I know racist people. But they are not british. I grew up in wycombe. Cant say racism was a thing growing up near booker common lol Ewanhoosami is right about one thing. The freedom to oppose any ideas or beliefs. We cant all agree. I personally think the proof is in the pudding. Our fans didnt flinch. Millwalls did. Look at the history of the club. The answer is there. In regards to the BLM movement. Well that is a whole subject on how you interpret it. Some see it for the right reasons and we must remember they are now an official political movement. So are the players and fans support actual black lives matter or the group. That seems to be the debate i see online.
@EwanHoosaami said:
OK, thanks for that. So, what is being said is that everything is down to personal interpretation then, as my understanding was as explained above.
Then by that surely, those Milwall fans that interpret "taking the knee" as supporting a marxist organisation that apparently want to erode family values etc, rightly or wrongly are entitled to express their displeasure? Isn't that what living in a "free"country is partly about.
Before I get slammed for this, I'm not saying I agree with their views only that they are entitled to them as much as you or I.
It’s a fair question, but the flip side of that is should we accept flat earth believers as “having an opinion”? Or perhaps more accurately anti-vaxxers, or birthers, or bell curvers? People whose outright stupidity threatens the lives of others.
On the cookies thing, I highly recommend this browser extension: https://ninja-cookie.com and if you want to block malicious spyware like Facebook ever even reaching your browser, then https://nextdns.io is outstanding.
OK, yep fair points @drcongo though I haven't a clue what a bell curver is, though it sounds as if it could be painful.
On the cookies thing, many thanks for the tips, I use a Mac desktop safari browser. Tried the ninja one but told me that I had the wrong/out of date whatever & the next thing you recommended looked a bit complex for me so will wait until my good lady finds the time to help me. Back in the day she was a programmer/analyst & very good at it. Some things are best left by tech fools like me as I have encountered her ire in the past by attempting somethings and making more work for her to unravel!!!
Also in my fifties I know lots of people (and family members) of all ages who are racist but dont think they are racist and get angry if you point out their dislike of people of colour is actually racism. And in many cases this hatred pre-dated them Muslins wanting to blow us up...
Yes. The effect of symbolism can be more than symbolic! I'd be interested to know how many people anyone here knows that they think they might fairly categorise as racist to any meaningful degree.
As individuals- some, including family members. I’m 54. I went to a very privileged, and therefore ‘white’ school in Amersham. Many of my peers were racist, and on reflection, I am ashamed to say, so was I, in the assumptions I made about why there were almost no BAME kids in my school, my village, no BAME authors in the literature we studied. I’d like to think we have changed but I know I carry implicit racial biases. I was raised to and educated to.
I’d say every organisation I have worked for has been institutionally racist, including the NHS, my current employer (which still is). In my opinion this country remains structurally racist. As such, symbols which remind us of this carry weight.
I'd hope/expect all of us of your age (including me) are very different in our outlook now to then. They were different times.
@Brownie said:
I do wonder if those who think BLM is an enforced political message think the same about footballers wearing poppies.
I made the same point on Twitter earlier today in support of David Wheeler’s post and got accosted by some angry types who claimed they were not racist but it had to stop.
Unsurprisingly, they were all obsessed with Brexit, Lee Rigby, Sadiq Khan and Help for Heroes (former charity partner of the EFL of course). They were all (to a man) keen retweeters of Julia Hartley-Sewer and some bloke called Martin Daubney, who appears to be a northern version of Toby Young as far as I can make out.
I’m fairly convinced that all of them were racist.
I'd hope/expect all of us of your age (including me) are very different in our outlook now to then. They were different times.
I'm obviously too dim but I think that's the whole point people are making? The events of this weekend, the rise of Tommy Robinson, Britain First Trump and beery Nigel prove that those outlooks and those' different times' are still here - if they ever actually went away - and are actually coming to the fore while any response is seen as posturing, virtue signalling and 'pc crap'. Sometimes things that sound and look racist...ARE racist. Not a brave battle against Marxist ideology by the Millwall crew.
