Racism in the UK

[Music] on april 5th 1968 the morning after martin luther king's assassination an american schoolteacher named jane elliott was asked by one of her eight-year-old pupils why they killed that black man in response she asked her class of all white students if they wanted to understand what it was like to be black they agreed and she went on to conduct what would become known as the blue eyes brown eyes exercise she told her class that the children with brown eyes were superior to those with blue eyes the blue-eyed children had to wear coloured armbands whilst the brown eyed ones had special privileges like rights to the water fountain and seconds at lunch almost in an instant the group stopped playing with each other the brown eyed kid suddenly became more cruel and more confident whilst the blue-eyed kids became despondent and their performance in class started to decline the next day elliott reversed the rules telling the blue-eyed kids they were now superior only this time the new superior group was less harsh than the brown eyed ones had been before them at the end the students wrote about what they had learned and their essays were published in a local newspaper there were a few death threats and parents who tried to get her fired but the story brought elliot to fame almost overnight and her exercise grew into an international phenomenon she would later conduct it with adults around the world and her sharp no-nonsense attitude made for some pretty entertaining pop education participants would give mostly positive feedback on how much they had learned and academic research tended to show that the exercise had generally moderate results in reducing long-term prejudice it isn't my fault you're stupid should i feel sorry for her are you doing it again persecuted her for standing up bring it and executed him for standing out the only change that ever happens is when people stand out the ethics were always an issue though after decades of positive results in countries riddled with racist history like australia america and south africa elliot reached a bit of a hurdle in 2009 when she tried the experiment for the first time in the uk where participants either refused to or struggled to play along with the rules and in the most british way possible the whole exercise very quickly descended into an argument over whether or not the uk was racist every person in this room you didn't you didn't listen to me you're assuming i've got a racist attitude just because they're blue eyes let's use the word political correctness you're not allowed to use the word [ __ ] to me it's not offensive to you i don't [ __ ] barbara black [ __ ] what's that one third of my class a black children then i've got a bunch of half cast children i've got one little girl who's stunningly beautiful she fell over scraped all her face i admit i was slightly surprised that when she scraped all her face it's all pink underneath right did i expect it to be black i don't know if you've ever tried to have a conversation about racism in the uk you've probably heard the phrase britain is the least racist country in europe a claim that is commonly made in reference to a study from 2019 which found the uk outperforming the rest of europe on quite a few different metrics and while almost every other country in europe is currently dealing with a surge of new far-right parties the people in the uk are at least dealing with the devil that we know but to borrow from dave the london rapper the least racist country is still racist and this badge we adorn ourselves with can be just as much of a weakness as it is a strength because too often the argument that britain is the least racist country is used as a cynical means to shut down the conversation entirely it's a phenomenon that was perfectly encapsulated in this viral moment featuring lawrence fox who and what is lawrence fox lawrence fox is an actor and singer-songwriter who is famous for about two weeks following this interaction he had with an audience member on bbc question time let's be really clear about what this is let's call it by its name it's racism she's a black woman and she has been it's not racist you can't she has been torn to people it's not racism it's absolutely no it is they're the most tolerant lovely country uh in europe let's go [Applause] what i am i was born like this it's an immutable characteristic so to call me a white privileged male is to be racist ah yes the old you called me white and therefore you must be the real racist how dare you suggest that this privately educated posh-boy celebrity might in some way be sheltered from certain social realities it's not like he went to eaton after all he actually went to harrow where the fees are 42 000 pounds a year but maybe this is a hashtag not all rich kids kind of thing george orwell was privileged as was tony benn so it would be unfair to say that lawrence fox definitely doesn't understand oppression here he is grabbing life by the throat in a song that he wrote about cancel culture they have put something in the water they seek a cure for the conversation they stole a march on your indecision [Music] okay maybe there's a reason that being called out on twitter for having dumb opinions isn't really striking the same chord as songs about racism and maybe being singled out as white and privileged doesn't carry the same kind of baggage as it does for being singled out as black and i'm not saying it's a great argument just to call someone