WHITE RAGE

Wednesday – 6 January 2021

“I solemnly swear to protect the United States against all enemies both foreign and domestic”.

The world looks on in astonishment at the anarchy unfolding before them on their TV and cell phone screens. A pro-Trump mob descending on the Capitol building of the most powerful democracy on the planet.

Police powerless to stop them!

This was no Hollywood doomsday movie, no box office blockbuster – THIS WAS THE REAL THING. Far-right hate on the march – A howl of white rage.

We have since learnt, in the weeks that followed, that this outburst was not a spontaneous ignition of the humbled downtrodden and the poor ; Not the storming of the barricades by Les miserables.
This was premeditated insurrection borne out of ignorance and hearts filled with hatred for fellow human beings, far worse than misguided patriotism, it was tribalism, the culmination of 400 years of historic racism.

The signs were there (BAME newsletter report Dec 2020), and nobody should pretend that the writing was not on the wall. With or without Donald Trump, the message has been steadily amassing across the centuries. Trump simply took full advantage of the signage in his psychotic attempt to further his own twisted ambitions.

Sadly, Trump’s big lie works, that is to say it is effective.
Just 60% of Americans, including 23% of Republicans believe Biden’s victory was legitimate. (According to a recent Quinnipac Minnesota University poll).

Trump’s big lie works because it taps directly into the ideology of the far-right, which in American politics is just a more palatable term or euphemism for ‘White supremacy’. For many of these people the election of a ‘Black man’ as their President in 2008 had simply been the final straw.

In November 2020 Barak Obama told us ‘Trump is an accelerant of division, not the cause’. Obama’s observation should not be seen to excuse Trump, who is after all a narcissistic white supremacist, who rose above all the others of his ilk to eventually lie his way into a presidency; Rather, it is Obama bringing a very real summation of the current state of America to our door.

The very idea of white supremacism actively thriving in wider society is an unpalatable accusation which many people just cannot face up to, or rather do not wish to face up to.
For some it seems that the road of denial is a more comfortable path to tread than introspection. It should be said that America is not alone in harbouring this discriminatory trope. Europe must share in the guilt, with overt racism and Eastern European ultra-Nationalism steadily on the rise.

As far as the USA is concerned, the idea of ‘white supremacy’ is the proverbial elephant in the room. Everyone recognises it is there but we must not mention it.
Even the so called ‘liberal-media’ prefers to label supremacists as ‘Fascists’ – Using political rather than ethnically derived terminology or perhaps flimsier still ‘Alt-right’ which is a total misreading of the supremacist groupings’ true motivations and intentions.

America has never in its history had a bent towards fascism, anymore than it has had towards communism. It should be remembered that the USA to a large extent has been populated by white European immigrants fleeing twentieth century authoritarian and fascist regimes, so their offspring are hardly likely to actively encourage fascism in their adopted land given the experience of their forbears. This is simply not how America works. ‘Land of the free and the brave’.

On the other hand, the defence of an actual or perceived ‘white privilege’ which European migrants have enjoyed over many decades, stemming from an historic discrimination of African Americans, is far more likely to be the modus operandi of Trump’s Right-wing support.

SUPREME SUPREMACY

So who are these Americans who apotheosise, glorify and idealise a liar, a narcissist, a white supremacist called Donald Trump? Who are these people who would storm their own Capitol building, declaring mob rule?
Well, they are office workers, factory workers, shop workers, construction workers, truck drivers, cab drivers, farmers and ranchers, small business owners, cops and soldiers, students, the employed and the unemployed. People who could be described as being both remarkable and unremarkable in the same breath. People that have experienced happiness and sorrow; In many ways people much like you and I. But wait, there is a fundamental difference between these people and those of us who would oppose their philosophy and damaged psychology.

The People I am trying to describe are fellow Hitchhikers in our galaxy, but alas they have all chosen to buy into the most tragic of lie, and it isn’t just that Trump won the election (Which he clearly did not).

The Big Lie

The lie of supremacy is supreme to these fellow travellers. It whispers soothingly in their ears, telling them that theirs is a god given privilege that trumps all others because ‘they are white’. They have been indoctrinated with this

lie by the culture they inhabit, their family’s prejudices, some of their teacher’s ideals, and sometimes even their priest’s prayers. Nobody is born a racist. It’s not biological it’s psychological.

I call it the lie of caste and colour, for as children later to become adults, and to their shame, these people have learnt to grow into acceptance of this lie, worn it, and chosen to embrace it.

