Showing posts with label racist. Show all posts
Showing posts with label racist. Show all posts
Thursday, October 29, 2009
racist attacks in UK
Shock CCTV of racist attacks
Sickening ... Justin and Luke Lovedale attack shopkeeper
By JOHN COLES
Published: 23 Oct 2009
The SUN (UK)
THREE racist teenagers have been publicly named and shamed for a series of sickening assaults on Asian shopkeepers.
Feral twins Luke and Justin Lovedale and yob Nicholas Gardener were all 16 when they launched their attacks amid a torrent of racist abuse.
The trio — now 17 — sneered and laughed as CCTV footage of one of the sickening assaults was shown to a court.
It showed them wrestling one shopkeeper to the floor before stamping on him as they shouted 'F***ing P***' while a terrified female shopkeeper desperately tried to fend them off.
Another clip showed them battering two shopkeepers to the ground before repeatedly stamping on them.
They admitted the attacks in Bristol this year but denied they were racially motivated — despite Luke Lovedale telling police after his arrest: "I aint beaten up no P***. F***ing **** needs to go back home."
Luke and Justin Lovedale
Hate crimes ... teen brute Justin Lovedale and his twin Luke, right
District Judge David Parsons found all three defendants guilty of racially aggravated common assault — and lifted an order banning their identification.
He warned them all to expect jail and told Bristol Magistrates' Court: "The protection of the community outweighed the teenagers' interests.
"Race hatred should be dealt with seriously by the court, and your victims deserve the protection of the court."
The convictions come days after a BBC Panorama programme showed an undercover reporter being subjected to race hate on Bristol's Southmead estate.
Gardener, who has 19 previous convictions, stormed in to Costcutter in Bedminster, Bristol, with an unidentified pal on April 5 and attacked shopkeeper Hardik Patel.
He punched him to the ground before hitting him twice more and shouted "You f****** P***".
The other youth then kicked him three times in the stomach and as they ran away Gardener shouted: "I will kill you, you f****** P***."
Two months later the Lovedale twins and Gardener — boyfriend of the brothers' sister — went to a Bargain Booze at 10.30pm to buy cigarettes and vodka.
When staff refused to serve them they launched a sickening assault on shopkeeper Ashok Selvam as a female member of staff frantically tried to beat them off with a broom handle.
They pulled his T-shirt over his head and, as one brother held him in a headlock, the other repeatedly punched him in the face.
Mr Selvam told the court that as they assaulted him they shouted "F****** Asian, f****** P***."
Less than an hour later, the three teenagers went to a nearby Costcutter and snatched a bottle of wine.
As shopkeeper Parakram Zala tried to call cops Gardener punched him in the face, shouting "We will kill you, f****** P***."
Colleague Girish Patel tried to fend of the youths, before all three began hitting him.
CCTV footage shows them continuing to punch and kick the two shopkeepers as they lay on the floor.
Mr Patel was left with such serious injuries he feared he may lose the sight in his left eye.
The three thugs showed no remorse throughout the three-day trial and sat yawning and sighing in the dock, chatting to each other and laughing.
Gardener was remanded in custody but the Lovedale twins were released on bail, on condition that they live at their home in south Bristol with a curfew of 8pm to 6am.
Detective Constable Gary Booth, of Avon and Somerset Police, said: "Racism will not be tolerated in Bristol."
The three will be sentenced on November 11.
Thursday, July 30, 2009
Race in America (cont) a familiar pattern
July 24, 2009
Henry Louis Gates: Déjà Vu All Over Again
Stanley Fish (NY Times Blog)
I’m Skip Gates’s friend, too. That’s probably the only thing I share with President Obama, so when he ended his press conference last Wednesday by answering a question about Gates’s arrest after he was seen trying to get into his own house, my ears perked up.
As the story unfolded in the press and on the Internet, I flashed back 20 years or so to the time when Gates arrived in Durham, N.C., to take up the position I had offered him in my capacity as chairman of the English department of Duke University. One of the first things Gates did was buy the grandest house in town (owned previously by a movie director) and renovate it. During the renovation workers would often take Gates for a servant and ask to be pointed to the house’s owner. The drivers of delivery trucks made the same mistake.
The message was unmistakable: What was a black man doing living in a place like this?
At the university (which in a past not distant at all did not admit African-Americans ), Gates’s reception was in some ways no different. Doubts were expressed in letters written by senior professors about his scholarly credentials, which were vastly superior to those of his detractors. (He was already a recipient of a MacArthur fellowship, the so called “genius award.”) There were wild speculations (again in print) about his salary, which in fact was quite respectable but not inordinate; when a list of the highest-paid members of the Duke faculty was published, he was nowhere on it.
The Associated Press Henry Louis Gates, Jr., during a book signing in 2006.
The unkindest cut of all was delivered by some members of the black faculty who had made their peace with Duke traditions and did not want an over-visible newcomer and upstart to trouble waters that had long been still. (The great historian John Hope Franklin was an exception.) When an offer came from Harvard, there wasn’t much I could do. Gates accepted it, and when he left he was pursued by false reports about his tenure at what he had come to call “the plantation.” (I became aware of his feelings when he and I and his father watched the N.C.A.A. championship game between Duke and U.N.L.V. at my house; they were rooting for U.N.L.V.)
Now, in 2009, it’s a version of the same story. Gates is once again regarded with suspicion because, as the cultural critic Michael Eric Dyson put it in an interview, he has committed the crime of being H.W.B., Housed While Black.
He isn’t the only one thought to be guilty of that crime. TV commentators, laboring to explain the unusual candor and vigor of Obama’s initial comments on the Gates incident, speculated that he had probably been the victim of racial profiling himself. Speculation was unnecessary, for they didn’t have to look any further than the story they were reporting in another segment, the story of the “birthers” — the “wing-nuts,” in Chris Matthews’s phrase — who insist that Obama was born in Kenya and cite as “proof” his failure to come up with an authenticated birth certificate. For several nights running, Matthews displayed a copy of the birth certificate and asked, What do you guys want? How can you keep saying these things in the face of all evidence?
He missed the point. No evidence would be sufficient, just as no evidence would have convinced some of my Duke colleagues that Gates was anything but a charlatan and a fraud. It isn’t the legitimacy of Obama’s birth certificate that’s the problem for the birthers. The problem is again the legitimacy of a black man living in a big house, especially when it’s the White House. Just as some in Durham and Cambridge couldn’t believe that Gates belonged in the neighborhood, so does a vocal minority find it hard to believe that an African-American could possibly be the real president of the United States.
Gates and Obama are not only friends; they are in the same position, suspected of occupying a majestic residence under false pretenses. And Obama is a double offender. Not only is he guilty of being Housed While Black; he is the first in American history guilty of being P.W.B., President While Black.
Henry Louis Gates: Déjà Vu All Over Again
Stanley Fish (NY Times Blog)
I’m Skip Gates’s friend, too. That’s probably the only thing I share with President Obama, so when he ended his press conference last Wednesday by answering a question about Gates’s arrest after he was seen trying to get into his own house, my ears perked up.
As the story unfolded in the press and on the Internet, I flashed back 20 years or so to the time when Gates arrived in Durham, N.C., to take up the position I had offered him in my capacity as chairman of the English department of Duke University. One of the first things Gates did was buy the grandest house in town (owned previously by a movie director) and renovate it. During the renovation workers would often take Gates for a servant and ask to be pointed to the house’s owner. The drivers of delivery trucks made the same mistake.
The message was unmistakable: What was a black man doing living in a place like this?
At the university (which in a past not distant at all did not admit African-Americans ), Gates’s reception was in some ways no different. Doubts were expressed in letters written by senior professors about his scholarly credentials, which were vastly superior to those of his detractors. (He was already a recipient of a MacArthur fellowship, the so called “genius award.”) There were wild speculations (again in print) about his salary, which in fact was quite respectable but not inordinate; when a list of the highest-paid members of the Duke faculty was published, he was nowhere on it.