white and privileged but isn't it true that lawrence fox hasn't really been forced to understand racism in the same way that other people might have that was my first suspicion at least one which i think was confirmed a couple of weeks later when he complained about the film 1917 for featuring a sikh soldier in the first world war without even bothering to see whether or not any sikhs fought alongside the allies they did fox accused the filmmakers of forced diversity and institutional racism a claim which confirmed my own suspicion that this guy wasn't so much necessarily a racist as someone who just didn't have any idea what he was talking about maybe in this case the assertion that britain is the least racist country isn't so much a celebration as it is a cop-out a way of saying i don't know and i don't want to know when i first watched the jane elliott experiment in 2009 it was pretty clear that every person of color in the room was on the same side as one another they each had their own personal experiences of racial prejudice which they shared only to get dismissed one at a time by dissenters in the room elliott herself was even accused of racism for assuming it was the white people who had to learn about racism against people of color and not the other way around i feel like this distinction between anti-black and anti-white racism is something that even well-intentioned people can struggle with like that time after the killing of trayvon martin when a group of people on cnn got together and scratched their heads over whether or not the word cracker was just as bad as the n-word i've noticed that this is a question that seems to hold a lot of ground in the uk so i think it's worth contending with so just in case you are one of those people maybe we can do a thought experiment we all know the social consequences around using the n-word so maybe just ask yourself how you would feel if someone called you a cracker the answer is probably nothing right and well that's the difference and if you accept that difference then you have to explain it in one of two ways one that black people experience a kind of discrimination that we might not understand or two black people are just a bit more sensitive for some completely unknown reason but i know this empathy-based rhetoric isn't going to be convincing to you dear viewer when your peers were learning to understand one another's feelings you were studying the blade and if i'm going to convince you of anything we're going to need to cut through this issue with some good hard masculine facts and i could talk about how black men in the uk have been three times more likely to die of covet 19 than white men due to their disproportionate representation in frontline services or how job applications with muslim names are more likely to be turned over than people with british names at a rate that hasn't changed since the 1960s there will be some of that but i'd rather not spend the next half hour rattling off numbers to you instead i'm going to look at how our history and our institutions have affected different ethnic minority groups and how our approach to these issues has changed over time part one british exceptionalism it's worth pointing out that racism in the uk is a little bit more complex than the kind that jane elliott was dealing with yes we are the birthplace of modern eugenics pioneers of the modern slave trade and old school anti-black racism has never really left us but if there is somewhere we draw the line when it comes to outsiders it isn't race for example the way an american white nationalist might talk about black africans i.e that they're importing crime superstition and low intelligence to a more civilized nation is exactly the same way that british nationalists will talk about immigrants from poland look hard enough amongst the english upper classes and you'll even see the same rhetoric still being used against people from scotland ireland and wales so if there are any americans in here who are longing for the return of a white christian brotherhood you might want to check in with your prospective allies because not only would a lot of them exclude americans from european identity obviously they also exclude each other some of the more crafty white nationalists might draw a line at nordic europe although this has its own problems in that it excludes france spain and italy but the most common distinction is the one between eastern and western europe where the west sees itself as civilized based wealthy and liberal whereas the east though mostly white is seen as uncivilized orientalists poor and regressive within western european countries similar arguments are expressed through north and south divides in italy for example there have been political movements based around breaking up the north and south where southerners see people in the north as calvinist inauthentic and basically the same as germans and northern italians will stereotype southerners as lazy superstitious and especially in sicily as having a bit too much of the moors in them but where exactly this frontier is between eastern and western europe is far from settled anyone who has ever mistakenly referred to a polish hungarian czech or slovenian person as eastern european will know what i mean here because they are central european you know the civilized ones and then you have claims that vary from nation to nation slovenian nationalists will argue that they are the beginning of civilization because