As someone who is the target of this lie I cannot really hate these people. I pity them….Though I steadfastly and absolutely will defend my right to denounce their mindset of hate, with every breath I draw.

Like most bullies and would be supremacists they hunt in packs, drawing ideological safety perhaps in numbers.
The American Right-wing militias carry weapons, justifying this liberty under their (1791) 2nd Amendment rights to bear arms. A civilian right, inserted into a constitutional document written in age when an enslaved black person could be legally hung, drawn and quartered, in some American states, for inciting fellow runaway slaves to insurrection. How perverse then when you consider that 230 years later in 2021 it would be a white billionaire President inciting insurrection and Right-wing white supremacist militias, who would be encouraged to go on to erect a scaffold of a gallows in the shadow of the house of Congress. ‘Pot calling the kettle black’ comes to mind.

Racism and Casteism are tools constructed and utilised by domineering cultures in order to accrue and monopolise scarce resources. White supremacism is a manifestation of cultural domination, based on a false belief in ethnic superiority and relayed culturally in the form of racial discrimination. Although white supremacism it is not the only strain of human discriminatory practice existing across global culture, it is nevertheless a particularly virulent form of social division.

FASCISM V ANTIFASCISM

Fascism as opposed to other forms of dictatorship or autocracy, for those who have taken the time to study the ideology, is understood as being a uniquely European construction, with its origins dating from the early Roman Republic. The etymology of the term – Fasces or Fascia littero – denotes a symbol of authority a bundle of rods tied around an axe which could be used by the civic magistrate to determine corporal or capital punishment at his command. Modern fascism draws its influence from Benito Mussolini’s fascist party, formed in Italy in 1915.

Fascism has justifiably come to be understood by liberal-democratic opponents as a pejorative term. A critical reference to ideologies espoused by the likes of Hitler, Mussolini and Franco.
Fascist ideology is sometimes applied to post-world War II organisations and ways of thinking that academics more commonly term ‘neo-fascist’.

Professor Richard Griffiths of the University of Wales wrote back in 2005 that fascism is the “most misused, and over used word, of our times”.

What then of the Anti-fascist movement (ANTIFA); the bane of Donald Trump and his legions of racists?

Antifa was formed in Germany (1932-33) and is an abbreviation of Antifaschistiche Action.
A short lived group of very brave activists, many of whom’s original members were brutally murdered by Hitler’s S.A (Brown shirts) or perished in Nazi concentration camps.

Oxford Dictionaries placed ‘Antifa’ on its shortlist for word of the year in 2017 and stated that the word emerged from relative obscurity to become an established part of the English lexicon over the course of 2017.

Former Antifa organiser – Scott Crow recently told an interviewer.

“The idea of Antifa is that we go where they (Right wingers) go. That hate speech is not free speech. That if you are endangering people with what you say and the actions behind them, then you do not have the right to do that.
And so we go to cause conflict, to shut them down where they are, because we don’t believe that Nazis or Fascists of any stripe should have a mouthpiece.”

There is no doubt that Antifa and Black Lives Matter (BLM) share many common values and they are willing to take to the streets together, often with shared aims; but we should recognise they are separate entities and we should be wary of simply branding racism as fascism, for this would be to oversimplify a complex set of social relations

TRUMP AND HIS TRUMPSTERS

Donald Trump won 46.8 percent of the votes cast in 2020 US Presidential election – 74,222,958 million voters.

Nothing in this article is in anyway suggesting that all those who voted for Donald Trump are either Fascists or White supremacists, many of these people (however misguided) genuinely believed Trump’s lies. Perhaps for many of these people Donald Trump represented a Republican return to a Ronald Reagan like figure.
Hollywood’s ‘Shoot ‘em up cowboy’ – A caricature reminiscent of the good old days when there was a new sheriff in town and bad guys had better beware.

For those voters then, this author suggests that their crime is one of lazy thinking and privileged nostalgia.
A yearning for the American dream, as played out on cinema and TV screens of the 50’s, rather than real life or real society. These voters were and still are undoubtedly naive, maybe even stupid, but not necessarily malicious, nor likely to go scurrying off to Congress to tear the place down and possibly lynch some of the incumbents.

Nevertheless, if we consider that only a fraction of that 74 million + Trump voters, are hardcore ‘Trumpsters’ ‘MAGA waving fanatics’ (Possibly 20% of those who voted) then we are looking at a lot of mad, bad and dangerous people 18.5 million plus to be more precise. And that is probably a conservative estimate, given the cult status of Trump in or out of the White House. Still, it represents a figure larger than many European populations.

