Stats??! update for those who asked…
Government is terrified of economic position post-furlough. The numbers across their desks look catastrophic. Companies who need human proximity (airlines, restaurants and pubs etc etc) are collapsing soon. We lost 20% of our economy in April. This is unheard of and the road back will be very, very hard, leaving funds for public services 2021 decimated unless we push the debts even further at our teenage children’s earning generation.
Having discussed how Covid-19 blame was overlapping a bit with the new emerging Brexit agenda in places, we then had the George Floyd murder charge (raised from Murder 3 to Murder 2 probably only because of demonstrations). So race is now an issue. We can make this a great opportunity to be honest about the work still to do in society on this, or we can destroy the debate and polarise behind false self-righteousness on all sides.
I saw a great post this week about terrible post-war Empire atrocities by the British in Kenya. I agreed we should (and need to) ‘un-re-write’ UK colonial school history. Or more accurately, include and publish more truth of our recent colonial dark acts, as well as balance up the wording on the plaques next to statues and put some – lawfully – in museums instead of in victims’ descendants’ faces every day from on high.
The result however will always be a ‘version’ of some kind – it’s not possible to balance perfectly the saints and sins, and these are so mixed too (eg Churchill). But the result should be a balance of good and bad, as both existed simultaneously. Self-flagellation alone at this time leading to self-loathing now, is not helpful or accurate. But a period of reflection, asking, and correction, yes. It highlights there is much to do.
I think we should include more older historical shameful truths with the context of their time (not our current context) and balance up more recent post WW2 stories (Windrush etc). And then also to ask other ‘races’ and ‘groups’ to be honest and balanced too.
Long ago, slavery existed wholesale in black Africa before the white colonialists arrived. Witnessing this may even have given the white colonialist opportunists the idea and some warped sense of justification. American indians committed many atrocities not connected to whites. They also had slaves. We were conquered by vicious Viking hordes. It’s complicated and all modern-day ‘groups’ need to own their own sins first (I am not equating here) before attacking others. Otherwise a sense of perspective is lost and justice will never be achieved. The danger is that a false sense of self-righteousness just replaces one tyranny with another.
‘Remove the plank in your own eye before condemning the splinter in another’ is a nice reminder, before we or any ‘group’ of any kind get too self-righteous.
Here’s one bit of relevant history. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/facts-about-slavery/
While I see the large majority of UK people are good and fair people and UK is better than most nations (try living alone and as an ‘outsider’ in Middle East, Arab nations, Russia, eastern europe, China, India, France) there is still a lot of ‘soft racism’ – subconscious and conscious – as well as overt acts by a nasty minority to eradicate here. It only takes a very few % of these nasty types (plus lack of empathy from those with unconscious inter-generational soft superiority? and blindness? – I’m off to tidy up my own act again with my grandfathers’ old-language voices in my head as a check-sheet) to exist in order to ‘colour’ a whole life of a black person in this country. But overthrow and a new, different, tyranny is not the answer on any side. We all need to work peacefully but energetically for more cross-understanding and justice now.