Digital Press-Gang
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
July 2021 RACISM Written and recorded By Dionysia Anarqxista Broadcast by TOR Radio
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Racism
The recent case of the England football team, at one point berated by Conservative politicians
but then supported when they had some success, has reignited issues over racism in UK media all
over again. Of course, it should not surprise us that political elites are involved in this since
it is their job to control people - and who are more in need of control than those uppity people
of differing skin colour – particularly if they should dare to have differing political views?
UK media chatter recently in regard to race treads well worn paths. Black Lives Matter are
regularly slurred as “Marxist” even though its clear the borderline fascist whites most often
uttering this slur couldn’t set out the tenets of Marxism if their lives depended on it.
The only other race-related comment regularly accosting British ears is that Muslims are a clear
and present sexual danger to children and that they probably want to impose Sharia Law on
everyone too. Of course, there is also the ever-present spectre of anti-semitism fouling the air
as well, although often one gets the impression with anti-semitism that Zionists think there’s
not nearly so much of it as there should be to justify their nationalistic death cult and
vendetta against Palestinian Arabs. Whenever anti-semites are pointed out, however, it always
seems to be ones on the Left the Zionists care about most. Funny that.
Many racists are grifters who have decided their means to fame and wealth are by stoking up hate
in people in general. You know the names - Steve Bannon, Nigel Farage, the coterie of Z list
voids of integrity who work for Spiked, Toby Young, Daily Telegraph journalists, anyone working
for Rupert Murdoch. There is a whole right wing-funded column of people who capitalists pay to
tell us racism doesn’t exist. Sometimes, the UK government employs some of them to write reports
about British institutions, such as the police, explicitly to tell us that racism doesn’t exist.
Yet the British police employ actual Nazis, people who murder black people in public with extreme
prejudice or who pose for photos with their dead bodies, and even have a Commissioner of the
Metropolitan Police in London who was in charge of an operation which killed a foreign man of
colour, Jean Charles de Menezes, "by mistake". We are meant to accept these are all isolated
incidents, one or two bad apples. But those using that metaphor forget that in a barrel of
apples one or two bad ones works its way through the lot if left unattended.
But back to the England football team which recently lost the European Championship final on
penalties. As several painfully white commentators on social media recently pointed out, the two
white players scored whilst the three black players missed. This caused these same white
commentators to press “send” on thousands of messages calling them “niggers” or “monkeys” or
“slaves” or merely mentioning this racial disparity as a “jokey” aside. Messages I personally
read included ones saying the black players should be “lynched” in reference to Ku Klux Klan
practices in post-Civil War America. Some of these people, with more being identified every day
by anti-racism activists, were bold enough to do this from accounts which listed their real names
and places of employment. [It also, by the way, included at least three serving police officers
last time I checked as well as military personnel and people in various professional situations.]
When forced to answer for their social media messages these people fell back on the moronic
claim that they had been “hacked”. The more interesting thing about the companies some of these
people worked for, however, is that even though the employers swiftly reacted to claims of having
racist employees with hastily put together PR statements about “urgent investigations” and
“the values of our company”, many of the companies were made up of almost entirely white people
at board or management level. Individual racism meet corporate and very structural racism.
Racism, however, is, of course, not new. In a recent essay I wrote about it in the context of
eugenics it went right back to 1478 - which is roughly when the Spanish Inquisition began.
Of course, it didn’t start there but that’s a good date to start from if you want to tell a
story of European racism [which is far from the only kind] which extends all the way through
the period of colonial imperialism and slavery to the world of today. Today European and
European-descended whiteys have a lot to atone for but, in the main, they seem loathe to do
any atoning. Often they elect largely white and right wing governments like that one currently
infesting the UK which is keen to imprison people who want to pull down the statues of slave
traders, like that of Edward Colston in Bristol, or attack those such as the Westminster statue
of lifelong racist and partaker in eugenics conferences, Sir Winston Churchill. In this century
Churchill, who actually publicly defended the right of white people to dispossess people of
colour of their land, was voted the greatest ever Briton. I would argue this says a lot, both
about those doing the voting and the education system in the Untied Kingdom. In fact, wherever
Europeans have spread since 1478 it is a history of similar things. Do we think Central and
Southern Amercia have always spoken either Spanish or Portuguese? Did the native peoples of
those places now renamed Canada and the USA always speak English or, in some other parts,
various other European languages? Racism, colonialism, imperialism, eugenics, slavery, slaughter:
they are all symptoms of the same disease.
