White Rule(s) and ‘Little’ White Lies — What Has Changed?
The Anglo-AmerKKKan Empire, Manipulating to Maintain It Is Business as Usual — Introduction
When I came upon the true story about the 6 Chinese survivors of the sinking Titanic, by Andrei Tapalaga here on Medium, I was kind of shocked. The story and, its suppression throughout the whole of the previous century, really affected me on many levels. First and foremost, the treatment of the Chinese men exposes the depths of the life-draining nastiness of white entitlement. When we hear of the atrocities of police brutality against people of colour and the recent shooting by a white man running wild and targetting ethnically-Asian women at work, when we hear of the far higher death rates of ‘minorities’, in the white-dominant societies, during disasters such floods, tornadoes, or currently, in the midst of the Covid health crisis, we can see evidence, clear as daylight, of the vicious inhumanity and ‘othering’, encountered by the Chinese survivors, is really really absolutely, continuing to this day. But wait. Is it REALLY continuing to this day? Apparently not, asserts the report of the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities, led by Tony Sewell.
I think the account about the Chinese travellors migrating to America, caught my attention by virtue of the fact that when we consider the thousands of articles and history books, not to mention the world famous film, about the sinking of the Titanic, the treatment faced by the Chinese passengers has been very deliberately, kept buried. I think these kinds of acts of ‘forgetting’, lie at the heart of how white power and it’s covert forms of supremacy, have been maintained, decade after decade and century after century.
So, according to the logic of white rule, these young men from China who had bought tickets (and therefore were legitimately travelling on the Titanic) should have willingly let themselves drown because ‘obviously’, white Europeans are more deserving of life and should have been survivors, in their stead? Each of the Chinese men should have said to themselves, “Oh Great White Person, I should drown and die before you do. Please, take my place on the lifeboat.” I ask you, is this expectation not idiotic, if not insane? To me, it’s indicative of an absolutely insane level of white entitlement which is kept deeply-hidden from conscious awareness.
The painful reality is that the ongoing practices of wage enslavement, the exploiting, degrading and policing of people of colour, these all lie only one hair breadth away from the Hollywood/London-shaped veneer of being a democracy. For example, how many thousands of films are there, which glorify the white male fighting against the odds for freedom etc etc? This creates the mirage that the Anglo-American empire ‘obviously’, respects human rights. Look how, time after time, the weary white man has to heroically go to the rescue of something or someone, in these ‘tin-pot’ dictatorships. These are the nations full of Black, Brown and slant-eyed people, that Amerikkka mocks, yet whose dictatorships she (secretly) supports. How else are they going to sell their weaponry and obtain thousands of kinds of foods, minerals and that black gold, oil, so essential to the Western populations’ over-consuming lifestyle?
On the same day that I read Andrei Tapalaga’s article, I happened to watch a film set in the 1960’s called, ‘The Black Klansman’. The film includes an elderly black man describing to Black students how he, as a teenager, witnessed his friend’s lynching. As I sat on my sofa in the north of England, hearing his testimony about how his young friend was tortured horrifically on the streets, (while white children being let out of school to see the spectacle), of his testicles being cut off, petrol poured over the child, how he was burnt slowly, deliberately, in order to prolong his agony, to death, as photographs were taken and then, these photos were sold as postcards … I was overcome by the unbearable horror; I was almost retching, physically, feeling sick. My skin crawled with the feeling of disgust.
Honestly, the more I learn about the hidden history of whites in general and white Anglo-Americans in particular, the more despicable they become in my eyes.
Hang on, though, it’s not really history is it? The extra-judicial killings of Black people and other people of colour, on the streets of Amerikka, just go on and on and on. Rest in Peace George Floyd. Here in the UK, we do get similar things happening. While the horrific case of the teenager, Steven Lawrence, waiting at a bus-stop and being killed by a white gang, gained publicity due to the heroic efforts of his family and friends, sustained over many years, there are many such killings that occur under the radar. There will be a short paragraph in the news, and then beyond the immediate family, the atrocity is quickly forgotten. I think it’s fair to say, that minoritised communities in the U.K are less organised and more atomised and divided, than in the USA. But all across the Western Empire, unless your family is exceptionally courageous, articulate, and well-connected, your death at the hands of the police or a racist gang, is likely to be soon forgotten.