Now that is a lot of supremacists clogging up the system!

FACEBOOK – HATE REUNITED

“Facebook let white supremacists and conspiracy theorists organise all over its platform and has failed to contain that problem”
(Jessica J. Gonzalez co-founder Anti-Hate Speech Group Change The Terms. 4/2/2021)

Facebook was used extensively in organizing of the Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville in 2019, where white nationalists and neo-Nazis violently marched.
Militarized groups including Proud Boys, Boogaloo Bois and militia groups all organised, promoted and grew their ranks on Facebook.

In 2020 officials arrested men who had planned a violent kidnapping of the Michigan governor, Gretchen Whitmer, on Facebook. A 17 year-old in Illinois shot three people, killing two, in a protest organized on Facebook.

(Guardian newspaper – 4/2/21)

A HITCHHIKERS GUIDE TO THE HATERS

It is worth noting that white supremacists, sharing the notion of ‘white supremacy’ often disagree with each other. Even hatred of others has its rules of engagement it would seem.
There are neo-Fascists who are also anti-Semites, and there are Evangelists who don’t much care for neo-Nazis, while the KKK appear to be equal opportunity haters and don’t discriminate between hating ‘blacks’, ‘Jews’ and ‘Catholics’; On the other hand the more recent hitchhikers on the road to hate, the QAnon conspiracy theory crowd are not quite sure exactly what or who they are supposed to be hating today; Nevertheless all the above would though unanimously agree that the ‘blacks’ must be kept at the bottom of the pile, with a white supremacist knee planted securely on their necks.

The following is a list of those groups currently operating in the USA that have been deemed by US law enforcement agencies or civil rights agencies as having direct or indirect links to white supremacist activity.
This is by no means an exhaustive list.

WHITE SUPREMACISTS.

KKK (ku klux klan)
AMERICAN FREEDOM PARTY
ARYAN BROTHERHOOD (Prisons)
ARYAN NATIONS
OATH KEEPERS
THREE PERCENTERS
PROUD BOYS
BOOGALOO BOIS
QANON (Conspiracy theorists)
WHITE AMERICA INC
EURO
NATIONAL ALLIANCE.
NATIONAL VANGUARD.
PACIFICA FORUM
UNITED DAUGHTERS OF THE CONFEDERACY HAMMERSKIN NATION (Power Rock music) ASATRU FOLK ASSEMBLY (‘folkish’ Viking)

WHITE SUPREMACISTS- Neo-NAZIS

AMERICAN NAZI PARTY WHITE ARYAN RESISTANCE
PATRIOT FRONT VOLKSFRONT
ATOMWAFFEN DIVISION AMERICAN IDENTITY MOVEMENT
WHITE SUPREMACISTS – EVANGELICAL 11th HOUR REMNANT MESSENGER
CHURCH OF JESUS CHRIST-CHRISTIAN PHINEAS PRIESTHOOD
CREATIVITY ALLIANCE (Pseudo religious)

On 6 January 2021 Kevin Seegfried, a 51 year old Trump supporter from Delaware discovered the meaning of the term infamy, when he brazenly marched through the Capitol Congress hall brandishing a confederate

battle flag. For most Americans this represented an act of profanity, given that as many as 110,000 Union Civil war soldiers had sacrificed their lives on battlefields across America, trying to prevent this spectacle ever possibly

happening. Kevin and his son Hunter, were charged by the FBI on January 14, with three Federal offences, including violent entry and disorderly conduct on Capitol grounds.

“ OKAY, HOLLYWOOD WE’VE HAD A PROBLEM HERE ! ”

In his address to Georgetown University in November 2012, the musician and global activist Bono, never one for understatement, neatly summed up how the USA is viewed by many people around the world.

“ America is an idea. Ireland is a great country, but not an idea. Britain is a great country, but not an idea. That’s how we see you around the world, as one of the greatest ideas in human history ”

The U2 frontman Bono is often lambasted for his pretentiousness concerning subjects that go way beyond the wit of a multi-millionaire rock star; But nevertheless the point he makes is acutely perceptive and relates to the cultural and social influence America exerts across the globe.