The Associated Press Henry Louis Gates, Jr., during a book signing in 2006.
The unkindest cut of all was delivered by some members of the black faculty who had made their peace with Duke traditions and did not want an over-visible newcomer and upstart to trouble waters that had long been still. (The great historian John Hope Franklin was an exception.) When an offer came from Harvard, there wasn’t much I could do. Gates accepted it, and when he left he was pursued by false reports about his tenure at what he had come to call “the plantation.” (I became aware of his feelings when he and I and his father watched the N.C.A.A. championship game between Duke and U.N.L.V. at my house; they were rooting for U.N.L.V.)
Now, in 2009, it’s a version of the same story. Gates is once again regarded with suspicion because, as the cultural critic Michael Eric Dyson put it in an interview, he has committed the crime of being H.W.B., Housed While Black.
He isn’t the only one thought to be guilty of that crime. TV commentators, laboring to explain the unusual candor and vigor of Obama’s initial comments on the Gates incident, speculated that he had probably been the victim of racial profiling himself. Speculation was unnecessary, for they didn’t have to look any further than the story they were reporting in another segment, the story of the “birthers” — the “wing-nuts,” in Chris Matthews’s phrase — who insist that Obama was born in Kenya and cite as “proof” his failure to come up with an authenticated birth certificate. For several nights running, Matthews displayed a copy of the birth certificate and asked, What do you guys want? How can you keep saying these things in the face of all evidence?
He missed the point. No evidence would be sufficient, just as no evidence would have convinced some of my Duke colleagues that Gates was anything but a charlatan and a fraud. It isn’t the legitimacy of Obama’s birth certificate that’s the problem for the birthers. The problem is again the legitimacy of a black man living in a big house, especially when it’s the White House. Just as some in Durham and Cambridge couldn’t believe that Gates belonged in the neighborhood, so does a vocal minority find it hard to believe that an African-American could possibly be the real president of the United States.
Gates and Obama are not only friends; they are in the same position, suspected of occupying a majestic residence under false pretenses. And Obama is a double offender. Not only is he guilty of being Housed While Black; he is the first in American history guilty of being P.W.B., President While Black.
Race in America (cont)
July 30th 2009
Two recent incidents that have come under public scrutiny are symptomatic of what many white Americans think but know better than to say on record:
Justin Barrett, a national guardsman in Boston referred to Professor Gates as "a banana-eating jungle monkey" in an email that came to light: “If I was the officer (Gates) verbally assaulted like a banana-eating jungle monkey, I would have sprayed him in the face with OC (pepper spray) deserving of his belligerent noncompliance,” the e-mail reads.
Boston Globe
Lee Landor, until recently deputy press secretary to Manhattan borough president Scott Stringer, posted comments on her personal Facebook page criticizing Henry Louis Gates and the President, and defending racial profiling"
I beleive Ms Landor speaks for many white people in America. Ms. Landor wrote in one post, “O-dumb-a, the situation got ‘out of hand’ because Gates is a racist, not because the officer was DOING HIS JOB!”
In response to one Facebook user who voiced disagreement, Ms. Landor referred to Professor Gates using a vulgarity and added: “And racial profiling does exist, but for good reason. Take a look at this country’s jails: who makes up the majority of inmates? Exactly.”
In another Facebook post, Ms. Landor wrote, “You know what, I am really getting SICK of hearing about how white people are evil racists.” She added: “I get it — white men have dominated for hundreds of years and there’s a lot of anger there. But HOW MUCH MORE can the white people do to correct past injustices of their ancestors?”
New York Times
Two recent incidents that have come under public scrutiny are symptomatic of what many white Americans think but know better than to say on record:
Justin Barrett, a national guardsman in Boston referred to Professor Gates as "a banana-eating jungle monkey" in an email that came to light: “If I was the officer (Gates) verbally assaulted like a banana-eating jungle monkey, I would have sprayed him in the face with OC (pepper spray) deserving of his belligerent noncompliance,” the e-mail reads.
Boston Globe
Lee Landor, until recently deputy press secretary to Manhattan borough president Scott Stringer, posted comments on her personal Facebook page criticizing Henry Louis Gates and the President, and defending racial profiling"
I beleive Ms Landor speaks for many white people in America. Ms. Landor wrote in one post, “O-dumb-a, the situation got ‘out of hand’ because Gates is a racist, not because the officer was DOING HIS JOB!”
In response to one Facebook user who voiced disagreement, Ms. Landor referred to Professor Gates using a vulgarity and added: “And racial profiling does exist, but for good reason. Take a look at this country’s jails: who makes up the majority of inmates? Exactly.”
In another Facebook post, Ms. Landor wrote, “You know what, I am really getting SICK of hearing about how white people are evil racists.” She added: “I get it — white men have dominated for hundreds of years and there’s a lot of anger there. But HOW MUCH MORE can the white people do to correct past injustices of their ancestors?”
New York Times
Monday, July 27, 2009
Race in America (cont)
Drama in the People's Republic of Cambridge: Boston Has Two Faces
July 22, 2009 0
Richard M. Benjamin
in the Huffington Post
Q: What do you call a black man with a PhD?
A: Nigger
Q: Where do liberal white people go to socially die?
A: Cambridge
These two jokes come to my mind when contemplating the horrific Skip Gates arrest. The Harvard scholar was handcuffed having been accused as a thief on his own property.
The first joke reveals an age-old truism: All the credentials in the world do not protect black men from police abuse.
The second joke, well -- that's the New York take on Cambridge. My friend Chester, a white, cutting-edge architect who had a cushy professorship at Harvard's graduate school, nevertheless fled Cambridge, since he feared he would die of either boredom or conformity. Chester complained that Cambridge's upscale, vanilla lifestyle would condemn him to a life-sentence of smug liberal orthodoxy. Chester noted that Cambridge is the most socially conservative politically liberal bastion in America: The town's p.c. doctrinaire ways of thinking and living -- oh, the dull dinner parties discussing The Nation -- exact a stifling, conservative effect.
"Cambridge is where fancy white people go to spiritually die," Chester likes to say.
Having lived in Cambridge for six months in the mid-1990s, and visited several times in later years, I have similar opinions of Cambridge.
Liberals in Cambridge, in my experience, like to make big statements about improving the status of black people. But they don't have much use for ordinary blacks themselves. Hands down, Cambridge is one of the most racially hostile places I've ever lived.
And I am not exactly imagining things.
Sudhir Venkatesh, the William B. Ransford Professor of Sociology at Columbia University, and bestselling author of Gang Leader for a Day (Penguin Press), named Boston, in 2008, "America's Most Racist City."
"The city puzzled me. I knew about the strong liberal sentiment among the populace, but I didn't have to look far to see that racism was part of its historical core. For example, school integration was violently resisted by many of its white ethnic residents. In sports, the city has been home to some of the most extreme forms of racism -- check out Howard Bryant's terrific book, Shut Out, in which he explores the longstanding bigotry in the Red Sox baseball organization."
A paradox reigns: Next to the racism of theTom Yawkey Red Sox syndicate is the forward-thinking, inclusive racial legacy of Red Auerbach's Celtics.
Even sports expose the two faces of Boston.
Cambridge was ranked "The Most Liberal City in America" by a 2005 national study. Residents even call it "The People's Republic of Cambridge." Yet Skip Gates got reported by a neighbor and arrested by the police in an apparent bit of racial profiling.
Gates's arrest revives Cambridge's, and greater Boston's, two faces: the bastion of liberalism and the fortress of prejudice. After all, Cambridge's mayor, E. Denise Simmons, is a black woman who even grew up there. Before that, Cambridge was the first city to elect an openly gay black man as mayor, Kenneth Reeves. What gives?
