Saturday, April 7, 2012

Same Sh*t, Different Country

Several people who read my earlier blog about racism in the UK (particularly amongst its police force) took umbrage to the point of various and sundry actually telling me I didn't know what I was talking about.

Look, I don't know if these people were Brits - who love to take the moral high ground and can dish it out to Americans, but hate to have it shoved back in their faces - or Americans who love to live with the myth that Europe is far more tolerant, far more educated and far more sophisticated than the United States, but I know this much: I've lived in the UK for 31 years. They are as racist as anyone you'd ever presume to be in the US. Certainly they're more racist than West Coast Progressives would like to believe their caricatured Southerners are.

The racism is here. It's more subtle, but it's still racism. The Brits are just better and more adept at sweeping this sort of thing under the carpet, because that's what they've done for years.

However, Rightwing politics is the stuff of fashion in Europe at the moment, however dippy our own Republican Party is. It's mete that all these cockroaches are crawling from the woodwork during that nice David Cameron's watch.

David, himself, is a crusading Christian, there are demonstrations outside abortion clinics now, "cunt" wars are so rife people aren't even aware they're being fought and now there's good old-fashioned racism rearing it's ugly head. Maybe I shouldn't feel homesick.

Anyway, for all the naysayers who said I didn't have a clue about Britain, here's the tape of the ueber-sophisticated, unarmed Metropolitan police (that's London) overtly racially abusing an innocent suspect whom they'd stopped - yes - just because of the colour of his skin.



And, yes ... you get two for the price of one, because they liberally used both the c-word and the n-word.

I guess you can say we learned a lot from the Mother Country.

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