slovenia is richer than its ex-yugoslavian neighbors croat nationalists will argue that because they're majority christian they should counter civilized and the barbaric east doesn't actually begin until the largely muslim countries of bosnia and albania on the other end austrian nationalists will exclude slovenians on the basis that they're still slavs german nationalists especially in the north will exclude austria because of their history with the austro-hungarian empire and how they tried to be german once and that didn't go very well french nationalists will dismiss germans for the nazis obviously and then at the end we have british nationalism which in the present day more or less says the uk is civilized and everywhere else is the balkans this european union is the new communism so racism is complicated basically one thing we can infer is that countries with exceptionless attitudes especially ones that allow exceptionalism to dictate their politics can probably be expected to treat outsiders as unexceptional and to treat them as such with that let's take a look part 2 the irish and the jews when a wave of irish immigrants arrived in the uk in the 19th century they were essentially treated like a different species they were not considered white and they were commonly depicted in art as having almost demonic features including a long prognathus jaw which phrenologists saw as an indicator of degeneracy and criminality anti-irish sentiment was intellectualized by scholars who contrasted irish emotion with british reason irish crime with british stability and irish alcoholism with british prudence okay and for the first time in british history a foreign entity was seen as an enemy of the working class who cheapened the workforce by offering their services for a lower rate than the locals while there was some evidence that irish migrants were suppressing the average wage the interesting thing is is that this exact same accusation was laid against jews who arrived a few decades afterwards despite there being barely any evidence for it in this case there were also very few of them but they were mostly concentrated in east london where they were crammed into squalid housing with little or no sanitation these were decisions made by the state obviously but nonetheless jews were routinely blamed for it anyway they were stereotyped as filthy and they were highlighted for their strange eastern culture which made it difficult for them to function outside of jewish areas like the irish they were not considered white and there was only after migrants from south asia and the caribbean arrived when the black and white binary became the way we know it today part 3 the windrush generation after the second world war britain went through a labor shortage and the government responded by inviting an influx of immigrants from the caribbean the group of migrants who arrived between 1948 and 1971 became known as the windrush generation because the caribbean was part of the commonwealth they became british subjects on arrival and in 1971 they were given indefinite leave to stay and work in the united kingdom however this process was very informal the home office didn't keep any record of those given indefinite leave to stay and in 2010 for some reason they destroyed the landing cards that recorded the arrivals of windrush migrants consequently the migrants were in a position where they had every legal right to stay here but couldn't provide the paperwork to prove their citizenship they were legal but undocumented so if one day there was a government policy to create a certain hostile environment towards illegal immigrants and there was a group of undocumented migrants who might through no fault of their own appear to be illegal immigrants then you might have some problems that's exactly what happened in 2012 when the now ex-prime minister rest in peace introduced the hostile environment strategy a policy which developed extra responsibilities to a range of citizens landlords were required to conduct checks on tenants and doctors were expected to check the immigration status of patients before treating them the problem with turning landlords and professionals into part-time immigration officers was that everyone who was an immigrant now became a potential suspect thousands of legal migrants were put through the stress of having to provide bank statements employment checks bills and proof of residency often for every year they had been in the country this was especially difficult for people who had been living here for decades and for the windrush generation it was almost impossible suddenly people who had been here for over 50 years were locked in a bureaucratic gray zone for something that was completely out of their control after two years of warnings and over a thousand formal complaints from people many of whom had been denied health care lost their jobs and been denied benefits the windrush scandal reached the news after it emerged over 160 people had been wrongfully detained or removed from the country the government apologized of course and the story went away fairly quickly two years on only 60 of the 1 200 applicants have been compensated now these numbers are pretty small so why am i talking about this well the problem is that having to dig through decades of paperwork whilst being threatened with deportation when you haven't done anything wrong isn't really the kind of thing that should be happening to anyone especially to people who theoretically