Aggravating Boston's racial turmoil, of course, are class divides. The Cambridge police force that arrested Skip Gates is charged with keeping the upscale enclave "safe" from some decidedly downscale neighborhoods nearby. Wealthy communities abutting poor ones often produce a class anxiety that borders on paranoia. Gates' white neighbor who failed to recognize him works at Harvard magazine. This "neighbor" so evidently suffers from said class anxiety, at least as much as racism. Such community anxiety - every "outsider" is a suspect - often demands "tough" policing, which curdles into abusive policing.
Poor Skip Gates. He likely experienced racial profiling.
July 22, 2009 0
Richard M. Benjamin
in the Huffington Post
Q: What do you call a black man with a PhD?
A: Nigger
Q: Where do liberal white people go to socially die?
A: Cambridge
These two jokes come to my mind when contemplating the horrific Skip Gates arrest. The Harvard scholar was handcuffed having been accused as a thief on his own property.
The first joke reveals an age-old truism: All the credentials in the world do not protect black men from police abuse.
The second joke, well -- that's the New York take on Cambridge. My friend Chester, a white, cutting-edge architect who had a cushy professorship at Harvard's graduate school, nevertheless fled Cambridge, since he feared he would die of either boredom or conformity. Chester complained that Cambridge's upscale, vanilla lifestyle would condemn him to a life-sentence of smug liberal orthodoxy. Chester noted that Cambridge is the most socially conservative politically liberal bastion in America: The town's p.c. doctrinaire ways of thinking and living -- oh, the dull dinner parties discussing The Nation -- exact a stifling, conservative effect.
"Cambridge is where fancy white people go to spiritually die," Chester likes to say.
Having lived in Cambridge for six months in the mid-1990s, and visited several times in later years, I have similar opinions of Cambridge.
Liberals in Cambridge, in my experience, like to make big statements about improving the status of black people. But they don't have much use for ordinary blacks themselves. Hands down, Cambridge is one of the most racially hostile places I've ever lived.
And I am not exactly imagining things.
Sudhir Venkatesh, the William B. Ransford Professor of Sociology at Columbia University, and bestselling author of Gang Leader for a Day (Penguin Press), named Boston, in 2008, "America's Most Racist City."
"The city puzzled me. I knew about the strong liberal sentiment among the populace, but I didn't have to look far to see that racism was part of its historical core. For example, school integration was violently resisted by many of its white ethnic residents. In sports, the city has been home to some of the most extreme forms of racism -- check out Howard Bryant's terrific book, Shut Out, in which he explores the longstanding bigotry in the Red Sox baseball organization."
A paradox reigns: Next to the racism of theTom Yawkey Red Sox syndicate is the forward-thinking, inclusive racial legacy of Red Auerbach's Celtics.
Even sports expose the two faces of Boston.
Cambridge was ranked "The Most Liberal City in America" by a 2005 national study. Residents even call it "The People's Republic of Cambridge." Yet Skip Gates got reported by a neighbor and arrested by the police in an apparent bit of racial profiling.
Gates's arrest revives Cambridge's, and greater Boston's, two faces: the bastion of liberalism and the fortress of prejudice. After all, Cambridge's mayor, E. Denise Simmons, is a black woman who even grew up there. Before that, Cambridge was the first city to elect an openly gay black man as mayor, Kenneth Reeves. What gives?
Aggravating Boston's racial turmoil, of course, are class divides. The Cambridge police force that arrested Skip Gates is charged with keeping the upscale enclave "safe" from some decidedly downscale neighborhoods nearby. Wealthy communities abutting poor ones often produce a class anxiety that borders on paranoia. Gates' white neighbor who failed to recognize him works at Harvard magazine. This "neighbor" so evidently suffers from said class anxiety, at least as much as racism. Such community anxiety - every "outsider" is a suspect - often demands "tough" policing, which curdles into abusive policing.
Poor Skip Gates. He likely experienced racial profiling.
Race in America
Are the Falsely Accused Required to be Polite to the Police?
Rich Rodgers
I hope we make the most of the national discussion and debate generated by the July 16th arrest of Harvard professor Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts by Sgt. James Crowley of the Cambridge police.
If you've been under a rock for the past 10 days, here's the quick version: Gates returned to his house at noon after an overnight flight from China, with his driver, to find he couldn't get into his house. His white neighbor called the police and reported that two men were trying to break into the home. Crowley responds, and the police report is here. Gates tells his side of the story here.
While so much of the debate pretends that the key question is what Gates said to Crowley, it's actually not illegal to yell at a police officer in Massachusetts:
In several cases, the courts in Massachusetts have considered whether a person is guilty of disorderly conduct for verbally abusing a police officer. In Commonwealth v. Lopiano, a 2004 decision, an appeals court held it was not disorderly conduct for a person who angrily yelled at an officer that his civil rights were being violated. In Commonwealth v. Mallahan, a decision rendered last year, an appeals court held that a person who launched into an angry, profanity-laced tirade against a police officer in front of spectators could not be convicted of disorderly conduct.
So Massachusetts law clearly provides that Gates did not commit disorderly conduct.
So Gates appears to have been guilty of nothing illegal, but is there any doubt that he is being judged in the court of public opinion for his alleged statements to the officer? You can bet that a large percentage of white Americans find it easy to believe in the falsehood that Gates's verbal challenges or resistance justified his arrest. This belief--that this black man or anyone else is obligated to be submissive to police officers in speech--should be called out and rejected.
It's human nature for an employee to consider taking a customer's behavior into account when deciding what kind of service to give to them. Professionals do a good job of ignoring insults or slights, but no one is immune from the temptation. For police, though, the bar has to be higher. Too much rides on the outcome. To begin to change the dynamics at the heart of racial profiling and the distrust that many minorities feel toward the police, the training that officers receive has to meaningfully recognize the negative experiences that most minorities in our country share.
In his recent column in the New York Times, Charles Blow cites a NYT/CBS poll from July 2008 that asked this question:
“Have you ever felt you were stopped by the police just because of your race or ethnic background?”
66 percent of black men said yes, compared to 9 percent of white men. That's a shocking statistic, but to really try to absorb what this means, you have to think about what really happens on some of these stops.
Blow tells the story of being stopped in Louisiana when he was 18, the president of his college freshmen class, in a car with his friend Andre:
Andre insisted on knowing why we had been stopped. The officer gave a reason. It wasn’t true. Then he said something I will never forget: that if he wanted to, he could make us lie down in the middle of the road and shoot us in the back of the head and no one would say anything about it. Then he walked to his car and drove away.
I was raised to treat police officers with respect, and have always figured it was in my interest to do so. I can think of three times when I was stopped for speeding and let go with a warning, and guessed that the 'yes sirs' and 'no sirs' didn't hurt my cause. But being deferential has never implied for me that I needed to swallow a sense of profound injustice. I've never thought for a second that I was or might be threatened, arrested or even shot just because I'm a white guy. Our experiences are so different, we might as well be living in different countries.
It's clear that the experience of prejudice at the hands of the police is all too common for black men and other minorities in the United States. It's asking too much to insist that someone show respect to an institution that has treated them unfairly. It's asking someone to accept a diminished or tarnished standing in the eyes of an entity that has the power to take away their freedom or even their life. For that respect to come, it's going to have to continue to be earned.
It seems certain that submission or deference is sometimes used by police officers as a litmus test for whether they will make an arrest or issue a citation, even when the expectation of submission goes beyond the legal obligations of a citizen in interacting with a police officer. This emphasis on submission and compliance no doubt has some of its roots in attempting to ensure the safety of our police officers, who must be prepared for any possibility. But when race and ego are injected into the mix, an expectation of "submission or consequences" is unacceptable as standard operating procedure for police officers-- even, or perhaps especially, when people are upset and saying so.
Rich Rodgers
I hope we make the most of the national discussion and debate generated by the July 16th arrest of Harvard professor Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts by Sgt. James Crowley of the Cambridge police.