Yes. The effect of symbolism can be more than symbolic! I'd be interested to know how many people anyone here knows that they think they might fairly categorise as racist to any meaningful degree.
As individuals- some, including family members. I’m 54. I went to a very privileged, and therefore ‘white’ school in Amersham. Many of my peers were racist, and on reflection, I am ashamed to say, so was I, in the assumptions I made about why there were almost no BAME kids in my school, my village, no BAME authors in the literature we studied. I’d like to think we have changed but I know I carry implicit racial biases. I was raised to and educated to.
I’d say every organisation I have worked for has been institutionally racist, including the NHS, my current employer (which still is). In my opinion this country remains structurally racist. As such, symbols which remind us of this carry weight.
I'd hope/expect all of us of your age (including me) are very different in our outlook now to then. They were different times.
I think you miss the point here @HCblue expressions of racism may be less overt, although certainly not always, but that’s not the main problem. Racism is not expressed prejudices, it is inequalities of power that mean one group’s prejudices impact disproportionately on other groups. Ans along with that the efforts made by those with power to retain it. I am certain that in those regards, the times are really not very different at all.
I’ve worked with four people from Chesterfield and all were outright racists. One was even a magistrate, who proudly told me he’d had diversity training shortly after using the term ‘n***er in the woodpile’ on the phone before worrying that he might have been speaking to ‘a coloured person’.
In my own family, my cousin is shacked up with a bloke who delights so much in sharing his racist views that I won’t attend family events that he’s at. His latest is that he won’t use the village chip shop anymore, now it’s been taken over by Muslims.
They are everywhere sadly and becoming emboldened at present.
@CyprusSwan said:
I know racist people. But they are not british. I grew up in wycombe. Cant say racism was a thing growing up near booker common lol Ewanhoosami is right about one thing. The freedom to oppose any ideas or beliefs. We cant all agree. I personally think the proof is in the pudding. Our fans didnt flinch. Millwalls did. Look at the history of the club. The answer is there. In regards to the BLM movement. Well that is a whole subject on how you interpret it. Some see it for the right reasons and we must remember they are now an official political movement. So are the players and fans support actual black lives matter or the group. That seems to be the debate i see online.
Agreed.
My main feeling when seeing the players do it before Wednesday's game was around feeling privileged to be back in the stadium to see it in the flesh. Not wondering why and even worse getting irate and booing it!? What an amazing reaction.
I'd hope/expect all of us of your age (including me) are very different in our outlook now to then. They were different times.
I'm obviously too dim but I think that's the whole point people are making? The events of this weekend, the rise of Tommy Robinson, Britain First Trump and beery Nigel prove that those outlooks and those' different times' are still here - if they ever actually went away - and are actually coming to the fore while any response is seen as posturing, virtue signalling and 'pc crap'. Sometimes things that sound and look racist...ARE racist. Not a brave battle against Marxist ideology by the Millwall crew.
I'd genuinely be intrigued to hear what your average Millwall fan even knows about Marxism. Maybe they've been watching Animal Farm recently?
@arnos_grove said:
I’ve worked with four people from Chesterfield and all were outright racists. One was even a magistrate, who proudly told me he’d had diversity training shortly after using the term ‘n***er in the woodpile’ on the phone before worrying that he might have been speaking to ‘a coloured person’.
In my own family, my cousin is shacked up with a bloke who delights so much in sharing his racist views that I won’t attend family events that he’s at. His latest is that he won’t use the village chip shop anymore, now it’s been taken over by Muslims.
They are everywhere sadly and becoming emboldened at present.
Some worrying stuff there!
With this lockdown it feels like I haven't seen a non related human in so long, but when I last went to the dentist I was amazed to hear the Eastern European receptionist clearly getting a hard time from someone on the phone.
Wanted to speak to someone who spoke English apparently.
Bearing in mind all the dentists are of foreign descent I would have been interested to see whoever this person was turn up.
