Things We Won't Say About Race That Are True

[poliphilo]

Racial stereotypes are true, says Trevor Phillips (in a documentary that went out on Channel 4 last night) or at least based in truth. Statistics back them up. Jews do tend to be high-achieving,  Afro-Caribeans are more likely than any other group to murder and be murdered,  Asian women in huge numbers become pharmacists,  white Britons commit more acts of drunken violence.

As a leading figure in the British race relations industry Phillips admits to having been in denial about all this and to have promoted a culture of denial. We've shut our eyes, he says,  to some basic facts about the human animal.  People are tribal; they like to live in ethnic enclaves- and each tribe has its own culture and its own signature crimes- and we're not going to build a just and equitable society if we pretend otherwise. The grooming and abuse of young girls by gangs in northern cities went unreported, unchallenged and unprosecuted for years because the offenders were mostly from the Pakistani community and the authorities didn't want- you know- to appear racially insensitive.

Phillips wobbles about a bit. At one point he goes confusingly off piste and devotes a quarter of an hour to interviewing Les Ferdinand and deploring the lack of black football managers- but who wouldn't wobble when tiptoeing through such a field of egg-shells? Does he have solutions? Well, yes; treat everyone as an individual- irrespective of ethnic background- but that's so obviously true as to amount to evasion.

Perhaps we all need to loosen our collars a bit, self censor less, thicken our skins and be less ready to take offence. So come back Jim Davidson, all is forgiven. Is that really what I mean? Oh, I don't know. Wobble, wobble, crunch, crunch.

Perhaps it's enough for the time being that the silence has been broken.

Comments

[howlin-wolf-66.livejournal.com]

At least by bringing the subject up, it makes it easier to have an open debate about it.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Yes, we need to talk about these things.

[matrixmann]

Sure that is a difficult topic indeed.
With the man / woman topic it is the same.
What, maybe, needs to happen is that those images of victim and suppressor slowly vanish out of the minds of people.
They still need to be remembered because there are people who think like yesterday which still use these as their base to justify themselves to treat one person lower than themselves.
But, in the greater circle, what needs to happen is these "prejudices" about vicitim and perpetrator need to vanish as a general base for judging somebody's deeds and misdeeds.
Otherwise it will always be like "women can be no bad people", or "you're only here because of the minority quota".
There's also sich a thing as "positive racism". Emphasizing someone being from a minority and having made it up on the career-latter even though.
Think that is also a base for telling people all the time "this person is different from us".

Always pick people up from where they are, they say.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Things are always changing- and the models we use to make sense of our experience wear out very quickly. The whole left-right dichotomy is a case in point. We're still using it but it no longer really fits. Oppressor-victim is also beginning to show its age.

[matrixmann]

Thinking about it, I think most of these Oppressor-victim schemes actually are from the last century. A few decades old at least.
With the revision of political attributes I don't know if this is a good idea, but, thinking about the attribute "liberal", which mostly follows the definition of "liberal" overseas these days even in Europe, I get some grumbling in my stomach.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

"Liberal" used to mean something fairly specific- but it now means so many different things it's become largely meaningless.

[matrixmann]

These days one gets the impression it means "coward". Partly.

[meistergedanken.livejournal.com]

When the elites decry "stereotypes", it's just another salvo in the War On Pattern Recognition.

I guess the left has "inconvenient truths", while the right has "hate facts.

"Bringing the subject up" doesn't make it easier to have an open debate, it just allows the battle lines to be more clearly delineated - and identifies which people need to be shamed and/or fired from their jobs for voicing the wrong thoughts.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Phillips wants the battle lines to be stood down, but I concede that his initiative may in fact have the opposite effect.

[cmcmck.livejournal.com]

It's not just race of course.

All my life I've been told to thicken my skin and be less ready to take offence.

Easy said when you're not the member of an oppressed minority surrounded by hatemongers and overprivileged commentators........

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Yes, but it's race that Phillips was talking about.

just a random stranger giving people her opinion

[antephialtic.livejournal.com]

It's annoying how some people won't accept change because they're scared of being politically incorrect. All this fear of being perceived as racist or narrow-minded is due to political correctness in my opinion. People need to understand the difference between actual discrimination between races and ethnic observations.

Re: just a random stranger giving people her opinion

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Fear of giving offence isn't a bad thing in itself, but there have been too many cases of people being afraid of saying "boo" to gooses that needed to be said "boo" to.

Re: just a random stranger giving people her opinion

[antephialtic.livejournal.com]

we live in a society that instead of tries to fix up issues in the world. cowers in fear when ever race, religion or ethnicity is involved. i would consider myself a tad bit liberal but we need to understand that sometimes people to need to point things out for a positive change to occur

[artkouros.livejournal.com]

When I was a kid I had a good friend whose parents were the very definition of American liberals. And we lived in a nice white suburb without exposure to minorities. There was a stereotype in those days, of the young Mexican man driving a older Chevy with fuzzy ball fringe around the windows and a bobble head Chihuahua in the back window.
I'm sure he was raised to believe that stereotypes had no basis in fact. We went to college together and once while driving through Lubbock we saw this very stereotype driving this very car. He was completely shocked - you could see his whole belief system crumbling.
What his parents should have told him is that some people do in fact embody stereotypes. And it's completely OK.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

One man's stereotypes are another man's proudly worn badges of identity.

[rosamicula.livejournal.com]

When I was young the only pooves I knew I knew were David Bowie, John Inman, Kenneth Williams and Oscar Wilde.

When I went to mu first gay club with a recently out teenage friend I was very surpised to discover that there were gay men who were not only working class! and rugged! but also, in some cases, really quite thick.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I guess the first gay men I knew were schoolmasters- all of them deeply closeted. They smoked pipes and wore tweed jackets with leather patches on the elbows.

[rosamicula.livejournal.com]

I realised long after I left that two of the teachers at my single sex grammar were lesbians. I mean we all knew about the lumbering PE teacher with the very hairy legs , but the French and Latin mistress with the immaculately groomed hair and elegant tweed suits? Or the chainsmoking Geography teacher with the passion for Nelson? How much more human and complex and fascinating they seem now I am as old as them.

[michaleen.livejournal.com]

The problem with such conversations is that race is a social construct. It has no scientific basis. When someone wants to talk about the hard facts of race, that alone should send up a red flag. There's nothing brave about giving lip service to the self-serving myths of a privileged class.

I think these oh-so-vital conversations about race are just a way of dodging the far more difficult conversation about racism. We get into these silly discussions about racial stereotypes, about which ethnicity is prejudiced against whom, about in groups and out groups and bigotry, when all that misses the point. The whole point of dividing humanity into separate races is to justify the privilege of one supposed race over another. This has always been the point of racism.

[rosamicula.livejournal.com]

Race isn't just 'a social construct'.

Stick me and my pallid Irish partner on a Caribbean beach for an afternoon and see which one of us burns.

Ask my endocrinoligist how annoyed he was that my ethnicity was misrecorded on my hospital records, and how much quicker he could he could have reached the diagnosis that saved my life if he had known I had Hasidic jewish ancestry.

Ask the 1000 odd female children raped and pimped out in Rotherham and Rochdale what they think of the social workers, local councillors and MPs etc too enlightened to to get into 'silly discussions about racial stereotypes' but happy to dismiss these girls experiences as the fault of their own poor life choices.