If you've been under a rock for the past 10 days, here's the quick version: Gates returned to his house at noon after an overnight flight from China, with his driver, to find he couldn't get into his house. His white neighbor called the police and reported that two men were trying to break into the home. Crowley responds, and the police report is here. Gates tells his side of the story here.
While so much of the debate pretends that the key question is what Gates said to Crowley, it's actually not illegal to yell at a police officer in Massachusetts:
In several cases, the courts in Massachusetts have considered whether a person is guilty of disorderly conduct for verbally abusing a police officer. In Commonwealth v. Lopiano, a 2004 decision, an appeals court held it was not disorderly conduct for a person who angrily yelled at an officer that his civil rights were being violated. In Commonwealth v. Mallahan, a decision rendered last year, an appeals court held that a person who launched into an angry, profanity-laced tirade against a police officer in front of spectators could not be convicted of disorderly conduct.
So Massachusetts law clearly provides that Gates did not commit disorderly conduct.
So Gates appears to have been guilty of nothing illegal, but is there any doubt that he is being judged in the court of public opinion for his alleged statements to the officer? You can bet that a large percentage of white Americans find it easy to believe in the falsehood that Gates's verbal challenges or resistance justified his arrest. This belief--that this black man or anyone else is obligated to be submissive to police officers in speech--should be called out and rejected.
It's human nature for an employee to consider taking a customer's behavior into account when deciding what kind of service to give to them. Professionals do a good job of ignoring insults or slights, but no one is immune from the temptation. For police, though, the bar has to be higher. Too much rides on the outcome. To begin to change the dynamics at the heart of racial profiling and the distrust that many minorities feel toward the police, the training that officers receive has to meaningfully recognize the negative experiences that most minorities in our country share.
In his recent column in the New York Times, Charles Blow cites a NYT/CBS poll from July 2008 that asked this question:
“Have you ever felt you were stopped by the police just because of your race or ethnic background?”
66 percent of black men said yes, compared to 9 percent of white men. That's a shocking statistic, but to really try to absorb what this means, you have to think about what really happens on some of these stops.
Blow tells the story of being stopped in Louisiana when he was 18, the president of his college freshmen class, in a car with his friend Andre:
Andre insisted on knowing why we had been stopped. The officer gave a reason. It wasn’t true. Then he said something I will never forget: that if he wanted to, he could make us lie down in the middle of the road and shoot us in the back of the head and no one would say anything about it. Then he walked to his car and drove away.
I was raised to treat police officers with respect, and have always figured it was in my interest to do so. I can think of three times when I was stopped for speeding and let go with a warning, and guessed that the 'yes sirs' and 'no sirs' didn't hurt my cause. But being deferential has never implied for me that I needed to swallow a sense of profound injustice. I've never thought for a second that I was or might be threatened, arrested or even shot just because I'm a white guy. Our experiences are so different, we might as well be living in different countries.
It's clear that the experience of prejudice at the hands of the police is all too common for black men and other minorities in the United States. It's asking too much to insist that someone show respect to an institution that has treated them unfairly. It's asking someone to accept a diminished or tarnished standing in the eyes of an entity that has the power to take away their freedom or even their life. For that respect to come, it's going to have to continue to be earned.
It seems certain that submission or deference is sometimes used by police officers as a litmus test for whether they will make an arrest or issue a citation, even when the expectation of submission goes beyond the legal obligations of a citizen in interacting with a police officer. This emphasis on submission and compliance no doubt has some of its roots in attempting to ensure the safety of our police officers, who must be prepared for any possibility. But when race and ego are injected into the mix, an expectation of "submission or consequences" is unacceptable as standard operating procedure for police officers-- even, or perhaps especially, when people are upset and saying so.
Wednesday, June 3, 2009
Why people like Andrew Bolt make australians seem racist
Column - Don’t believe us; we’re not racist
Andrew Bolt Blog
Pulbished at the Herald Sun, Australia
Wednesday, June 03, 2009 at 03:25pm
336 Comments
IF we weren’t so scared of seeming racist, we wouldn’t now seem so, er, racist that even India is giving us lectures.
Amazing, that. India, which perfected the caste system and is plagued by Hindu-Muslim bloodfests, is telling us we’re too prejudiced?
But we have only our own stupidity and grovelling self-hatred to blame.
After all, which nation has spent so much apologetic cash and sweat to persuade the world we are vomiting with racism, and which has been, on the other hand, too militantly anti-racist to point out who is actually bashing many of these Indian students?
There’s no doubt that Indians here - not least the 90,000 students - have something to worry about, especially in Victoria. In this one state alone, and in just one year, an astonishing 1447 people of Indian origin were punched, kicked, raped or robbed.
That fact alone should worry us most in this affair that has now led to two angry demonstrations by Indians in Melbourne, hysterical coverage in the Indian press, official protests from the Indian Government and the burning in India of effigies of Kevin Rudd.
It’s the sheer level of violence, not the motives driving some thug to kick in a student’s teeth, that should shame and alarm us. After all, it’s no less terrifying to be kicked in the head by a saint.
It also hurts just the same whether you’re Indian, English or a Colac farmer, so we should be angry that it’s not just Indians being bashed, but people born right here who are kicked unconscious at railway platforms, glassed in pubs, shot in Flinders St or pack-attacked to death outside nightclubs.
Where are the police? Where are the punishments? How did we fail to civilise so many young men, now acting like gleeful extras in a Tarantino splatter-fest or an Underbelly celebration of ferals? How did we fail even to make them fear to break the law?
Yet this violence alone was not enough to make our leaders and police do much beyond some ritual tut-tutting and a spasmodic police blitz or two.
It’s only when the Indian students cleverly claimed they were victims of racism that - kaboom - these muggings became an international conflict involving the leaders of two nations, with Australia scrambling to protect not just its reputation but the $2 billion a year we earn from these foreign students.
Prime Minister Rudd hurried into Parliament this week to reassure India we weren’t racist at all: “Australia is a country of great diversity, harmony and tolerance.”
Premier John Brumby agreed, and offence at the charge of racism was dutifully taken on almost every talk-radio station in the country, including even the ABC.
Yet who can blame Indians for thinking this worst of us, and treating Rudd’s denials as mere spin, when we’ve spent so much time telling the world we really are steeped in racism, right up to our red necks?
Only last year, Rudd himself announced we’d been so evilly racist that we’d even stolen Aboriginal children by the thousands just because they were black - a false claim cheered in every school despite the inability of “stolen generations” activists to name even 10 such “stolen” children.
Last year, too, we gave the the world Australia, a movie made and promoted with the help of $80 million of taxpayers’ money, which portrayed us as so racist that we’d actually sent Aboriginal children into the path of the Japanese army during World War II, while carefully evacuating the white ones.
More nonsense, yet how keen our opinion makers have been to slander us as bigots on evidence just as bogus.
Remember how the Cronulla riot was described as a racist uprising, rather than a booze-fuelled backlash of locals given too little police help against Lebanese gangs?
Remember how Pauline Hanson was vilified as the symbol of racist middle Australia, rather than of merely the sneered-upon working class and bush folk who had been taken for granted for too long by our smug political class?
So, after accusing ourselves of so much racism with so little reason, why should we now be surprised when Indians agree that - yes, indeed - we’re as racist as we’ve always said?
The difference is that this time we stand to lose billions of dollars from our trade in education services to India. Stupidity becomes too stupid to endure when it costs, and the fact is we really aren’t so racist at all. Indeed, our problem may in part be the opposite.
That so many Indian students are bashed and robbed can be largely explained by the kind of part-time jobs they tend to take, being hard workers - the late shifts in 7-Eleven stores, taxis and petrol stations, for instance.
Imagine how safe these students are when they then go home alone late at night, often walking or taking near-deserted trains back to the tough suburbs where the cheap rents are. How safe would your own children be?
But some attacks aren’t so easily explained away. Some, you might say, are “racist” in that Indians are famously peaceable - less likely to break the law and less likely to fight back when attacked by those who do. To thieves and thugs, they’re soft targets.