Cinema, or rather in American speak -‘movies’ – has evolved through the twentieth century and on into the twenty-first century to become part of our cultural DNA. Indeed, human societies consider it to be an art form. Pick a continent, pick a country, and the chances are that right now someone is viewing a feature film (legally or illegally), and there’s a very good chance (dubbed-subtitled or not) that the film’s origin is Hollywood.
I myself have sat with locals watching scratchy, worn, umpteenth generation copies of Hollywood movies from as far afield as the coast of Cuba to the mountains of the Himalayas, and many points in between. It would seem that Hollywood can get to those places where no US army would dare to tread. And that gives Hollywood a lot of power indeed. The power of ideas; and so we come full circle back to Bono.

If America is an ‘idea’ then it has allowed itself to become a very partisan idea, too often failing to include everyone. Furthermore, if such an ‘idea’ as America gave us Hollywood and its cast of Tinsel town heroes then with few exceptions it has also given us a very selective edit; As viewed through a distinctly monochromatic lens. The screen titles may have boasted In Technicolor but invariably the message onscreen was devoid of any colour.

It has taken decades and decades for the Hollywood elite to recognise #OscarsSoWhite.Hashtag.
Decades and decades for Hollywood executives to acknowledge ‘black films don’t travel’…..is of course a myth!

So what is this power of ideas, embedded in film, one might ask?
Well, movies it should be no surprise to learn ‘move’ while actors use their consummate skill to enact stories written down as scripts, or screenplays – To use Hollywood parlance – These stories, or ideas, are played out in frames of fiction by equally skilled direction and photography, testing plausibility in the minds of an audience. When this is done well, and Hollywood do this very well, then we have a masterful conceit of fiction; where myth and fiction blur into a ‘truth’ that can lay in the subconscious of an audience long after a movie ends.

These mythical truths, as I call them, can be bought for the price of a cinema ticket, or these days the cost of cable or download subscription. Soon facts become our fiction and in turn fiction become our ‘alternative facts’, as spun by Hollywood’s movie machine. Perhaps we are now witnessing the emergence of ‘Netflixtion’ as fact.

THE GREAT FAKERS

Fake news was in Hollywood well before Donald Trump was even a twinkle in his mother’s eye.
The brilliant portrayal of the arch manipulator of public opinion – Charles Foster Kane in the 1941 Orson Welles classic film Citizen Kane demonstrates this all too well.
Propaganda, to use that old fashioned term, fell in love with cinema a long time ago just as surely as cinema fell in love with propaganda.

Before the reader throws their hands up in dismay, citing their love of cinema, movies and Hollywood.
Please hear (read) me out. As a screenwriter who spends much of my life perfecting my craft, I too love cinema, movies and, believe it or not even Hollywood, but that doesn’t mean I should shy away from understanding the mediums potential negative effects; Just as the mere fact that I love candy floss, shouldn’t inhibit me from understanding the dietary harm enjoying it may be having on me.

Some might argue that you should be watching documentaries for your facts and movies for your escapism! Beyond the complex argument of what actually defines a factual documentary, there is unfortunately the eponymous disclaimer, ‘based on a true story’. The studio get out clause, which adroitly sidesteps many of the distinctions in audiences’ minds between matters of fact and those of fiction in film.

Sure! It would be great if we really lived in a world where you could say. ‘calm down! It’s only a movie’.
But unfortunately, and as dramatic as it may sound, we live in a world where a movie can get people killed and I don’t just mean onscreen. Screenwriters and film makers of fiction for mass consumption, in my opinion, have a moral responsibility to bear that fact in mind.

THE ART OF ATROCITY

In 1915 the American D.W.Griffith directed what is considered to be the first ever full length feature film in history. Many American cineastes, historians and critics have come to view this highly controversial film A Birth of Nation as a Hollywood epic; a masterpiece of cinematography.

Unfortunately for humanity, at its very core, Birth Of A Nation is possibly the vilest piece of racist propaganda ever produced outside of Nazi Germany. Based on the Thomas Dixon Jnr’s 1905 novel
The Clansman – It is effectively a love letter to the Ku Klux Klan.

Griffith’s film was so racist it was performed by its principle actors in ‘blackface’ and depicts Southern slavery as benign, abolition as a corrupt Republican plot, and the Ku Klux Klan as band of heroes restoring the rightful order. The film portrays ‘blacks’ as predatory beasts, valued only as chattel to be subjugated by white masters.

The film is a shameful piece of racial fiction that tapped directly into The minds of an already racially paranoid society steeped in over 200 years of white supremacism.