But somehow, Black Lives Matter protests also broke out in solidarity, here in the U.K last summer. I jumped for joy, on said sofa and punched the air with delight, seeing the exhilarating sight of young people of every hue, cooperating together to pull down the statue of a slave trader in Bristol. They succeeded in throwing the damn statue into the river! At last, we were getting visibility, we who have tried to argue in the public domain, that glorifying mass murderers, setting up memorials to them in public spaces, was part of a shameful history of genocidal exploitation. Could it be that finally, this perspective was now, no longer just that of the powerless few black activists, wierdos, hippies, and commies, at the margins of white society? So, what was the reaction of the UK government, to these street protests in the summer of 2020? Boris Johnson set up a commission to look into institutional racism.
That hand-picked set up, dignified by the name, ‘Commission’, has concluded some nine months on, that the U.K should serve as a beacon to other white-dominant nations, for its exemplary improvement in establishing equality for the BAME communities in the U.K. (BAME = Black, Asian, Minority Ethnic). The report even suggested that, given it was white working class boys who achieved the least academically, it was really time to give them more support. Thankfully, there are still people of integrity and honesty, of every hue, who dared to speak up and describe how this entire report is an ugly gaslighting, a suppression of the truth. From trade union leaders, to teachers in education, journalists in the media and representatives of the medical profession, people have over the past few days, spoken out to express their outrage. Many voices called the report, ‘an insult’.
Coincidentally, the very week that the report was published, a documentary had been released about the high maternal deaths of Black women in the U.K. Despatches revealed that Black women are four times more likely to die during or soon after childbirth. Also, in the same week, children of colour in London, had been protesting about school rules that humiliated those with Afro hair. The children’s protests exposed other instances of institutionally-driven harm like the all-white curricula that whitewashes European’s crimes against humanity and re-presents invasions as ‘adventure’, as ‘progress’ and ‘development’, essential to the development of the ‘Enlightenment’ and the Industrial Revolution.
On hearing the report’s results, I myself was speechless with anger. Perhaps I am one of those ‘Highly Sensitive Persons’, for, after listening to summaries of the report on the news late in the evening, I woke up in the middle of the night, in distress. I was wheezing like a wounded creature. I lit a candle, took the inhaler, and made myself a hot drink to try and calm myself. I had been woken by a colossal kind of rage. I understand now, the descriptions of people feeling ‘possessed’. It about emotion we have not been able to process. Flashing pictures, a litany of events, were appearing vividly in my mind, as my soul recalled the times I had been humiliated, slapped in the face and punched in the guts by white rule seeking to maintain its supremacy. All the times I had been disciplined and dismissed for opposing white managers’ poor treatment of students of colour. How, more than once, an unqualified or under-qualified white male, was given all my classes at college and I was made to feel redundant, unwanted, rejected. Yet, I was the one with the undergraduate degree in philosophy and social anthropology, a further degree in teaching and a Masters in Education, specialising in socio-linguistics. More importantly, students turned to me for support in relation to their experiences of racism. I thought it was part of my role as a teacher/lecturer, to represent their concerns. Maybe because they felt I could be depended upon to represent them and would not use their complaint against them, I was more popular with the students, than the white staff were, year after year. And that was a problem, for the institution.
Leaving my experience aside, I sipped my cinnamon-flavoured tea, and gazed at the single candle light, recalling the highly competent African manager, gracefully expressing her authority to turn around a failing department. She was absent from work for months and on inquiring, I learnt it was with stress-induced illnesses. Things degenerated to the point where she had to be placed on suicide watch in the hospital. I could go on, sharing the experiences of white-shaped harm, directed at staff and students from all over the world, in the various colleges I worked in. It was there that I also met colleagues of every shade of colour, who shame-facedly, ‘kept their head down’ for they had children to support and I did not. It was easier for me to be ‘confrontational’ they hinted. Or when in Rome, do as the Romans do.