That said, other attacks, as Victoria Police now belatedly admit, are indeed no-mucking-about racist. But to whose shame are these racists, really?
True, video footage of the infamous pack-attack on Sourabh Sharma on the Werribee train shows thugs of various ethnicities, including, it seems, the Anglo kind.
But what police and many journalists refuse to confirm or even discuss is what victims and their spokesmen repeatedly say - that many of their attackers are Africans, Islanders and, less often, Asians who are newcomers themselves, beneficiaries of our eagerness to seem kind and tolerant.
Hear it from Macquarie University student Mukul Khanna, called back home by his worried parents: “A lot of my Pakistani friends have left the place after being brutally attacked and robbed . . . Interestingly, the attackers are mostly not locals and are themselves people of foreign origin.”
Or read it in an edited statement that Tanveer X, bashed in January, gave to Beyond India Monthly: “When I turned on Anderson Rd I saw four black men . . . One of them came running behind us and hit me with the stick. Then they started hitting my wife . . . I want action against those African guys.”
And have it confirmed in this Herald Sun report from last year, when Indian taxi drivers protested at having been the victims of most armed robberies on cabbies: “This year between May 8
and August 2 there were 12 reported robberies on taxi drivers in Flemington, Moonee Ponds and Ascot Vale.
“Police will not officially acknowledge any particular ethnic group is a target, or that any other group is carrying out the crimes. But in every case the victims told police their attackers were African . . .” And in all but two their victims were Indians.
Note yet again the reluctance of police to admit they have trouble with African gangs—or gangs of any particular ethnicity.
Recall also how former chief commissioner Christine Nixon banned police from even using the word “gangs” and falsely claimed the crime rates for Sudanese were at the community average, rather than way, way above.
Note, also, how few media outlets will even discuss the ethnicity of some of the people now bashing Indian students, for fear of seeming racist.
That’s how the false perception is allowed to grow that these attacks on Indians are just another example of our institutional racism, when the reverse may well be true—that we’re so over-eager to seem not racist that we take in immigrants we perhaps should not, and refuse to admit when they go wrong.
And so we are hanged for our virtues. Again, I must point out Australia has home-grown racists, too, and too many children growing up underparented and uncivilised.
They, too, bash Indians - and each other. But to call us a racist nation on the scanty evidence so far is grossly unfair.
That we should take such offence is evidence we’re actually not, no matter how loudly and how foolishly we once insisted we were.
Andrew Bolt Blog
Pulbished at the Herald Sun, Australia
Wednesday, June 03, 2009 at 03:25pm
336 Comments
IF we weren’t so scared of seeming racist, we wouldn’t now seem so, er, racist that even India is giving us lectures.
Amazing, that. India, which perfected the caste system and is plagued by Hindu-Muslim bloodfests, is telling us we’re too prejudiced?
But we have only our own stupidity and grovelling self-hatred to blame.
After all, which nation has spent so much apologetic cash and sweat to persuade the world we are vomiting with racism, and which has been, on the other hand, too militantly anti-racist to point out who is actually bashing many of these Indian students?
There’s no doubt that Indians here - not least the 90,000 students - have something to worry about, especially in Victoria. In this one state alone, and in just one year, an astonishing 1447 people of Indian origin were punched, kicked, raped or robbed.
That fact alone should worry us most in this affair that has now led to two angry demonstrations by Indians in Melbourne, hysterical coverage in the Indian press, official protests from the Indian Government and the burning in India of effigies of Kevin Rudd.
It’s the sheer level of violence, not the motives driving some thug to kick in a student’s teeth, that should shame and alarm us. After all, it’s no less terrifying to be kicked in the head by a saint.
It also hurts just the same whether you’re Indian, English or a Colac farmer, so we should be angry that it’s not just Indians being bashed, but people born right here who are kicked unconscious at railway platforms, glassed in pubs, shot in Flinders St or pack-attacked to death outside nightclubs.
Where are the police? Where are the punishments? How did we fail to civilise so many young men, now acting like gleeful extras in a Tarantino splatter-fest or an Underbelly celebration of ferals? How did we fail even to make them fear to break the law?
Yet this violence alone was not enough to make our leaders and police do much beyond some ritual tut-tutting and a spasmodic police blitz or two.
It’s only when the Indian students cleverly claimed they were victims of racism that - kaboom - these muggings became an international conflict involving the leaders of two nations, with Australia scrambling to protect not just its reputation but the $2 billion a year we earn from these foreign students.
Prime Minister Rudd hurried into Parliament this week to reassure India we weren’t racist at all: “Australia is a country of great diversity, harmony and tolerance.”
Premier John Brumby agreed, and offence at the charge of racism was dutifully taken on almost every talk-radio station in the country, including even the ABC.
Yet who can blame Indians for thinking this worst of us, and treating Rudd’s denials as mere spin, when we’ve spent so much time telling the world we really are steeped in racism, right up to our red necks?
Only last year, Rudd himself announced we’d been so evilly racist that we’d even stolen Aboriginal children by the thousands just because they were black - a false claim cheered in every school despite the inability of “stolen generations” activists to name even 10 such “stolen” children.
Last year, too, we gave the the world Australia, a movie made and promoted with the help of $80 million of taxpayers’ money, which portrayed us as so racist that we’d actually sent Aboriginal children into the path of the Japanese army during World War II, while carefully evacuating the white ones.
More nonsense, yet how keen our opinion makers have been to slander us as bigots on evidence just as bogus.
Remember how the Cronulla riot was described as a racist uprising, rather than a booze-fuelled backlash of locals given too little police help against Lebanese gangs?
Remember how Pauline Hanson was vilified as the symbol of racist middle Australia, rather than of merely the sneered-upon working class and bush folk who had been taken for granted for too long by our smug political class?
So, after accusing ourselves of so much racism with so little reason, why should we now be surprised when Indians agree that - yes, indeed - we’re as racist as we’ve always said?
The difference is that this time we stand to lose billions of dollars from our trade in education services to India. Stupidity becomes too stupid to endure when it costs, and the fact is we really aren’t so racist at all. Indeed, our problem may in part be the opposite.
That so many Indian students are bashed and robbed can be largely explained by the kind of part-time jobs they tend to take, being hard workers - the late shifts in 7-Eleven stores, taxis and petrol stations, for instance.
Imagine how safe these students are when they then go home alone late at night, often walking or taking near-deserted trains back to the tough suburbs where the cheap rents are. How safe would your own children be?
But some attacks aren’t so easily explained away. Some, you might say, are “racist” in that Indians are famously peaceable - less likely to break the law and less likely to fight back when attacked by those who do. To thieves and thugs, they’re soft targets.
That said, other attacks, as Victoria Police now belatedly admit, are indeed no-mucking-about racist. But to whose shame are these racists, really?
True, video footage of the infamous pack-attack on Sourabh Sharma on the Werribee train shows thugs of various ethnicities, including, it seems, the Anglo kind.
But what police and many journalists refuse to confirm or even discuss is what victims and their spokesmen repeatedly say - that many of their attackers are Africans, Islanders and, less often, Asians who are newcomers themselves, beneficiaries of our eagerness to seem kind and tolerant.
Hear it from Macquarie University student Mukul Khanna, called back home by his worried parents: “A lot of my Pakistani friends have left the place after being brutally attacked and robbed . . . Interestingly, the attackers are mostly not locals and are themselves people of foreign origin.”
Or read it in an edited statement that Tanveer X, bashed in January, gave to Beyond India Monthly: “When I turned on Anderson Rd I saw four black men . . . One of them came running behind us and hit me with the stick. Then they started hitting my wife . . . I want action against those African guys.”
And have it confirmed in this Herald Sun report from last year, when Indian taxi drivers protested at having been the victims of most armed robberies on cabbies: “This year between May 8
and August 2 there were 12 reported robberies on taxi drivers in Flemington, Moonee Ponds and Ascot Vale.