The film became an instant box office success, the greatest recruiting poster for the Ku Klux Klan in its history, and a prelude
to an era of ‘negro lynchings’ across America. As if to make matters worse, In 1953 the Directors Guild of America instituted the
D.W. Griffith Award, as its highest honour.
Despite the film’s controversy from day one, up to the death of
the film maker in 1948, D.W.Griffith never once showed any personal regret or remorse for the cataclysmic effect his film had on the lives of millions of African Americans. The fact that the director was the son of a defeated Confederate Army Colonel, and was himself an ardent supporter of the KKK might suggest that Griffith’s atrocious message was in his art. And to say, as some do, that the film’s overt racism doesn’t ultimately detract from its technical and artistic prowess is as disingenuous as reminding mankind that Hitler built great autobahns or that Mussolini ensured Italy’s trains always ran on time.

HAPPY ENDINGS???

Hollywood loves happy endings. Injustices must be shown to be reversed, the sins of others must be seen to be avenged, because that’s what audiences generally want. ‘In this life or the next’ – To paraphrase a gladiator.
So It is perhaps fitting then, at least by the laws of good Karma, that in 1999 The Directors Guild of America announced that the D.W. Griffith Award would be renamed as the “DGA Lifetime Achievement Award”. They felt Griffith’s film The Birth Of A Nation had ‘helped to foster intolerable racial stereotypes’ and that it was thus better not to have the top award in his name.

Nearly 50 years late, but Hollywood got there in the end……Happy endings?

Perhaps it is time to remind my reader that this brief sojourn through the annals of Hollywood is relevant because it questions the role that the most illustrious film industry on the planet has historically played, in no small part, through its support of ideas that are morally questionable, and at times indefensible. By which I mean the onscreen portrayal of a perceived superior ethnicity, a more worthy skin colour, a more righteous nationality. Call it what you like, we all know what it is. It is more than unconscious bias, it is quite definitely conscious bias.

NEVER LET THE TRUTH GET IN THE WAY OF A GOOD STORY!

Hollywood has made a lot of money out of historically based drama. The wide panoramic sweep of history looks good onscreen. Sci-fi may well be the future, but Hollywood knows that history is always there, and it’s ripe for the picking. But history, alas, doesn’t always come up with a happy ending. This being particularly the case with “Macho-war films”. A genre where Hollywood may have concerns that the victors are the wrong nationality or heaven forbid, the wrong hue.

No problem for Hollywood. ‘we just drop a few of the uncomfortable facts , and muddy the water a little’.

Case in point: THE BATTLE OF THE ALAMO
The historic battle of the Alamo in 1836 has come to be immortalised as America’s last stand, thanks in large part to

films lauding folk heroes like Davy Crocket and John Bowie who defended the Mission building.
The actual politics around the siege are however, like much U.S history, a lot more nuanced and steeped in the fantasy of white American exceptionalism than common folklore suggests.

THE BATTLE

At 5.30 am on the morning of 6 March 1836 over 2,000 Mexican troops led by President- General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna surrounded the Alamo’s small mission building, which had been converted into a fortress in San Antonia Bexar, Texas.
(Texas was an independent state at that time and not part of the United States.)

Installed in the Alamo, defending the fortress after seizing it from Mexican authorities several months prior, were a mix of approximately 250 diehard combatants (Texian volunteers, American soldiers/volunteers) and approximately 20 (non-combatants) family members, servants and slaves.

By 6.30 am that morning, outnumbered nearly 10 to 1, and despite a ferocious defence of the mission building, approximately 200 defenders of the Alamo lay dead and 50 had been captured (only to be executed the following day, after having been charged and convicted by General Santa Anna with international piracy).
Approximately 500 Mexican troops had been killed retaking the Alamo.

Six weeks later a Texan army tracked down and surprised Santa Anna’s Mexican army in what would be a rout at the battle of San Jacinto on 21 April 1836, declaring Texan independence from Mexico, in the days that followed. Although Texas would not become the 28th State of the USA until 1846. Hence the nickname ‘LONE STAR STATE’

TWO SIDES TO A STORY

Life generally teaches us that there are usually two sides to a story, despite Hollywood teaching us otherwise. The Alamo is no exception to this general principle.
Spoiler Alert: Lovers of the ‘Lone Star State’ should look away from their screens now!

Americans and especially Texans might argue that the defence of the Alamo was an heroic struggle to uphold the Rights of Texan Independence from a hostile Mexico. That they were defending their liberty to be free.
They might point to the nature of the Mexican invaders as typified by what they consider as the blood thirsty slaughter of 200 brave American Texans fighting for ‘liberty’; and they may well damn the Mexican troops for what they consider to be the subsequent murder of fifty prisoners of war, as well as cremation of their bodies.