I suspect they'd have been more respectful of a dentist than a receptionist for a bit of classic selective prejudice.
It’s a fair question, but the flip side of that is should we accept flat earth believers as “having an opinion”? Or perhaps more accurately anti-vaxxers, or birthers, or bell curvers? People whose outright stupidity threatens the lives of others.
This is a tricky one. I accept all of the above have an opinion. I think they are wrong. I have strong rationalist and empiricist leanings when it comes to the natural sciences. If you can gather evidence then opinion, in my view, can be converted to fact through scientific methods. The earth is not flat. Global warming is true. We can know what we can observe and test. Other things we can hold a strong hypothesis for and should continue to test.
Some things that are opinions are factually incorrect, some are not. In my opinion Meshuggah are a wonderful band. Her Indoors has a different opinion (some nonsense about grating tuneless noise). Much as I want it to be, her opinion is not factually incorrect. Some opinions when expressed from a position of power are dangerous to others, especially those that are factually, (when empirically tested to the best of our ability) correct. This is, in my opinion, a problem.
Going back to the origin of the thread.
Could a solution be that the taking the knee is too closely linked with violent protests in the USA & subsequently around the world.
Maybe another form of gesturing that can only be linked to the "kick out racism" message would better convey the real issue?
I am covering Millwall v QPR for Sky on Tuesday night.
I very much hope that the actions of those players who do or do not take the knee are treated with the respect they deserve.
Do you actually think, on the balance of what evidence and reasonable supposition is available, that the majority of those booing yesterday were doing so as a perceived anti-Marxist statement or expressing their frustration at professional supporters showing joint support for their black colleagues and the wider black community?
Afterwards some supporters claimed their actions were not racist but merely expressing their disdain for the politics of the “Marxist” Black Lives Matters movement. The Millwall defender Mahlon Romeo saw through that. “Spreading hatred”, he called it.
“What they’ve done is booed and condemned a peaceful gesture which was put in place to highlight, combat and stop any discriminatory behaviour and racism,” said Romeo, a London-born black player who has represented Antigua and Barbuda. “That’s it – that’s all that gesture is. But in society there is a problem – and that problem is racism.”
It is hard to argue, although some undoubtedly will.
The equivocation and disingenuous statements coming out of Millwall and their supporters is quite something.
If they are going to follow the reasoning that they object to taking a stand against racism by taking the knee because some people who have done that were in a violent protest, then will they boo any player wearing a poppy based on the violent acts of individuals who have worn them?
If you see a footballer taking a stand against racism and only see "marxism", then I hazard a guess you're not particularly bothered about eradicating racism from society.
The right response is not to let those offended by taking a stand against racism win and continue to do so. Leaving Romeo out to dry like they have is quite frankly pathetic.
I'd hope/expect all of us of your age (including me) are very different in our outlook now to then. They were different times.
I'm obviously too dim but I think that's the whole point people are making? The events of this weekend, the rise of Tommy Robinson, Britain First Trump and beery Nigel prove that those outlooks and those' different times' are still here - if they ever actually went away - and are actually coming to the fore while any response is seen as posturing, virtue signalling and 'pc crap'. Sometimes things that sound and look racist...ARE racist. Not a brave battle against Marxist ideology by the Millwall crew.
I'd genuinely be intrigued to hear what your average Millwall fan even knows about Marxism. Maybe they've been watching Animal Farm recently?
Because only we Wycombe fans are erudite and well-informed? This seems to be exactly the thinking that leads to, among other things, racism.
Yes. The effect of symbolism can be more than symbolic! I'd be interested to know how many people anyone here knows that they think they might fairly categorise as racist to any meaningful degree.
As individuals- some, including family members. I’m 54. I went to a very privileged, and therefore ‘white’ school in Amersham. Many of my peers were racist, and on reflection, I am ashamed to say, so was I, in the assumptions I made about why there were almost no BAME kids in my school, my village, no BAME authors in the literature we studied. I’d like to think we have changed but I know I carry implicit racial biases. I was raised to and educated to.