“Police will not officially acknowledge any particular ethnic group is a target, or that any other group is carrying out the crimes. But in every case the victims told police their attackers were African . . .” And in all but two their victims were Indians.
Note yet again the reluctance of police to admit they have trouble with African gangs—or gangs of any particular ethnicity.
Recall also how former chief commissioner Christine Nixon banned police from even using the word “gangs” and falsely claimed the crime rates for Sudanese were at the community average, rather than way, way above.
Note, also, how few media outlets will even discuss the ethnicity of some of the people now bashing Indian students, for fear of seeming racist.
That’s how the false perception is allowed to grow that these attacks on Indians are just another example of our institutional racism, when the reverse may well be true—that we’re so over-eager to seem not racist that we take in immigrants we perhaps should not, and refuse to admit when they go wrong.
And so we are hanged for our virtues. Again, I must point out Australia has home-grown racists, too, and too many children growing up underparented and uncivilised.
They, too, bash Indians - and each other. But to call us a racist nation on the scanty evidence so far is grossly unfair.
That we should take such offence is evidence we’re actually not, no matter how loudly and how foolishly we once insisted we were.
Autralia - Temple vandalized and yet another Indian student stabbed
Gurdwara vandalized, student stabbed in Oz
3 Jun 2009,
Times of India
MELBOURNE: Racial assaults continue unchecked in Australia. On Monday, a Sikh gurdwara was vandalized in Shepparton, a small town 90km north of Melbourne.
Racist graffiti and swastikas were scribbled on its walls, eggs thrown at it and the fencing around the gurdwara smashed by a car. On Tuesday, another Indian student was stabbed in the chest by a box-cutter knife on his way to college in east Melbourne.
Meanwhile, Australia set up an inquiry committee to look into the attacks even as Union minister for overseas Indian affairs Vayalar Ravi said his ministry would prepare and maintain a register of all Indians studying abroad and streamline campus placements to foreign universities.
Nardeep Singh, a 20-year-old from Ludhiana, was assaulted in a car park. The five attackers initially asked for cigarettes. When the student replied he was a non-smoker, they asked for money. On refusal, one of them stabbed him in the chest. Nardeep is a student of nursing at the Chisholm Technical Institute.
Singh, who had arrived in Australia only a month ago, fled to the police station where his statement was recorded. He is under observation in a Melbourne hospital.
3 Jun 2009,
Times of India
MELBOURNE: Racial assaults continue unchecked in Australia. On Monday, a Sikh gurdwara was vandalized in Shepparton, a small town 90km north of Melbourne.
Racist graffiti and swastikas were scribbled on its walls, eggs thrown at it and the fencing around the gurdwara smashed by a car. On Tuesday, another Indian student was stabbed in the chest by a box-cutter knife on his way to college in east Melbourne.
Meanwhile, Australia set up an inquiry committee to look into the attacks even as Union minister for overseas Indian affairs Vayalar Ravi said his ministry would prepare and maintain a register of all Indians studying abroad and streamline campus placements to foreign universities.
Nardeep Singh, a 20-year-old from Ludhiana, was assaulted in a car park. The five attackers initially asked for cigarettes. When the student replied he was a non-smoker, they asked for money. On refusal, one of them stabbed him in the chest. Nardeep is a student of nursing at the Chisholm Technical Institute.
Singh, who had arrived in Australia only a month ago, fled to the police station where his statement was recorded. He is under observation in a Melbourne hospital.
Monday, March 2, 2009
Two reviews of Slumdog from the left
A Hollow Message of Social Justice
Slumdog Millionaire's Dehumanizing View of India's Poor
By MITU SENGUPTA
Counterpunch
February 20, 2009
Slumdog Millionaire, one of the most celebrated films of recent times, tells the rags-to-rajah story of a love-struck boy, Jamal, who, with a little help from “destiny,” triumphs over his wretched beginnings in Mumbai’s squalid slums. Riding on a wave of rave reviews, Slumdog is now poised to win Hollywood’s highest tribute, the Academy Award for Best Picture. This honour could add some US$100 million to Slumdog’s box-office revenues, as Oscar wins usually do. But it will also enhance the film’s already-robust reputation as an authentic representation of the lives of India’s urban poor. So far, most of the awards collected by the film have been accepted in the name of “the children,” suggesting that its own cast is promoting it not as an entertaining, cinematically spectacular work of fiction, which it is, but as a powerful tool of advocacy. Nothing could be more worrying, as Slumdog, despite all hype to the contrary, delivers a disempowering narrative about the poor that renders hollow its apparent message of social justice.
Many Indians are angered by Slumdog because it tarnishes their country’s image as a rising economic power and beacon of democracy. While understandable, this is not defensible. Though at times embarrassingly contrived, most of the film’s heartrending scenarios reflect a sad, but well-documented reality. Torture is not unheard of among the police, though none is surely dim enough to target an articulate man who is also a rising media phenomenon. Beggar-makers do round-up abandoned children and mutilate them to make them more sympathetic, though such a child will unlikely ever chance upon a $100 bill, much less be capable of identifying it by touch alone.
If anything, Boyle’s magical tale, with its unconvincing one-dimensional characters and absurd plot devices, understates the depth of suffering among India’s poor. It is impossible, for example, that Jamal would emerge from his ravaged life with a dewy complexion and upper-class accent. The real problem with Slumdog, however, is not its shallow portrayal of poverty, but its minimizing of the capabilities and even basic humanity of those it claims to speak for.
It is no secret that Slumdog is meant to reflect life in Dharavi, the vast sprawl of slums at the heart of Mumbai. The film depicts Dharavi as a feral wasteland, with little evidence of order, community or compassion. Other than the children, the no-one is even remotely well-intentioned. Hustlers and petty warlords run amok, and even Jamal’s schoolteacher is inexplicably callous. This is a place of sheer evil and decay.
But nothing is further from the truth. Dharavi teems with dynamism, and is a hub of small-scale industries, whose estimated annual turnover is between US$50 to $100 million. Nor is Dharavi bereft of governing structures and productive social relations. Residents have built strong collaborative networks, often across potentially volatile lines of caste and religion. Many cooperative societies work together with NGOs to provide residents with essential services such as basic healthcare, schooling and waste disposal, often compensating for the formal government’s woeful inadequacy in meeting their needs. Although these under-resourced organizations have touched only the tip of the proverbial iceberg, their efforts must be acknowledged, along with the fact that slum-dwellers, despite their grinding poverty, have lives of value and dignity, and a resourcefulness that stretches far beyond the haphazard, individualistic survival-of-the-fittest sort shown in Slumdog.
In the end, Slumdog presents a profoundly dehumanizing view of the poor, with all its troubling political implications. Since there are no internal resources, and none capable of constructive voice or action, all “solutions” must arrive externally. After a harrowing life in an anarchic wilderness, salvation finally comes to Jamal in the form of an imported quiz-show, which he succeeds in thanks only to “destiny.” Must other unfortunates, like the stoic Jamal, patiently await their own destinies of rescue by a foreign hand? While this self-billed “feel good movie of the year” may help us “feel good” that we are among the lucky ones on earth, it delivers a patronizing, colonial and ultimately sham statement on social justice for those who are not.
Mitu Sengupta, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Politics & Public Administration at Ryerson University in Toronto. She can be reached at mitu.sengupta@gmail.com
-----------------------------------------------------
An idiots' guide to India
Hirsh Sawhney
Guardian
Saturday 21 February
When India's call centres and booming economy began to grab headlines, writers and filmmakers attempted to woo western audiences with tales from the subcontinent. Some of these works were nuanced and sophisticated, like Richie Mehta's recent film Amal or Suketu Mehta's bestselling book Maximum City. But many of them were designed to cash in on the India craze and provide digestible titbits about the country's culture and history to western audiences – India for idiots, if you will.
Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire, the runaway favourite for the best picture Oscar tomorrow night, is precisely one of these simplistic texts. It contains a smattering of all the major Indian hot buttons: call centres, religious riots, urban development, sex workers, the Taj Mahal –and, of course, slums.
The film, which traces the life of Jamal Malik from the devastatingly poor streets of Mumbai to his deliverance on the TV game show Who Wants to be a Millionaire, has elicited some furious reactions in India. Many have pointed out that the slum children Boyle used as actors weren't fairly compensated for their performances. A group of protestors in the city of Patna burned Slumdog posters and ransacked a theatre where the film was being screened, claiming that film's depiction of slum dwellers was a "violation of human rights." Some Indian commentators insinuated that the movie has been successful in the west because uses "poverty porn" to "titillate foreign audiences".
At the other end of the spectrum, Slumdog's admirers assert that those who whine about the film are guilty of "patriotic indignation" and lack "genuine anger and concern" about India's horrific poverty. Fans not only find the film upbeat, colourful and entertaining, they also applaud the fact that it sheds light on the state of slums. The Indian romance novelist Shobhaa De claimed that it has taken an outsider like Boyle "to go fearlessly into 'No Man's Land' and hold up a mirror to our sordid society…"
Yes, Boyle deserves a pat on the back for diving into Mumbai's entrails and drawing attention to its poverty. But it's a mistake to label him original for shedding light on India's underbelly. Before him, scores of filmmakers – from the iconic Guru Dutt to today's Madhu Bhandarkar – have decried inequity and portrayed India honestly, warts and all. The legendary Raj Kapoor even employed a mixture of fantasy and realism that pre-dates Boyle's masala formula for cinematic success.
But it's also clear that Boyle's version of the third world, complete with fetidness and depravity, is particularly gratifying to our UK and US sensibilities. Why? Because it grossly oversimplifies poverty and our relationship with it.
After watching the film, viewers are left to infer that slums are horrid, rancid places because of beggar masters, Hindu zealots and Muslim gangs. Of course these forces play their role in perpetuating misery. But in reality, slums are an international problem caused by an intricate set of entities: corrupt government officials, gargantuan multinational corporations and suspect IMF structural adjustment programs.
Playing it safe, Boyle doesn't implicate any of these entities. As a result, his movie does allow us to believe that we have been responsible global citizens by engaging with the intensity of third world slums. We in the audience even feel genuine sympathy for destitution. But at no point do we have to forsake the delusion that abject poverty and inequity are strictly foreign things for which we share no culpability.
In fact, far from spreading the blame for global poverty, Boyle's film actually suggests that the west is the solution to India's problems. Protagonist Jamal only escapes his ceaseless cycle of squalor and crime once he makes it into the orderly, democratic world of a British call centre. This call centre, in turn, delivers him to his fateful redemption on Millionaire. The subtext is clear: things are really bad in urban India but healthy servings of western values are just what the doctor - and the Academy judges - ordered.
Of course, many relish this action-packed fairy tale. It reinforces the notion that our policies and mindsets are righteous and can rid the world of its troubles. Stories that perpetuate this myth are especially appealing right now. In the wake of a grave economic collapse and a wretched, unending war, we have to begin the painful process of questioning the integrity of our way of life. A movie like Slumdog allows us to put that off for a few more minutes.
------
Its particularly interesting to read the Many self righteous British people's comments to this article refuting it. Here is a sample
* peterNW1
21 Feb 09, 9:24am
Danny Boyle has taken a novel by an Indian writer, Vikas Swarup, and has filmed it with an Indian cast and crew - in India. If Danny was Indian, Hirsh Sawhney would be celebrating his success. But Danny is a Brit (of Irish descent) and therefore has to be condemned as a colonial exploiter. Pathetic.
* guardianreeda
21 Feb 09, 9:24am
Silly me: there was I watching a story about 'slum guy gets well paid job', when all the while Danny Boyles sickening western-imperialist subtext passed me me by.
Is he a racist too? (Just want to check)
Thank you thought police. I'm so grateful for opening my eyes.
* thetrashheap
21 Feb 09, 9:27am
India is a hugely overpopulated, country with a deeply bigoted caste system. These are the two biggest factors in it's poverty. India has a space program and nukes but slums.
I don't buy into the hype about how great the India boom is when they seem to care so little for the poverty stricken in their country but neither do I accept this is all our fault.
Slumdog Millionaire's Dehumanizing View of India's Poor
By MITU SENGUPTA
Counterpunch
February 20, 2009
Slumdog Millionaire, one of the most celebrated films of recent times, tells the rags-to-rajah story of a love-struck boy, Jamal, who, with a little help from “destiny,” triumphs over his wretched beginnings in Mumbai’s squalid slums. Riding on a wave of rave reviews, Slumdog is now poised to win Hollywood’s highest tribute, the Academy Award for Best Picture. This honour could add some US$100 million to Slumdog’s box-office revenues, as Oscar wins usually do. But it will also enhance the film’s already-robust reputation as an authentic representation of the lives of India’s urban poor. So far, most of the awards collected by the film have been accepted in the name of “the children,” suggesting that its own cast is promoting it not as an entertaining, cinematically spectacular work of fiction, which it is, but as a powerful tool of advocacy. Nothing could be more worrying, as Slumdog, despite all hype to the contrary, delivers a disempowering narrative about the poor that renders hollow its apparent message of social justice.
Many Indians are angered by Slumdog because it tarnishes their country’s image as a rising economic power and beacon of democracy. While understandable, this is not defensible. Though at times embarrassingly contrived, most of the film’s heartrending scenarios reflect a sad, but well-documented reality. Torture is not unheard of among the police, though none is surely dim enough to target an articulate man who is also a rising media phenomenon. Beggar-makers do round-up abandoned children and mutilate them to make them more sympathetic, though such a child will unlikely ever chance upon a $100 bill, much less be capable of identifying it by touch alone.
If anything, Boyle’s magical tale, with its unconvincing one-dimensional characters and absurd plot devices, understates the depth of suffering among India’s poor. It is impossible, for example, that Jamal would emerge from his ravaged life with a dewy complexion and upper-class accent. The real problem with Slumdog, however, is not its shallow portrayal of poverty, but its minimizing of the capabilities and even basic humanity of those it claims to speak for.
It is no secret that Slumdog is meant to reflect life in Dharavi, the vast sprawl of slums at the heart of Mumbai. The film depicts Dharavi as a feral wasteland, with little evidence of order, community or compassion. Other than the children, the no-one is even remotely well-intentioned. Hustlers and petty warlords run amok, and even Jamal’s schoolteacher is inexplicably callous. This is a place of sheer evil and decay.
But nothing is further from the truth. Dharavi teems with dynamism, and is a hub of small-scale industries, whose estimated annual turnover is between US$50 to $100 million. Nor is Dharavi bereft of governing structures and productive social relations. Residents have built strong collaborative networks, often across potentially volatile lines of caste and religion. Many cooperative societies work together with NGOs to provide residents with essential services such as basic healthcare, schooling and waste disposal, often compensating for the formal government’s woeful inadequacy in meeting their needs. Although these under-resourced organizations have touched only the tip of the proverbial iceberg, their efforts must be acknowledged, along with the fact that slum-dwellers, despite their grinding poverty, have lives of value and dignity, and a resourcefulness that stretches far beyond the haphazard, individualistic survival-of-the-fittest sort shown in Slumdog.
In the end, Slumdog presents a profoundly dehumanizing view of the poor, with all its troubling political implications. Since there are no internal resources, and none capable of constructive voice or action, all “solutions” must arrive externally. After a harrowing life in an anarchic wilderness, salvation finally comes to Jamal in the form of an imported quiz-show, which he succeeds in thanks only to “destiny.” Must other unfortunates, like the stoic Jamal, patiently await their own destinies of rescue by a foreign hand? While this self-billed “feel good movie of the year” may help us “feel good” that we are among the lucky ones on earth, it delivers a patronizing, colonial and ultimately sham statement on social justice for those who are not.
