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We need to listen to Black Lives Matter

We need to listen to BLM so we know what sort of people they are.

Janet Powe of BLM UK writes:

SEWELL COMMISSION WAS WRITTEN BY HOUSE SLAVES

Note for readers from outside the UK: a report recently issued by the government Commission for Race and Ethnic Disparities said that, although racism still remains in the United Kingdom, the UK’s relative success in removing race-based disparity in education and the economy “should be regarded as a model for other white-majority countries”. The black man being called a “house slave” by Janet Powe is the Chair of the Commission, Dr Tony Sewell, an educational consultant and author.

A Cambridge professor of postcolonial studies, Dr Priyamvada Gopal, was also displeased by the report. Dr Gopal first questioned whether Dr Sewell really had a doctorate, and, when informed that he did, set a new standard for gracious acknowledgement of error by saying that “Even Dr Goebbels had a research PhD.”

13 comments to We need to listen to Black Lives Matter

  • Schrodinger's Dog

    Why Black Lives Matter has not been banned as a terrorist organisation is beyond me. After all, it seeks political change through violence, which is the classic definition of terrorism.

    It’s also worth noting that, while perhaps unenlightened in the past, Britain has never been a truly racist country. Overtly racist British political parties have never got anywhere. During the 1930s the British Union of Fascists didn’t win so much as a single council seat. (For foreign readers, that’s the lowest level of British government.) More recently, in the 1970s, the National Front got nowhere while its successor, the British National Party, effectively collapsed around 2013.

  • Dr. Caligari

    I wonder, how exact the UK is a role model for other countries.
    I hear different stories from Eastern European immigrants. At least by all accounts, they are more accepted in Germany than in the (not more so) “golden West”.

  • Angnezka Roberts

    Poles & Czechs have done extremely well in Britain, and there are really a lot of Poles in UK. Intermarriage rates with British people also very high, which is absolutely best indication of integration. Most local shops where I live are owned by Poles, Albanians, Turks, Chinese and Italians, who also seem to be doing pretty well (to the extent anyone is doing well during his weird time we’re in).

  • KJP

    What she really wants to call them, but can’t, is House Niggers: slaves who served in the Master’s house and had an easy life compared to field slaves. Another pejorative term she could have used would be Uncle Toms.

    They did not say what she wanted to hear, that is the problem. The panel of twelve seemed to come from different ethnic backgrounds and all had a different expertise: there was only one white person, an education expert.

    Dr. Gopal seems to have issues. She complained that porters at a Cambridge college addressed her as madam not Dr. I think that that is a matter of tradition, I may be wrong, but she made a big issue of it.

    Schrodinger’s Dog said, “Why Black Lives Matter has not been banned as a terrorist organisation is beyond me.” Yes, they have paraded in what only can only be called para-military uniforms.

    Dr. Caligari commented about Eastern European immigrants. Well, this is a report on race; Eastern Europeans are not a different race. But their behaviour, maybe a disproportional involvement in crime, makes them unwelcome.

  • Natalie Solent (Essex)

    My impression is that Eastern European immigrants to the UK are widely admired for their work ethic. That has meant that they are often employed in preference to native Brits, and that has meant that their presence has made life worse for many native-born unskilled workers, not because of their vices (I’ve never heard anyone say that they have a disproportionate involvement in crime; the contrary if anything) but because of their virtues. Nothing I have written is meant to take a side between the two groups, or to imply that widespread perceptions are universal truths. I’m just trying to sketch out the situation between the groups as I would if it had all happened a thousand years ago.

    Though in any difference there is always the potential for tension, I would like to make what small contribution I can to moving us away from thinking of the world in terms of a zero-sum game between opposed racial groups. It doesn’t have to be that way, particularly if people are free to trade with each other and make new wealth rather than compete against other races for a helping from the fixed pot of government largesse. That is a zero sum game.

    Ditto times a thousand for blacks and whites, the two groups whose troubled relations prompted this post. The likes of BLM and Dr Gopal (and their legion of white hangers-on) need blacks and other visible ethnic minorities to be miserable, unsuccessful and angry. Hence the inflammatory rhetoric directed at Dr Sewell.