I’d say every organisation I have worked for has been institutionally racist, including the NHS, my current employer (which still is). In my opinion this country remains structurally racist. As such, symbols which remind us of this carry weight.
I'd hope/expect all of us of your age (including me) are very different in our outlook now to then. They were different times.
I think you miss the point here @HCblue expressions of racism may be less overt, although certainly not always, but that’s not the main problem. Racism is not expressed prejudices, it is inequalities of power that mean one group’s prejudices impact disproportionately on other groups. Ans along with that the efforts made by those with power to retain it. I am certain that in those regards, the times are really not very different at all.
British society at every level is hugely different in both its attitudes and behaviours to how it was in the '70s and '80s.
The attempt to slide in a new definition of racism is noted but not agreed. Free societies always have imbalances of power and prosperity and have their elites, counter-elites and those in neither category (including most of us). The question is what reasonably might or should be done when such inequalities are identified. No human society is likely to be, or more pertinently be viewed by everyone as, "equal". There will always be those who do not care for the status quo for some reason.
Mature societies consider the issues and address them carefully. Other ones see inequalities and automatically attach pejorative labels to them, according to their political perspective. Marx had an idea about what should be done. Though, like a lot of people, I find his theory appealing, his ideas didn't seem to me to work and had severely negative consequences. I think this is uncontroversial. Post-modern thinkers are putting forward ideas about equality of outcome rather than opportunity that are Marxist in nature (the BLM movement has such ideas in its "manifesto", though it should be noted, since no-one else has mentioned it so far, that the FA has separated itself from "BLM" and the current taking of a knee in football is in support of the general notion of equality for black people rather than the BLM movement).
I disagree that focusing on race makes us more likely to be less racist. I am with Martin Luther King rather than the critical theorists in aspiring to a society where we are valued for what we bring to the table as humans rather than our immutable characteristics. It is less tribal and, thus, less likely to cause division.
None of this means to suggest the job is done and we are living in Nirvana without realising it. Everyone in the present always sees what was wrong with the past. It's not a new thing. But we should beware the way in which we move forward and be sure not to catastrophise the present because the we're smart enough to see that things aren't exactly as we think we wish them to be.
@glasshalffull said:
I am covering Millwall v QPR for Sky on Tuesday night.
I very much hope that the actions of those players who do or do not take the knee are treated with the respect they deserve.
They will get the respect the warm famously inclusive politically mature patriots at The New Den think they deserve I am sure.
@HCblue notes the FA has distanced itself from BLM and sees taking a knee as being in support of a general principle of equality. Yet Millwall’s supporters were booing as an anti-Marxist protest? Is supporting a general principle of equality only a Marxist stance? If so I’m seeing the FA in a new light. If it isn’t just a Marxist stance then in what way is supporting a general principle of equality a problematic position unless one really believes that to make a public statement of intent means one cannot then act on that intent.
And @HCblue do you believe Dr King’s vision of a society where people are only valued for what they bring to the table has been achieved? Might it be that some groups of people are still devalued for immutable characteristics whereas other groups are overvalued?
@Manboobs said: @HCblue notes the FA has distanced itself from BLM and sees taking a knee as being in support of a general principle of equality. Yet Millwall’s supporters were booing as an anti-Marxist protest? Is supporting a general principle of equality only a Marxist stance? If so I’m seeing the FA in a new light. If it isn’t just a Marxist stance then in what way is supporting a general principle of equality a problematic position unless one really believes that to make a public statement of intent means one cannot then act on that intent.
And @HCblue do you believe Dr King’s vision of a society where people are only valued for what they bring to the table has been achieved? Might it be that some groups of people are still devalued for immutable characteristics whereas other groups are overvalued?
Re the first paragraph: I think the "anti-Marxist" tag, so far as it might be applied accurately to some proportion of the booing group, is more likely to be better expressed as opposition to a race-based message of this sort. As I wrote above, if you make an argument all about race, you're not to be surprised if one race, reading a threat to themselves, reacts against it, rightly or wrongly.