That disease is authoritarianism, the desire to exploit and control others or to otherwise coerce
their lives. In our more capitalist times, which exist only due to the greed of the elite, one of
the main authoritarian tools of choice is sowing division. The idea is that if we all hate each
other for various, ultimately spurious, reasons then we shall not recognise who our real enemy is.
For the truth of the matter is that the people who stoke racism, who foster racist structures and
who wish to propagate racist ideologies, are not only racists. They are often likely to be
misogynists too. And transphobes. And homophobes. An example may suffice to demonstrate this point.
The example is Boris Alexander de Pfeffel Johnson, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom who, in
print, has insulted pretty much every oppressed grouping it is possible to personally insult.
Its him, too, who presented the report into the wholly imaginary lack of structural police racism
and who oversees appointments to the British organ overseeing equality in British institutions yet
does this by staffing it with people known to have prejudices themselves. It is this same Johnson
who, in the past, uttered eugenics-tinted comments about needing to reduce the population – just
like his father before him.
And its also the same Johnson and his migrant-hating Home Secretary, not so Priti Patel, who
recently gave the all clear to racists wanting to boo the England team who, in an action of
solidarity, had decided they would take the knee to highlight racism and equality issues. Of
course, when the England team had success these culture wars obsessed bigots had to quickly
backtrack and issue ever more hypocritical “come on lads!” type messages to derision from those
seeing through their hypocrisy. One respondent to Patel, the England defender Tyrone Mings,
skewered her perfectly with a two-footed tackle which hoist her on the petard of her own empty
words. And Mings is right: you don’t get to denounce moronic social media racists when you have
been the one stoking the fire all along. You’re the living embodiment of the problem with your
racist anti-refugee policies, not the solution to it. No wonder, then, that a reception for the
England team was swiftly cancelled when it transpired the players would refuse to meet Johnson,
the cheerleader and encourager of racists the team themselves were explicitly protesting against.
So its actually far, far past the time when any of this racist shit should have been dealt with.
Don’t blame “social media companies” for racist posts about “niggers” and “monkeys”. Yes, they
themselves have their own duty to deal with the users on their platforms and they do a piss poor
job of it - but they are only conduits. The racism comes from society and exists in it at every
level, often encouraged and stoked by those in government and left to sow its poison by management
structures everywhere. All racists must be held to account and face consequences whether in
corporations and governments or in the homes and work places that we inhabit ourselves. Its time
to name and shame, to report people to their bosses, to refuse to work with or associate with
racists. Its time to make them unemployable pariahs, people afraid to show their faces. We need
militant, active, in your face anti-racism. Let these motherfuckers know there’s a cost to being
a racist, one they might have to pay.
But at the same time we have to realise that while each racist bears personal responsibility for
their racism it is also more insidious and structural than that too. The individual racist types
“monkey” on his keyboard but its the system which leaves him unpunished, his comment online,
perhaps indefinitely, and leaves him with few consequences for his or her hate. It is systems
working as they should which ensure all white, or white-dominated, management or boardrooms or
political administrations. To tackle both we need to push back consistently against the individual
acts of racism but to do so in solidarity with people of all races, creeds and colours to challenge
it at the societal, structural level. Racism exists in order to designate a “them” and an “us”.
It is a tool of power and it is used to practically wield authority over the oppressed group.
We resist it by not letting them divide us, by refusing their classification differences and by
refusing a “them and us” mentality. Solidarity has always been the answer to division and it
always will be as well.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Written and recorded By Dionysia_Anarqxista For broadcast by TOR Radio 2021.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------