Last week I mentioned celebrity “people of colour” talking “po-faced rubbish” about slavery. I don’t have the time to wade through it now, but please do skim the drivelling of “Ms Dynamite” on the subject over at the BBC News Website. I’m proud to say I didn’t pay the BBC to pay this woman to represent the descendants of Jamaican slaves in a documentary about them.
23Mar07 — 14
Interesting link.
Who would you rather the BBC paid for this ‘task’? 🙂
Or perhaps it’s the ‘task’ itself you object to.
I am rather impatient with this culture of ‘representation’, if I may call it that. Someone must always be ‘representing’ something/some culture/some minority group etc. Even better is if the person in question is a celebrity. We seem, as a society, to be indulging in that sort of thing too much these days. Somehow, Ms Dynamite is deemed to acquire some special worth because she has managed to put herself in the shoes of people in common with whom she shares nothing of substance.
Still, it will make for a very ‘pretty’ documentary; a beautiful girl in a jungle, some good music, and a gesture toward serious discussion … what more could we possibly want?
Nothing can even conceivably ridicule Ms Dynamite as profoundly as the liner notes she wrote for her first album.
This is a bit of a tangent, but it occurs to me that the BBC would be rather dismissive towards Creationists yet would never dream of sending a white man to his ancestral land of Africa.
So, you didn’t pay the BBC ? Aha, you are a licence fee dodger !
I believe the wily Pootergeek dodges the licence by the cunning ploy of not buying a television.
You just can’t trust anybody these days.
I just had a flashback to my ‘our day out at the farm. By tim almond age 8 1/2’ report.
All that “compensation for slavery” stuff really is blithering. Very selective and implicitly racist for a start, what does it mean?
Whites pay blacks simply because of colour? So I, being part Irish (another race occupied and starved by the British for centuries), part Brazilian and part from a long line of English skivvies and factory workers who lived on subsistence wages and saw no profit from slavery have to pay a black man who could be descended from one of the many black chiefs who profited by selling members of another tribe, just cos I’s white?
Ridiculous. The world is too complex for these simplistic notions and this victim mentality serves nobody, especially the “victims”
I note you describe yourself in that link as a nice, beige, middle-class person. I haven’t seen the word beige in so long I had to look it up. There was me thinking you were pale green, like Shrek. I was confusing it with ochre.
I’m struggling to see the problem here. It may be a bit clumsy and you can certainly argue that it’s dumbing down, but getting media heads to front history documentaries in the hopes of widening the audience for factual programming seems like a good idea to me. Where does Ms Dynamite attempt to “represent” anyone? And who will professional misanthrope Jeremy Clarkson be representing tomorrow night, when he fronts a BBC documentary about a WWII battle?
Even if I accepted your assessment, Gregg—I don’t, but I’m busy, so I’ll go into why it’s mistaken later—Ms Dynamite doesn’t even score points on the “widening audience” front. She hasn’t had a hit for years and, even then, no one with any credibility took her seriously. The “kids” she’s supposed to attract to the programme would just think: “Lame!” and turn over. The last time she was in the news it was because she was arrested for (allegedly) assaulting a police officer—not because she was intervening to save a “sistah” from “institutional racism”, but because Ms D couldn’t get into a club. How much of a has-been do you have to be a female sleb who can’t get into a club?
I can say with confidence they’d have got bigger ratings with Vanilla Ice presenting.
Is beige similar to taupe ? I have recently bought a taupe mountain bike frame. I never heard any middle class people described as taupe.
Is Ms Dynamitee-hee out to resurect her music career ? I seem to remember she had at least one hit that was worth listening to.
There was some sort of numptie on the radio this morning suggesting white people ought to accept their responsibility for slavery. I have no evidence that my ancestors were involved in slavery, or if were they prime movers in building the British Empire. A few of them got killed in wars they probably didn’t ask to fight.
Depending on how far back you want to go, there’s probably a point at which most people have slave ancestory – since was a feature of most civilisations. Spartacus was a slave – he was Thracian. The Barbery Pirates were taking white slaves from European costal areas – some of whom ended up in the Ottoman Empire. Should Turkey apologised to Ireland for this before they are allowed into the EU? Do modern day Turkish citizens bear any responsibility for this?
This isn’t to suggest that the industrialised slave trade was not horrendous – it was. Millions displaced and worked to their deaths far away from home. It should be remembered, but the attempt by some to suggest that there is some sort of genetic guilt passed down the generations is counter-productive.
My response to this anniversary is that it is a valuable time to reflect on the evil trade that existed, and to celebrate that our culture was one of the first in history to realise the moral failings of such a trade. Rather than attempting to extract some sort of meaningless apology of guilt from people who had nothing to do with slavery, we should now focus our energy on ensuring slavery is compleletly abolished – whether it be the child trafficking in our own society, slavery in Sudan or the child camel jockeys in the Gulf states.
If instead we are going down this line of genetic guilt, I have recently discovered I am a descendent of Huguenot immigrants. Since then I have found myself deeply alienated from the French Nation, and have decided to nurse a greivance – until such time as the French government apologises for the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre and every individual Frenchman realises his responsibility for the persecution of the Huguenots. I could even blow myself up on the Metro to obtain justice for the Huguenots.
It is a statistical certainty I have some slaves in my ancestry somewhere.
Personally I am still waiting on an apology from the Romans, for their part in oppressing my ancestors. Maybe a few denari in my pocket too.
To the best of my knowledge the Romans, along with every other empire, didn’t loose much sleep over the issue—Again, to the best of my knowledge, it was the British Parliament that after all those centuries made Slavery illegal wherever they could make it stick.
So if anyone should apologise for Slavery it is… well everyone… going waaay back.
Surely the Brits at least have a get out of jail free card on this, having had a definitive hand in trying to stamp it out.
I think there is a prevailing confusion over what racism actually entails today as opposed to fifty or a hundred years ago. The fact that the word slavery is still used to define race issues pays tribute to the fact that there are many people intent on fighting the wrong battle; a battle that was already fought and won by MLK et al. However, the Civil Rights movement addressed the root cause of a problem, not the social consequences of it.
Even in St. Louis, one of the most segregated cities in the US, it’s fair to say that with relatively few exceptions the racism of old (the KKK flavour) is obsolete. You can’t even find it in the outer, predominantly white, suburbs (although it’s alive an kicking in the Bootheel of MO, I’m told). However, frustration in the black community here is still prevalent because segregation and the black/white wealth disparity is so terribly apparent. As a result, skin colour quickly serves as a convenient stereotype for class and a different flavour of racism has certainly arisen. A type that uses the term ‘nigger’ to define a particular class of African American much the same way that ‘chav’ defines a particular class of white in the UK. It’s a problem that requires an entirely different strategy to alleviate it; namely a general class-targeted strategy (designed to increase an otherwise completely retarded level of social mobility among blacks and whites alike) rather than a race-targeted strategy such as affirmative action (which, although well-meaning, is essentially a half-arsed attempt at ‘reparations’, and stirs up more racial tension that it thwarts).
Unfortunately, the last time I tried to argue that distinction with a St. Louis Democrat, I was shut down and accused of being a racist. I guess that kind of alludes to the sensitivity of the issue. Ho hum.
permanent victimhood/minority/religious persecution, yada, yada……………………
lunatic left cretins seeking to condition thoughts.
bollox to the lot