Re the second: no, but we're much further along the road than when he was around. I imagine we'll always carry prejudices of some sort, collectively and individually.
@hcblue I don’t think MLK would be with you. Let’s not forget that at his time MLK was a radical opposed by the establishment and disliked by many across America.
He was also basically a Marxist, criticising US capitalism saying it gives luxuries to the classes and takes necessities from the masses. He was a strong supporter of trade unions and economic equality. He supported universal basic income and radical redistribution of wealth.
He was certainly to the left of someone like Jeremy Corbyn.
He has been co-opted into being a safe, cuddly, liberal figure (in opposition to Malcolm X) but this image is misleading.
@Chris said: @hcblue I don’t think MLK would be with you. Let’s not forget that at his time MLK was a radical opposed by the establishment and disliked by many across America.
He was also basically a Marxist, criticising US capitalism saying it gives luxuries to the classes and takes necessities from the masses. He was a strong supporter of trade unions and economic equality. He supported universal basic income and radical redistribution of wealth.
He was certainly to the left of someone like Jeremy Corbyn.
He has been co-opted into being a safe, cuddly, liberal figure (in opposition to Malcolm X) but this image is misleading.
All fair enough comment in principle. But he would certainly be with me on the meaning of his own words about his vision of a future society. His observations about the American capitalist system are not unique to the marxist perpective.
Comments
This gentleman's few tweets sum up my views on the Marxist argument
That’s a fantastic post @Manboobs. I’d argue that anyone who thinks they don’t know anybody who is racist, is racist.
I know racist people. But they are not british. I grew up in wycombe. Cant say racism was a thing growing up near booker common lol Ewanhoosami is right about one thing. The freedom to oppose any ideas or beliefs. We cant all agree. I personally think the proof is in the pudding. Our fans didnt flinch. Millwalls did. Look at the history of the club. The answer is there. In regards to the BLM movement. Well that is a whole subject on how you interpret it. Some see it for the right reasons and we must remember they are now an official political movement. So are the players and fans support actual black lives matter or the group. That seems to be the debate i see online.
OK, yep fair points @drcongo though I haven't a clue what a bell curver is, though it sounds as if it could be painful.
On the cookies thing, many thanks for the tips, I use a Mac desktop safari browser. Tried the ninja one but told me that I had the wrong/out of date whatever & the next thing you recommended looked a bit complex for me so will wait until my good lady finds the time to help me. Back in the day she was a programmer/analyst & very good at it. Some things are best left by tech fools like me as I have encountered her ire in the past by attempting somethings and making more work for her to unravel!!!
Also in my fifties I know lots of people (and family members) of all ages who are racist but dont think they are racist and get angry if you point out their dislike of people of colour is actually racism. And in many cases this hatred pre-dated them Muslins wanting to blow us up...
I'd hope/expect all of us of your age (including me) are very different in our outlook now to then. They were different times.
I made the same point on Twitter earlier today in support of David Wheeler’s post and got accosted by some angry types who claimed they were not racist but it had to stop.
Unsurprisingly, they were all obsessed with Brexit, Lee Rigby, Sadiq Khan and Help for Heroes (former charity partner of the EFL of course). They were all (to a man) keen retweeters of Julia Hartley-Sewer and some bloke called Martin Daubney, who appears to be a northern version of Toby Young as far as I can make out.
I’m fairly convinced that all of them were racist.
I'm obviously too dim but I think that's the whole point people are making? The events of this weekend, the rise of Tommy Robinson, Britain First Trump and beery Nigel prove that those outlooks and those' different times' are still here - if they ever actually went away - and are actually coming to the fore while any response is seen as posturing, virtue signalling and 'pc crap'. Sometimes things that sound and look racist...ARE racist. Not a brave battle against Marxist ideology by the Millwall crew.
