The Race Question

Sorry no answers here.

In The Godfather there is a scene where the heads of the major crime families are having a convention, one of the family bosses launches into a complaint against Don Corleone ‘he has all the judges and politicians in his pocket, he refuses to share them’. This scene reminds me of how identity politics works. Certain groups or individuals achieve positions of influence, and are granted the status of community leaders, activists or social commentators. A few years back, before 2020 when Black Lives Matter achieved global significance in the wake of the killing of George Floyd, there was a spokesman from BLM interviewed on a UK news show, he talked about how all other groups were in the business of achieving resources and influence, but for some reason some took exception when black people did the same. His was a kind of pluralistic pragmatism.

Interestingly I had a look at the Godfather clip online as I was writing this, these things are often not as I remember them, there is a dark humour here, or is just dark? The consensus was that Corleone needed to share his resources, his defence was strangely enough a moral aversion to the drugs trade. Another crime boss while agreeing with Corleone’s misgivings, insisted that they had to move with the times, he argued that drugs should be kept away from schools and children, or directed towards the ‘dark people’ who are ‘animals anyway’.

During our BLM summer of 2020 in the UK, some argued that we in the UK had been too influence by the American narrative. My view was that we’ve always been influenced by American narratives for better or worse.

This week in South London, an area I know well, there was an incident of disorder involving young people, there was something new about this, it has been reported that it was influenced by social media, where the perpetrators agree to arrive at a given destination, then raid a particular retail outlet, to steal and cause general carnage. Meet up? Flash mob? Swarming? Steaming? I don’t know what the current vocabulary is.

We know what a riot is, and years ago a riot was a big news story, and race was generally part of that story. The way the racial disturbances were reported was always contentious. For the right these were mindless, criminal actions, on the left these were people responding to racism or police harassment. Today we have an establishment that is terrified of the race question, and fearful of even reporting or discussing it.

There are some who hope for a post-racial society, or racelessness or colour blindness. I don’t mock these people I share their sympathies. But I don’t believe that we can forget about race, we are generations away from that. When I heard about these incidents, I immediately feared or imagined that the perpetrators were black. Is that my own prejudice? So what if they were black? Weren’t they just young people who happened to be black? I still live in South London and yet incidents like this are outside of my experience and understanding, these young people are far away from me socially and generationally. But there is still this feeling that I should be ashamed or embarrassed by this behaviour, that it will reflect badly on me. I would be a hypocrite to say that I feel responsible for these young people. There are still black people who feel that they have a responsibility towards ‘our’ young people, and there are white people who think that the misconduct of young black people is the responsibility of the black community. But imagine a family with a criminal or drug addicted member, who at some point find that not only are they unable do anything for that person, but that person is actually dragging them down too.

If I was a black community leader or strategist, I would say, this is bad for us, it makes us look bad, it attracts negativity from people who don’t like us anyway, it gives them ammunition to use against us. But I’m not a community strategist or leader, and I don’t know anyone who is. I’ve often commented that it is unrealistic to expect a commonalty among black people, for good reasons; where we come from, our life experiences, and generationally, we are strangers to each other, although some of us are old enough to remember the idea of solidarity, we only expect to see solidarity in some corrupted form these days, self-appointed leaders who take it upon themselves to speak for ‘us’. Black Lives Matter UK 2020 was an example of what this kind of solidarity looks like, a media narrative, taking in influential media, entertainment, political and sporting figures, creating a media reality that is more real than real.

Of course, the BLM house of cards collapsed. The culture war continues between media factions; the woke and the anti-woke, while young black people are running wild in our cities oblivious to this. Are these young people representative of black people in general or even young black people of their own generation? Although we shouldn’t kid ourselves that our problems would be over if we could resolve the race question there are many other social divisions. The right delude themselves, capitalist society is hierarchical, and before they take issue with me, I don’t know of any human society ever that has not been hierarchical, someone has to lose, someone will be left behind.