Mexicans might respond by reminding Texans that they were in fact the invaders, and that over 500 brave Mexican soldiers died recovering a Mexican Mission; That Mexican authorities had warned Texan authorities several months earlier that they would not tolerate a slave-owning state being established on Mexican territory. And that any combatants taking up arms against Mexico would be charged under capital offence laws of international piracy. They might also remind their former slave owning neighbours that all females, children and enslaved persons seized in the Alamo were released unharmed and given assistance in travelling safely on to the nearest town, days after the battle was over. At least one black enslaved person by name of Joe was freed, possibly three others by the name of Ben, Sam, Charlie, along with a cook named Bettie. Approximately 15 women and children (families of the invaders) were also released unharmed.

Historical footnote:

Whilst Texans may assert their inalienable rights to freedom and liberty, they should note their past denial of those same rights to others. Between 1861-64, under the rebel confederacy of the Civil war, the Alamo was regularly used by Texans as a slave auction house.

In 2016 – Donald Trump’s Presidential campaign statement on Mexican immigration did note bode well for amity.

“They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime, they’re rapists…’ ‘Build that wall’.

Well, The Great wall of Trump still hasn’t been fully completed yet, and hopefully never will be; although its current stasis did not prevent ‘The Donald’ from making his final public visit as President Of The United States to…. Guess where?

Journalist Chelsea Steiner writing on 12 January 2021 (Mary Sue Publications)
‘Trump is making his first public appearance since last week’s rally by visiting a section of completed border wall

In Alamo, Texas. In choosing the Alamo, Trump and his cronies are clearly invoking the history of the Battle of the Alamo, where Mexican troops stormed and reclaimed the Alamo Mission.

‘Clearly, Trump and his sycophants view themselves as the last bastion of white America and have co-opted the Alamo imagery for their own purposes. But being team Trump, they completely bungled their message by going to the wrong Alamo. Trump and company are headed to the city of Alamo, Texas. The actual Alamo Mission, however, is located in San Antonio, Texas.

Great work, everyone. Frankly, I’m surprised they’re not holding the event at an Alamo car rental kiosk’.

Team Trump….Coming to a screen near you!

FINAL CREDITS

I began this article by outlining the momentous events of 6 January 2001 with the aim of highlighting the very real dangers in underestimating the burgeoning power and intent of supremacist groups specifically in America but also noting that examples of racism are growing not only in the USA but steadily across Europe.
To support my later claim that a discriminatory bias operates extensively in the USA, to the degree that it could be described as Institutional racism, I have cited examples of practices prevalent in the American film industry. Historical examples have been used in order to demonstrate how the Arts & Media have been complicit in perpetuating notions of white supremacy.

In doing so I have been forced to face the paradox of having to discuss broad culture in terms of black and white; Adjectives of colour, rather than any real qualitative definition of human anthropology. A binary opposition of monochromes that is apparently unavoidable in any denunciation of racial theory.
To this extent, it should be seen then that a discussion of the pernicious nature of racism inevitably ensnares the commentator, linguistically at least, in the ‘black’ and ‘white’ trap of using racially charged language itself in order to refute the validity of ‘race’ as a justifiable concept.

Human beings of course are not simple adjectives of colour, nor are they pre-programmed robots, unless they choose to act as such. They are sentient creatures with the capacity to think and empathise with others irrespective of their perceived differences. Our shared history shows us this.
A phrase from Shakespeare’s Othello, later popularised in America by Abraham Lincoln using the phrase in his First Inaugural address to Congress, Lincoln cited that we should be bound by our ‘Better Angels’.

We can be optimistic that democracy and decency are not bound to collapse in the face of authoritarianism,
if good people do their part.
If we all reject notions of racial supremacy, be those notions ‘white’ or for that matter ‘black’. If we choose to reject fascism and its bully boy tactics. If we choose to reject those who dictate that we cannot vote to replace them. Then we are sending a message of optimism and hope.
But, If we not do these things, in our conversations with reach other. In the way we behave towards each other.
In the respect we show to each other. If we choose to do none of these things, then we are most surely bound to find ourselves on the wrong side of history.

BAME NEWSLETTER – FEBRUARY 2021

Stephen Ridley is a Screenwriter & Lecturer in Social Sciences. He was born in London, some time ago.

stephenridley@bolash1.com