I think you miss the point here @HCblue expressions of racism may be less overt, although certainly not always, but that’s not the main problem. Racism is not expressed prejudices, it is inequalities of power that mean one group’s prejudices impact disproportionately on other groups. Ans along with that the efforts made by those with power to retain it. I am certain that in those regards, the times are really not very different at all.
I’ve worked with four people from Chesterfield and all were outright racists. One was even a magistrate, who proudly told me he’d had diversity training shortly after using the term ‘n***er in the woodpile’ on the phone before worrying that he might have been speaking to ‘a coloured person’.
In my own family, my cousin is shacked up with a bloke who delights so much in sharing his racist views that I won’t attend family events that he’s at. His latest is that he won’t use the village chip shop anymore, now it’s been taken over by Muslims.
They are everywhere sadly and becoming emboldened at present.
Agreed.
My main feeling when seeing the players do it before Wednesday's game was around feeling privileged to be back in the stadium to see it in the flesh. Not wondering why and even worse getting irate and booing it!? What an amazing reaction.
I'd genuinely be intrigued to hear what your average Millwall fan even knows about Marxism. Maybe they've been watching Animal Farm recently?
Some worrying stuff there!
With this lockdown it feels like I haven't seen a non related human in so long, but when I last went to the dentist I was amazed to hear the Eastern European receptionist clearly getting a hard time from someone on the phone.
Wanted to speak to someone who spoke English apparently.
Bearing in mind all the dentists are of foreign descent I would have been interested to see whoever this person was turn up.
I suspect they'd have been more respectful of a dentist than a receptionist for a bit of classic selective prejudice.
This is a tricky one. I accept all of the above have an opinion. I think they are wrong. I have strong rationalist and empiricist leanings when it comes to the natural sciences. If you can gather evidence then opinion, in my view, can be converted to fact through scientific methods. The earth is not flat. Global warming is true. We can know what we can observe and test. Other things we can hold a strong hypothesis for and should continue to test.
Some things that are opinions are factually incorrect, some are not. In my opinion Meshuggah are a wonderful band. Her Indoors has a different opinion (some nonsense about grating tuneless noise). Much as I want it to be, her opinion is not factually incorrect. Some opinions when expressed from a position of power are dangerous to others, especially those that are factually, (when empirically tested to the best of our ability) correct. This is, in my opinion, a problem.
Going back to the origin of the thread.
Could a solution be that the taking the knee is too closely linked with violent protests in the USA & subsequently around the world.
Maybe another form of gesturing that can only be linked to the "kick out racism" message would better convey the real issue?
Taking the knee goes back way further tbf, to 2016 when Colin Kaepernick started kneeling during the anthem.
I am covering Millwall v QPR for Sky on Tuesday night.
I very much hope that the actions of those players who do or do not take the knee are treated with the respect they deserve.
Genuine question for @HCblue
Do you actually think, on the balance of what evidence and reasonable supposition is available, that the majority of those booing yesterday were doing so as a perceived anti-Marxist statement or expressing their frustration at professional supporters showing joint support for their black colleagues and the wider black community?
The following (from https://www.theguardian.com/football/blog/2020/dec/06/toxicity-on-show-at-millwall-goes-beyond-the-club-and-football?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other )
Is, I think, worth repeating:
Afterwards some supporters claimed their actions were not racist but merely expressing their disdain for the politics of the “Marxist” Black Lives Matters movement. The Millwall defender Mahlon Romeo saw through that. “Spreading hatred”, he called it.
“What they’ve done is booed and condemned a peaceful gesture which was put in place to highlight, combat and stop any discriminatory behaviour and racism,” said Romeo, a London-born black player who has represented Antigua and Barbuda. “That’s it – that’s all that gesture is. But in society there is a problem – and that problem is racism.”
It is hard to argue, although some undoubtedly will.
The equivocation and disingenuous statements coming out of Millwall and their supporters is quite something.
If they are going to follow the reasoning that they object to taking a stand against racism by taking the knee because some people who have done that were in a violent protest, then will they boo any player wearing a poppy based on the violent acts of individuals who have worn them?