have exactly the same class of citizenship as white brits so it's almost like the legal systems in the uk have been giving unequal treatment to equal citizens on the basis of race like a kind of systemic racism perhaps no in the 1980s black migrants alongside gay people were also routinely blamed for the aids crisis and in the most cucked way possible the national front used it as an excuse to protect white british women from the virility of black men beta for many black britons it was a catch-22 where people were denied work for failing to prove they were hiv negative whilst at the same time others were denied work when it was found out that they were hiv positive others who were positive were denied health care altogether and as decades of research has shown the stigma around hiv only made people more reluctant to get tested part four islam i know i know what are the muslims doing here in a video about racism don't you know islam is not a race that is a very good point you've just made and just so i'm not talking past your argument here is a long-winded digression on the philosophy of language move over because me coming through and this is what me and we're going to do i'm going to punch in the hair i kick in the face because i am the king of the whole islam race right now we've got that sources the muslim population in the uk started steadily increasing in the 1960s they were brought over from the old south asian colonies as a response to labor shortages brought about by the second world war it was in this period when south asians played an instrumental role in developing the national health service but at the end of the 60s the conservative health minister enoch powell gave his infamous rivers of blood speech which was laced with ominous warnings and inflammatory language concerning immigration powell did recognize the contributions of migrant health workers and insisted his speech had nothing to do with them you'd imagine so he was the one who urged them to come here but the locals who picked up on his words didn't seem to care for the same fine distinctions his speech was immediately followed by a surge in nationalist and skinhead violence against south asian migrants professional and unprofessional alike this brought the birth of the national front a far-right political party which was founded by an ex-member of the british union of fascists both black and asian migrants were branded as cheap labor and accused of breaking workers solidarity despite the fact that their primary purpose in both cases was to plug labor shortages that migrant workers were more unionized than the locals and despite the fact that it was much more common for white workers to cross immigrant picket lines than the other way around i just want to suggest a theory um maybe the thing that was much more responsible for breaking worker solidarity was racism part four be uh terrorism since 9 11 there was a noted shift in the rhetoric of british policymakers away from the ethnic identity of british asians and towards the religious identity of british muslims now that we were fighting a war on terror the politicians who were previously silent on their issues with islam probably because they were supporting the taliban very quickly started to treat british muslims as dangerous outsiders who were guilty by association a study from 2018 showed that 59 of media articles involving islam have been shown to paint muslims in a negative light on a systemic level two counter-terrorism policies in particular have fallen especially hard and almost exclusively on british muslims the first community cohesion before 9 11 the focus of the british government was believe it or not to promote multiculturalism and the celebration of ethnic and religious differences but after 2001 the emphasis on multiculturalism was replaced by the policy incentive of community cohesion which stressed the promotion of a common vision and a shared sense of belonging they used legal measures like citizenship tests integration contracts and even compulsory courses on national values now the citizenship test is pretty well known for the strange requests it makes of its applicants one of them being to swear loyalty to the queen and if we contrast that with a british citizen by birth who wants to abolish the monarchy say my good friend boner locks no relation you could suggest that different ethnic groups living in the uk are not necessarily enjoying the same rights second the prevent strategy the prevent strategy was introduced as a counter-terrorist measure encouraging citizens to out potential extremists within the muslim community in the past 10 years the strategy has gained a reputation not so much for outing terrorists but for subjecting muslims to a witch hunt where people including children were being detained and interrogated for things as trivial as using the word terrorism in a classroom discussion both of these strategies have essentially created a second class of free speech rights which have led to a breakdown of communication between muslims and the state the two are now stuck in a vicious cycle where muslims react to state policy by becoming more insular and the state reacts by using more aggressive means to impose their idea of western values part five drugs so people often dismiss the war on drugs as just a kind of knee-jerk reaction from pearl clutch and conservatives who were simply not very down with the kids more recently john ehrlichman who is a chief advisor under