I have spent most of the lockdown year, in recovery mode, experiencing a very deep-seated burnout. It left me low in energy and the asthma condition, quite literally made me speak less. Now, hearing of this tortuous marginalisation and erasure of the experiences of people of colour by this commission looking into institutional racism, what was I to do? Bang my head on the nearest wall, in furious impotence? Too often have people of colour been goaded into acts of self-harm due to the levels of gaslighting, isolation and abandonment we experience. And then they dismiss us, because we are ,’too angry’ to be listened to, obviously!
It’s the Internet that has brought something new to the equation. We are still in many ways, barred access to newspapers, journals, academia and publishing houses that are 95% white. But with websites like Medium, we are able to share our research and our life experiences.
Collaborators Sought
I have made a decision to honour those people of colour and seekers of justice of whatever complexion, including white allies, all of us who have been written out of the history books. I am going to write every single day for the rest of April, about the racism in the UK as I have directly experienced, or observed it. Perhaps, with the right collaborators, this will all come together in the form of a play or a book. Collaborators definitely needed!
Interesting word, that. It’s got two very distinct meanings. According to the Collins dictionary,
- A collaborator is someone you work with to produce a piece of work, especially a book or research.
- A collaborator is someone who helps an enemy who is occupying their country during a war. In this sense, it means ‘a traitor’ or ‘turncoat’.
I want collaborators who seek to join hands to expose and dismantle white supremacist rule(s), not the kind of collaborators/commissioners of reports/writers of articles, printers of books and makers of films who clap and declare gushingly, ‘The Emperor has got the most beautiful clothes on’.
It’s true, something has changed since the sensibility that barred entrance to America to those Chinese survivors of the sinking Titanic. But it’s not the view that they did not deserve to live; we know that white lives are still valued more than Black lives and the lives of all other people of colour. While the Chinese as a nation, have recovered from the cruel, opium-induced weakness applied by the criminally-cunning British, ethnically Chinese people are in the present moment in history, facing a tide of hatred outside of China’s borders, and increasing calls for sanctions against them, as a nation on the global stage. And see how the West is crying tears for the Uygur Muslims, that allegedly suppressed minority living in the North West province of China. Crocodile tears for the Uygur’s ‘plight’, while the torture and killing of dissenters, no matter how horrific, by the West’s puppet leaders in nations, like Saudi Arabia, matters not at all. Bombing Muslim lands and destroying the infrastructure in say, Chile, Argentina, Somalia, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Syria (the list could go on and one) is not a crime, but the Chinese supposedly placing Muslims in re-education centres, is.
Based on long experience, we know what will come next: English-speaking experts along with shipments of weapons will be covertly sent to that region of China. How many other parts of the world have been exploited and civil wars deliberately fomented by the white supremacists, posing collectively as ‘democracies’, who are the guardians of ‘human rights’? The tragic truth is that the manipulation of divisions between civilian populations in Africa, Asia, Arabia and South America, goading them into civil wars, is a long-honed skill developed over centuries, by the Western colonial/imperialist powers.
Over the past decade or so, these manipulations and the arming of opposing factions, has resulted in the desperate migration of millions of people, out of African and Arabic nations, towards Europe and the destroyed economies of the South American nations, motivate people to migrate to the USA.
So, out of necessity really, the rewards and the space which White rule has always given to treacherous collaborators, both within and outside of its borders, is growing quite a lot.
My hope is that we who are not craven opportunistic cowards, seeking a little comfort while the rest of the planet faces near unfathomable levels of catastrophe, on land, sea and air, we can join hands to erode the power of white supremacy. The life of the planet itself, depends on putting an end to the entitled greed that has manifested over the past four centuries of Western domination. It has become a life-threatening disease, percolating into an all-poisoning consumerism that ensures want and starvation everywhere outside of the settler colonies and European states. Within their borders, the average white person, (forming the infrastructure, running schools, hospitals, universities, the media, the police and other government bodies) is complicit. That’s what we call ‘white privilege’.
We don’t want to join hands with white privilege to screw the rest of the people and planet. We want to help the younger generation, the ones pulling down statues in memory of genocidal exploiters, to stay on course, go for the long haul, and refuse to be accomplices to evil.