Beyond White Guilt

I seem to be posting a lot on UK specific issues lately. If it's inappropriate, please tell me and I'll stop.

I read this on a friend's LJ this morning, and thought it was something this community might want to hear about. It's about the new Mayor of London's crackdown on knife crime.

( Text for the link phobic )

Some friends of mine ar putting up this conference in the UK in the fall. It should be really good.





Bristol Radical History Week is a series of events aimed at opening to public scrutiny up some of the hidden and misrepresented history of Bristol. Rather then concentrating on royals, famous engineers or wealthy merchants, Bristol Radical History Week is going to concern itself with the proper people of Bristol. The mass of sometime rebellious and mutinous people who had their own agendas to fulfil.

The week will also be looking at the links to people who were drawn into the network of Atlantic trading that centered on Bristol as a port. These are the impressed sailors, West African slaves, transported vagrants, indentured labourers and pirates amongst others, who made up what has recently been called the 'Atlantic Proletariat'.

We will discover how the end of slavery, the rise of democracy, and the independence of colonial lands were the results of collective actions by extraordinary 'ordinary' people and NOT just middle class reformers, rich benefactors and generous governments as we are constantly told.

Scientists Find A DNA Change That Accounts For White Skin

By Rick Weiss
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, December 16, 2005; Page A01

Scientists said yesterday that they have discovered a tiny genetic mutation that largely explains the first appearance of white skin in humans tens of thousands of years ago, a finding that helps solve one of biology's most enduring mysteries and illuminates one of humanity's greatest sources of strife.

( Read more... )

I was litening to the BBC a coupla days ago and a journalist who had been interviewing the youth who've been rioting quoted one as wanting to leave france because there were too many jews and that it was a common sentiment. Anyone else know much about that particular fact(hatred) as part of the cause of the riots? Or a more permeating presence? I realize its a lot of nothern african muslims and arab muslims rioting...so i'm just curious if its more than just the thousands of years of hatred/anger over israel/palastine, or something more as well?

Doug Ireland has written a really important piece about the riots in France; notably his explanation of the blatantly racist comments by Minister of the Interior Sarkozy is something which I haven't seen anywhere else. Here's an excerpt:

But Sarkozy only poured verbal kerosene on the flames, dismissing the ghetto youth in the most insulting and racist terms and calling for a policy of repression. "Sarko" made headlines with his declarations that he would "karcherise" the ghettos of "la racaille"-- words the U.S. press has utterly inadequately translated to mean "clean" the ghettos of "scum." But these two words have an infinitely harsher and insulting flavor in French. "Karcher" is the well-known brand name of a system of cleaning surfaces by super-high-pressure sand-blasting or water-blasting that very violently peals away the outer skin of encrusted dirt -- like pigeon-shit -- even at the risk of damaging what's underneath. To apply this term to young human beings and proffer it as a strategy is a verbally fascist insult and, as a policy proposed by an Interior Minister, is about as close as one can get to hollering "ethnic cleansing" without actually saying so. It implies raw police power and force used very aggressively, with little regard for human rights. I wonder how many Anglo-American correspondents get the inflammatory, terribly vicious flavor of the word in French? The translation of "karcherise" by "clean" just misses completely the inflammatory violence of what Sarko was really saying. And "racaille" is infinitely more pejorative than "scum" to French-speakers -- it has the flavor of characterizing an entire group of people as subhuman, inherently evil and criminal, worthless, and is, in other words, one of the most serious insults one could launch at the rebellious ghetto youth.

The full text can be found at Ireland's blog: DIRELAND.