richard nixon offered a new perspective the drugs were used as a strategic way to consolidate state efforts against the anti-war movement and black people in his own words the nixon campaign in 1968 and the nixon white house after that had two enemies the anti-war left and black people you understand what i'm saying we knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and the blacks with heroin and then criminalizing both heavily we could disrupt those communities we could arrest their leaders raid their homes break up their meetings and vilify them night after night on the evening news did we know we were lying about the drugs of course we did in keeping with the great british tradition of borrowing all of our bad ideas from the united states the war on drugs found its way here today black people in the uk are almost 10 times more likely to be stopped in search for drugs than white people despite the fact that black and ethnic minority groups use drugs including class a's at a lower rate than white people but wait isn't that because of the knife crime epidemic well no because in the uk the reason for the stop and search is given before the search takes place over 60 of stop-and-searches are drug searches and before you ask the vast majority of these searches are aimed at catching small-time possession rather than dealing furthermore only nine percent of searches are conducted to find weapons and government data found that stop and search had no effect on the rates of knife crime so in either case there is no evidence that racial profiling increases the chances of police finding what they're looking for part 6 29 million romanians and bulgarians in january 2014 a set of transitional controls were lifted between the united kingdom and romania and bulgaria at the time nigel farage then leader of the uk independence party was warning that 29 million romanians and bulgarians may come to this country 29 million is just the combined population of both countries but it is technically true that free movement gave them all the right to come to the uk so while i can't prove that this is definitely an attempt to inflate the expected number of migrants what i can say is that any fears which might have been completely accidentally prompted by farage's extremely careful use of words were completely unfounded since 2014 any increase in immigration from both countries was negligible compared to previous years and farage's warning of a romanian crime wave have not been backed by any evidence around the same time farage also unearthed an old relic when he argued that people who were should not be allowed into the country despite international organizations agreeing that this would have no impact on the epidemic and if anything research has shown that this kind of stigma only makes the problem worse because it reduces people's likelihood of getting tested part 7 patterns so by this point you might have noticed a few recurring threads here from the irish and the jews to muslims and eastern europeans migrants in the uk have in one way or another been routinely labeled as cheap laborers who are unruly superstitious and diseased there have been so many variations of these arguments that it would take me ten videos to debunk all of them but it should be obvious that there are problems with using the exact same talking points against people who are migrating from very different places at different times and under very different circumstances there was some evidence that irish migrants were being used to cheapen labor costs but when the same accusation is laid at black and south asian migrants who were explicitly brought over to plug labor shortages you do have to wonder is this really all about the facts and even when there are elements of truth to what they're saying for example migrants in the uk are more likely to be hiv-positive the solutions they offer are vindictive and completely useless i've made a couple of videos in the past addressing anti-migrant talking points as well so go look at those and whether it's the alcoholism and backward catholicism of the irish the unsanitary jews with their strange eastern culture the hiv riddled black criminal sex gods the criminal romanians and the grooming muslim terrorists clip that out of context the talking points made against foreigners have been consistently irrational but baseless as they are these arguments have been used interchangeably against different migrant groups for over 150 years one thing that has changed is the people making them and over the last couple of decades anti-migrant parties in the uk have been very successful in rebranding themselves to court public approval the lineage of the bnp for example can be very easily traced back to the british union of fascists people like nigel farage on the other hand have made every effort to distance themselves from the old fascist movements even to the point that ex-bnp members weren't allowed in his party with newer parties like ukip and the brexit body anti-immigrant politics is now very comfortably in the british mainstream and blessed as he is with the smile and charm of a thousand grandpas nigel farage's efforts to sell xenophobic rhetoric to the wider public have been nothing short of a total success and it's safe to say that the aesthetics of older fascist parties are now a thing of the past well apart from the occasional anti-refugee poster that looks quite similar to an old piece of nazi propaganda though i'm sure that's just a