Mitu Sengupta, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Politics & Public Administration at Ryerson University in Toronto. She can be reached at mitu.sengupta@gmail.com
-----------------------------------------------------
An idiots' guide to India
Hirsh Sawhney
Guardian
Saturday 21 February
When India's call centres and booming economy began to grab headlines, writers and filmmakers attempted to woo western audiences with tales from the subcontinent. Some of these works were nuanced and sophisticated, like Richie Mehta's recent film Amal or Suketu Mehta's bestselling book Maximum City. But many of them were designed to cash in on the India craze and provide digestible titbits about the country's culture and history to western audiences – India for idiots, if you will.
Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire, the runaway favourite for the best picture Oscar tomorrow night, is precisely one of these simplistic texts. It contains a smattering of all the major Indian hot buttons: call centres, religious riots, urban development, sex workers, the Taj Mahal –and, of course, slums.
The film, which traces the life of Jamal Malik from the devastatingly poor streets of Mumbai to his deliverance on the TV game show Who Wants to be a Millionaire, has elicited some furious reactions in India. Many have pointed out that the slum children Boyle used as actors weren't fairly compensated for their performances. A group of protestors in the city of Patna burned Slumdog posters and ransacked a theatre where the film was being screened, claiming that film's depiction of slum dwellers was a "violation of human rights." Some Indian commentators insinuated that the movie has been successful in the west because uses "poverty porn" to "titillate foreign audiences".
At the other end of the spectrum, Slumdog's admirers assert that those who whine about the film are guilty of "patriotic indignation" and lack "genuine anger and concern" about India's horrific poverty. Fans not only find the film upbeat, colourful and entertaining, they also applaud the fact that it sheds light on the state of slums. The Indian romance novelist Shobhaa De claimed that it has taken an outsider like Boyle "to go fearlessly into 'No Man's Land' and hold up a mirror to our sordid society…"
Yes, Boyle deserves a pat on the back for diving into Mumbai's entrails and drawing attention to its poverty. But it's a mistake to label him original for shedding light on India's underbelly. Before him, scores of filmmakers – from the iconic Guru Dutt to today's Madhu Bhandarkar – have decried inequity and portrayed India honestly, warts and all. The legendary Raj Kapoor even employed a mixture of fantasy and realism that pre-dates Boyle's masala formula for cinematic success.
But it's also clear that Boyle's version of the third world, complete with fetidness and depravity, is particularly gratifying to our UK and US sensibilities. Why? Because it grossly oversimplifies poverty and our relationship with it.
After watching the film, viewers are left to infer that slums are horrid, rancid places because of beggar masters, Hindu zealots and Muslim gangs. Of course these forces play their role in perpetuating misery. But in reality, slums are an international problem caused by an intricate set of entities: corrupt government officials, gargantuan multinational corporations and suspect IMF structural adjustment programs.
Playing it safe, Boyle doesn't implicate any of these entities. As a result, his movie does allow us to believe that we have been responsible global citizens by engaging with the intensity of third world slums. We in the audience even feel genuine sympathy for destitution. But at no point do we have to forsake the delusion that abject poverty and inequity are strictly foreign things for which we share no culpability.
In fact, far from spreading the blame for global poverty, Boyle's film actually suggests that the west is the solution to India's problems. Protagonist Jamal only escapes his ceaseless cycle of squalor and crime once he makes it into the orderly, democratic world of a British call centre. This call centre, in turn, delivers him to his fateful redemption on Millionaire. The subtext is clear: things are really bad in urban India but healthy servings of western values are just what the doctor - and the Academy judges - ordered.
Of course, many relish this action-packed fairy tale. It reinforces the notion that our policies and mindsets are righteous and can rid the world of its troubles. Stories that perpetuate this myth are especially appealing right now. In the wake of a grave economic collapse and a wretched, unending war, we have to begin the painful process of questioning the integrity of our way of life. A movie like Slumdog allows us to put that off for a few more minutes.
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Its particularly interesting to read the Many self righteous British people's comments to this article refuting it. Here is a sample
* peterNW1
21 Feb 09, 9:24am
Danny Boyle has taken a novel by an Indian writer, Vikas Swarup, and has filmed it with an Indian cast and crew - in India. If Danny was Indian, Hirsh Sawhney would be celebrating his success. But Danny is a Brit (of Irish descent) and therefore has to be condemned as a colonial exploiter. Pathetic.
* guardianreeda
21 Feb 09, 9:24am
Silly me: there was I watching a story about 'slum guy gets well paid job', when all the while Danny Boyles sickening western-imperialist subtext passed me me by.
Is he a racist too? (Just want to check)
Thank you thought police. I'm so grateful for opening my eyes.
* thetrashheap
21 Feb 09, 9:27am
India is a hugely overpopulated, country with a deeply bigoted caste system. These are the two biggest factors in it's poverty. India has a space program and nukes but slums.
I don't buy into the hype about how great the India boom is when they seem to care so little for the poverty stricken in their country but neither do I accept this is all our fault.
Thursday, February 5, 2009
Tennis player Jo-Wilfried Tsonga
Carol Thatcher is believed to have been referring to Jo-Wilfried Tsonga of France when she made her golliwog comment
The Church and Nazis
FT
February 5, 2009
Pope Benedict XVI has done it again. In September 2006, in the course of an arcane speech about the de-Hellenisation of Christianity, he managed to enrage Muslims by throwing in a quote from a Byzantine emperor on Islam being violent, evil and inhuman. We all missed the point, the Vatican said. His Holiness was talking about the relationship between faith and reason.
Last month, Pope Benedict received back into the Catholic Church four clerics excommunicated in 1988, including an English-born bishop, Richard Williamson, who had just told Swedish television “not a single Jew died in a gas chamber”. Despite widespread outrage, apparently we all missed the point again. The Pope was trying to heal a schism in the Church, the Vatican said, and Benedict was not even aware of the bishop’s views.
As the furore grew, the Vatican ordered the renegade bishop to recant. But this simply won’t wash.
Mr Williamson and his colleagues belong to the Society of Saint Pius X and were ordained bishops – illicitly under canon law – by its founder, Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, who led a rebellion against the opening up of the Church started by the Second Vatican Council of 1962-65. That is why they were chucked out, despite the best efforts of the Pope – then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger – to keep them in. Mr Williamson has long been openly anti-Semitic, from a fundamentalist group that has flirted with fascism in its defence of causes from Vichy France to Francoist Spain.
There is also the excellent film by Costa-Gavras on the collusion between the Church and Nazis - "Amen"
February 5, 2009
Pope Benedict XVI has done it again. In September 2006, in the course of an arcane speech about the de-Hellenisation of Christianity, he managed to enrage Muslims by throwing in a quote from a Byzantine emperor on Islam being violent, evil and inhuman. We all missed the point, the Vatican said. His Holiness was talking about the relationship between faith and reason.
Last month, Pope Benedict received back into the Catholic Church four clerics excommunicated in 1988, including an English-born bishop, Richard Williamson, who had just told Swedish television “not a single Jew died in a gas chamber”. Despite widespread outrage, apparently we all missed the point again. The Pope was trying to heal a schism in the Church, the Vatican said, and Benedict was not even aware of the bishop’s views.
As the furore grew, the Vatican ordered the renegade bishop to recant. But this simply won’t wash.
Mr Williamson and his colleagues belong to the Society of Saint Pius X and were ordained bishops – illicitly under canon law – by its founder, Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, who led a rebellion against the opening up of the Church started by the Second Vatican Council of 1962-65. That is why they were chucked out, despite the best efforts of the Pope – then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger – to keep them in. Mr Williamson has long been openly anti-Semitic, from a fundamentalist group that has flirted with fascism in its defence of causes from Vichy France to Francoist Spain.
There is also the excellent film by Costa-Gavras on the collusion between the Church and Nazis - "Amen"
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