If you see a footballer taking a stand against racism and only see "marxism", then I hazard a guess you're not particularly bothered about eradicating racism from society.
The right response is not to let those offended by taking a stand against racism win and continue to do so. Leaving Romeo out to dry like they have is quite frankly pathetic.
Millwall players are planning on taking the knee again against QPR on Tuesday - another home game.
Oh and it's on Sky as well. The fans will get to disgrace themselves live in front of a national audience.
Because only we Wycombe fans are erudite and well-informed? This seems to be exactly the thinking that leads to, among other things, racism.
British society at every level is hugely different in both its attitudes and behaviours to how it was in the '70s and '80s.
The attempt to slide in a new definition of racism is noted but not agreed. Free societies always have imbalances of power and prosperity and have their elites, counter-elites and those in neither category (including most of us). The question is what reasonably might or should be done when such inequalities are identified. No human society is likely to be, or more pertinently be viewed by everyone as, "equal". There will always be those who do not care for the status quo for some reason.
Mature societies consider the issues and address them carefully. Other ones see inequalities and automatically attach pejorative labels to them, according to their political perspective. Marx had an idea about what should be done. Though, like a lot of people, I find his theory appealing, his ideas didn't seem to me to work and had severely negative consequences. I think this is uncontroversial. Post-modern thinkers are putting forward ideas about equality of outcome rather than opportunity that are Marxist in nature (the BLM movement has such ideas in its "manifesto", though it should be noted, since no-one else has mentioned it so far, that the FA has separated itself from "BLM" and the current taking of a knee in football is in support of the general notion of equality for black people rather than the BLM movement).
I disagree that focusing on race makes us more likely to be less racist. I am with Martin Luther King rather than the critical theorists in aspiring to a society where we are valued for what we bring to the table as humans rather than our immutable characteristics. It is less tribal and, thus, less likely to cause division.
None of this means to suggest the job is done and we are living in Nirvana without realising it. Everyone in the present always sees what was wrong with the past. It's not a new thing. But we should beware the way in which we move forward and be sure not to catastrophise the present because the we're smart enough to see that things aren't exactly as we think we wish them to be.
Wow. These things are always an eye opener arent they?
They will get the respect the warm famously inclusive politically mature patriots at The New Den think they deserve I am sure.
@HCblue notes the FA has distanced itself from BLM and sees taking a knee as being in support of a general principle of equality. Yet Millwall’s supporters were booing as an anti-Marxist protest? Is supporting a general principle of equality only a Marxist stance? If so I’m seeing the FA in a new light. If it isn’t just a Marxist stance then in what way is supporting a general principle of equality a problematic position unless one really believes that to make a public statement of intent means one cannot then act on that intent.
And @HCblue do you believe Dr King’s vision of a society where people are only valued for what they bring to the table has been achieved? Might it be that some groups of people are still devalued for immutable characteristics whereas other groups are overvalued?
Re the first paragraph: I think the "anti-Marxist" tag, so far as it might be applied accurately to some proportion of the booing group, is more likely to be better expressed as opposition to a race-based message of this sort. As I wrote above, if you make an argument all about race, you're not to be surprised if one race, reading a threat to themselves, reacts against it, rightly or wrongly.
Re the second: no, but we're much further along the road than when he was around. I imagine we'll always carry prejudices of some sort, collectively and individually.
@hcblue I don’t think MLK would be with you. Let’s not forget that at his time MLK was a radical opposed by the establishment and disliked by many across America.
He was also basically a Marxist, criticising US capitalism saying it gives luxuries to the classes and takes necessities from the masses. He was a strong supporter of trade unions and economic equality. He supported universal basic income and radical redistribution of wealth.
He was certainly to the left of someone like Jeremy Corbyn.
He has been co-opted into being a safe, cuddly, liberal figure (in opposition to Malcolm X) but this image is misleading.
All fair enough comment in principle. But he would certainly be with me on the meaning of his own words about his vision of a future society. His observations about the American capitalist system are not unique to the marxist perpective.