coincidence but the one thing that hasn't really changed is the arguments when farage brought up hiv quite a few people noticed that this argument hadn't really been used against migrants since the days of the national front similarly his constant connection of migrants to crime despite migrants committing less crime than locals and his focus on wage suppression despite the fact that he opposes an increase in the minimum wage because he thinks it would attract more migrants and his comments on disease are almost identical to the arguments made by the fascist parties of old but credit where credit's due his rebranding of british xenophobia has allowed him to become one of the most influential politicians in the last 20 years and the way he and many conservatives have done this is very interesting part 8 the liberal veil so the arguments used against migrants today aren't all that different from those users against jews and irish people in the 19th century but the presentation of those arguments is very different if you remember from the beginning of this video one of the aspects i mentioned about british exceptionalism especially today is that we're liberal and tolerant after all we're the mother of democracies we didn't have a nazi takeover like germany and we didn't have a bloody revolution like france but while anti-immigrant rhetoric used to come from people who were quite critical of britain's liberal credentials it looks like the xenophobes of today have come up with a new spin when the right honorable gentleman lord bumbling loin of beef compared muslim women and knee cabs to letterboxes and bank robbers the number of hate crimes against muslims rose by 375 percent in the same week nonetheless boris refused to apologize and insisted that his comments were made as a liberal defense of women's rights obviously some people probably missed that message in quite a few of the recorded incidents the offenders were reported to have referenced boris johnson's comments during the attacks and this paradox of hiding bigotry behind a veil of progressive values is far from unusual nigel farage will often flaunt britain's proud record of accepting refugees whilst constantly regurgitating the talking points of past figures who were anything but accepting of refugees at the time tommy robinson once described his politics outside of immigration as generally liberal and left-wing and when edl activists attack muslims they'll often try to justify themselves by saying it's because muslims oppress women and gay people this is not racism you see this is feminism and queer rights so maybe that british exceptionalism we spoke about earlier is a double-edged sword maybe the thing that makes us flaunt our status as the least racist country is the same thing that makes us racist it's a bit like ronald reagan's claim that when fascism comes again it will do so in the name of liberalism only in this case it makes sense part 9 conclusion obviously british exceptionalism does have a bit of a dissonance to it on the one hand we are very progressive very liberal very tolerant huzzah but as soon as we start to treat migrants as people who need these values imposed on them the results are predictably illiberal and intolerant whether it's the hostile environment community cohesion prevent the stigma around hiv employer discrimination and deportations migrants in the uk are constantly faced with systemic challenges that effectively makes them second-class citizens but as for the locals you'll notice i haven't said too much about them of course the majority public opinion on migrants is fairly negative but i'm a bit hesitant to put this down to the callousness of the average person when anti-blm protesters gathered in london and their opponents didn't show up they fought with the police instead and it made them look terrible overt and trigger happy racism in the uk is weak and disorganized our problem is not died in the wool racism it's more of a middle-of-the-road denialism that allows these broader structural issues to exist without scrutiny our issue doesn't come in the form of confederate flags and shameless white supremacy it comes in the way all british things do politely and as much as i enjoy taking on the ideas of fascists and white nationalists hello by the way you guys just aren't worth the effort in this case you have no power here what i'm much more interested in challenging is this sense of complacency it's this dismissive attitude of otherwise decent people that just makes it impossible to have an honest discussion about something that isn't really befitting of the most tolerant least racist country in europe if i can appeal to your national pride here that title isn't something we'll be holding on to forever unless things start to change the experiences of ethnic minorities in this country have started getting worse and it doesn't look like the last 10 years of conservatives and liberals [ __ ] on foreigners has made anything better for locals in the meantime maybe that's because the interests of white brits and ethnic minorities are not so different after all maybe these all-white towns in the midlands and northern england are no more bastions of the traditional working class than places like central birmingham tottenham and hackney maybe the workers of the world should whatever [Music] do do you

Channel: LonerBox

Views: 380,356

Keywords:

Id: 3jBy6S-6FpE

Length: 34min 53sec (2093 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 14 2020