’s leftovers.
It leave significant sectors of both nations *bothered* by so many apparently not-from-here folks who insist on acting like it’s *their* free country, too.
(
The problem is not their presence, or even their ideology unless their ideology sets them against public order and the well-being of the populace), but our inability to accept them as ‘us’.
The friction, sadly, seems unavoidable so far, based on the fact of it staying at a simmer here and there. Perhaps y’all have not yet passed through the ‘respectability’ phase, but we have, and one of the hard lessons is that efforts by a dominant population to police - not the behavior but the presentation - of non-dominant groups *must fail* because of recognized principles of justice at work in society at large. Basic issues of parity in citizenship, equality before the law, and fairness in the public sphere. We have been through that, may still BE going through it -it’s just another form of exclusion to be identified, worked through, and moved beyond.
While I can’t approve of animus for its own sake, I believe I understand the fear that one’s tenuous hold on the necessities and a few pleasures of life is threatened by ‘others’ who ‘don’t belong’ and ‘don’t deserve’ - when you feel like you’re just hanging on, and all the nice accents are predicting doom and worse, it’s the easiest thing in the world to see one’s multicolored neighborhood as harboring existential threats. The process of integration here was far more violent, threatening, and racially-charged than anything I’ve seen happening in Britain - and as a white child, newly-baptized, the discrepancies between the two sides made it a real horrorshow to witness. Even with these years branded into my memory, it was many years before I was able to get past the conditioning that had been instilled in me - the black citizen as terrifying threat to peace and order.
That still remains in the USA after all these years and all that has gone down, because it’s hard for people to see room and reason for change IN THEMSELVES. It’s why the continued reassertion that black lives DO matter, that black citizens are CITIZENS and not to be gunned down in the street, not to be set on fire in their homes, not to be dragged with chains by a pickup truck, not to find nooses in their desk drawers at work....
At the risk of sounding like a joke, the struggle is real, and it continues.