  • bobby b

    ” . . . I would like to make what small contribution I can to moving us away from thinking of the world in terms of a zero-sum game between opposed racial groups.”

    Be careful. That’s what got Trump his Evil Master of the Universe status. By increasing employment and incomes and societal-membership of various minority groups, he threatened the monolithic minority progressive hold. Why do you think he gained in minority vote and simultaneously enraged the minority “leadership”?

  • bobby b

    “It’s impossible to envision a world without race for the Democratic Party. For such people, it’s impossible to envision a world that gets beyond race because their bread and butter, their bottom line, their raison d’être, and everything that they’re trying to do depends upon people being kept in these boxes.”

    Professor Glenn Loury.

    From https://davidthompson.typepad.com/davidthompson/2021/04/dark-comedy.html

  • Alexander Tertius Harvey

    Whom would you chuck out first in a balloon debate – Dr Gopal or Dr Goebbels?. My choice is the former.

  • John Lewis

    Natalie. Unfortunately one specific category of Eastern European immigrants, namely the Roma, are seen as having a disproportionate involvement in crime. That and selling the Big Issue (which is at least working).

    importantly the general population is sensible enough to acknowledge that this tendency is not a reflection on all Eastern European’s who as you correctly say are widely admired and, in my opinion, integrating well as have many but not all other immigrant groups over the past century.

  • WindyPants

    Should the lessons learned from BLM be that ‘all of those Diversity Tsars, Equality Commissions and Race Relations Hucksters have achieved nothing’?

    Great stuff – let’s get slashing some budgets!!!

  • Paul Marks

    Well first full disclosure – my own doctorate was not granted by the University of York, and years of legal conflict in the Lord Chancellor’s department (or “office”) achieved nothing. It was a classic Dickens “Bleak House” Court of Chancellery thing.

    So clearly I am inferior to Dr Goebbels, Dr Gopal and Dr Karl Marx – and other Collectivists.

    As for “Black Lives Matter” – it is a Marxist organisation founded in 2014, whose members have killed police officers (for example in Dallas) and have burned large areas of American cities. For some reason many sporting figures kneel to it.

    “House Slave” – well Dr Sewell must be very old, as there have been no house slaves in the United Kingdom since the early 1770s.

    There is a scandal here – in that there were repeated legal judgements against slavery in England (going back as far as the Middle Ages) – what was different about the Mansfield Judgement was that it was ENFORCED.

    This gives rise to the obvious question as to why previous judgements were NOT enforced – if Dr Gobal would give his attention to that matter he might do some good.

    One idea that occurs to me is the practice of the Common Law of concentrating on the specific person in front of the court – “seeking a remedy” for that specific person.

    Even in Tudor times if someone was actually before a court the court might well find that they were not slave because no slavery could legally exist in England – and the same ruling was made by Chief Justice Sir John Holt in the early 1700s.

    But generalising from a specific case to a general rule (applying to all) seems to have been a problem for the Common Law – before Mansfield.

    In commercial matters the Common Law tended to be avoided by merchants (again before Mansfield) – as each case tended to be an exercise in “reinventing the wheel” with long and drawn out procedures, starting from scratch each time.

    There is something to be said for the Scots Law (Roman Law) way of “here is the principle – so now let us apply to all the cases, in the same way”.

    Of course if the principle is WRONG then all Hell breaks lose – but that is another discussion.

  • Rudolph Hucker

    Recommended viewing: a documentary by Trevor Phillips (the former chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission)

    Things We Won’t Say About Race That Are True

    “Trevor Phillips, the man at the heart of 30 years of effort to reduce discrimination and improve equality across the UK, makes the argument that whilst much of the work of those in the “equality movement” has changed Britain for the better, it may also have led to serious and unwanted consequences that could undermine what’s been achieved. In the process, he confronts some uncomfortable truths about racial stereotypes.”

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-kFzzPtHsE

  • Tom Janiček

    Unfortunately one specific category of Eastern European immigrants, namely the Roma, are seen as having a disproportionate involvement in crime.

    If you think Roma are disliked in Britain, you’ve never spend much time in Central or Eastern Europe, where Roma are absolutely hated. Most citizens don’t even regard them as local nationals at all regardless of their de jure status.