Thread by @thehoff102

@JBickertonUK Clearly you dont understand the history of 400 years of racism in the United States. I suggest you watch the program by Henry Louis Gates Jr on reconstruction after the civil war. Then look at figures like Booker T Washington

@JBickertonUK Who put a focus on economic empowerment as a way of tackling institutionalised racism, because only eight years after the end of slavery in 1883 until the civil rights act, the Supreme Court ensured that African Americans across all U.S. states had less rights than they did

@JBickertonUK After slavery was abolished and were worse off economically.

This was due to allowing officially segregation which led for many years to apartheid across the USA in businesses, restaurants, shops, schools etc.

@JBickertonUK This was pushed under the false concept of 'separate but equal'. However the Columbus day world fair in Chicago which the brave truth seeking journalist Ida B Wells mockingly called the White City, painted black people as savages and people who were underdeveloped.

@JBickertonUK They painted this as having a slaves mindset, but the reality is it was based on seeing themselves as better and more advanced than African-Americans.

In his last famous speech speaking at the Columbus Day Exhibition William Frederick Douglas exposed the institutionalised

@JBickertonUK Racism at the heart of the United States.

Alongside this especially in the Southern U.S. states but not confined to it lynchings were the order of the day and this worsened in the early 20th century with the Ku Klux Klan who not only terrorised African Americans

@JBickertonUK But had great political power and the ear of Presidents, law enforcement agencies etc. Its similar to how Trump does the bidding of Alt-right white Supremacists today via Twitter and it's why so many military men like Gen Martin Dempsey and Gen James Mattis

@JBickertonUK Who nobody could doubt the patriotism of have spoken out so strongly against the President who not only does not believe in the concept of #JusticeForGeorgeFloyd, but spits on the concept of justice and for institutionalised racism. This takes us back to the times of

@JBickertonUK Nixon who used terms like the moral majority, the silent majority and law and order to justify his southern strategy which bought the likes of Strom Thrummond in to the Republican Party based on racism. The only difference is that Trump is much more explicit.

@JBickertonUK Going back to the history lesson which I'm not ashamed to say I learnt from Henry Louis Gates and I feel you need as the way you dont understand black owned businesses came about due to segregation, lynching, the painting of African Americans as inferior people

@JBickertonUK For white Americans to be worried about and to lock up your daughters from the violent evil rapists that cartoons in nazi style images spread across newspapers, school books, pamphlets etc. Indeed the depictions of African-Americans I saw in the @PBS first two episodes of

@JBickertonUK @PBS Reconstruction reminded me and shocked me to its core of the Julius Streicher style propaganda and cartoons that led to the Holocaust. It reminded me of the thinking which led to Jews being chased out of England in the middle ages based on blood libels that Jews poisoned the

@JBickertonUK @PBS Wells. Lest you think this hateful propaganda about African-Americans was all just words and pictures but led to murder and lynching let me take you back to Ida B Wells. She exposed not just how the lynchings were based on lies, but based on white people having been fed

@JBickertonUK @PBS For years lies that African-Americans by virtue of their black skin colour were immoral, sexual, violent deviants looking to rape white woman.

Ida B Wells highlighted it all through the radical free speech newspaper and many African-American journalists were inspired by her.

@JBickertonUK @PBS What bought the situation close to home to Ida was a situation where a black and white kid were playing marbles on a street. The black kid won and tensions grew as this was not the natural order of things. A black owned business in this white street was vandalised and

@JBickertonUK @PBS Destroyed by a white mob all due to a game of marbles.

Black owned businesses in America, black churches which were key to the civil rights protest and black areas was a way of economic empowerment, to be able to protect their livelihoods and dignity in

@JBickertonUK @PBS 'Separate but equal America'. It was not African American owned businesses which created separatism in the USA but Christopher Columbus 400 years ago. Slaves from Africa were transported and shackled together like cattle and moved across to the USA. There has been no reparations

@JBickertonUK @PBS Separate but equal did not end with the abolition of slavery but was enshrined in federal law first in 1883 and then in the plessis supreme court case of 1895. Nor did it after the passage of the civil rights act - just take a look at the political career of Jesse Helms.

@JBickertonUK @PBS Gerrymandering is used particularly now in Republican districts to try and disenfranchise African Americans. Rather than the red scare of the 1920s, we have the postal ballot scare of the Trump era, whipped up by Trump himself on Twitter, based on little evidence of fraud.

@JBickertonUK @PBS We have a situation where you are more likely to be pulled up in a car if you are black and understandably this leads to black people in America slowing down when they see police cars. Despite doing the right thing they still get taken out of the car.

@JBickertonUK @PBS You have the war on drugs which has led to millions of African-Americans over many years along also by the way with many poor white Americans.

You have an institutionalised racist police system which police chiefs, sheriffs and leading politicians in places across the USA

@JBickertonUK @PBS Are now finally acknowledging. It shouldn't have taken the death of George Floyd to challenge years of institutionalised racism in the USA or to hear the cries of anguish from African Americans, but now rather than having a go at black people economically empowering

@JBickertonUK @PBS Themselves, perhaps listen and understand how black owned businesses came about in the first place. They are not boycotting white owned or Jewish owned businesses, they are just seeking to empower black businessman and women. As a capitalist I support that.

@JBickertonUK @PBS May I ask would you have a problem with trying to redress the balance by positive discrimination? University Scholarships, grants etc. If so, please James tell me how you would challenge systemic racism in the USA.

@JBickertonUK @PBS By the way you paint those who disagree with what I believe to be your wrong headed assertion as the far left or black supremacists. Sure their will be a small minority such as SWP, sections of Anti-FA, Nation of Islam like that, but they are not the vast majority of those

@JBickertonUK @PBS Like me sickened by systemic racism in the USA and wanting not justice for #GeorgeFloyd but for so many others.

If that makes you think I'm far left - fine I know it not to be true.

@JBickertonUK @PBS You may want to paint me as racist towards white - fine again I know it not to be true. Indeed it's due to my hatred of racism in all its forms I speak out against the likes of Al Sharpton, Tamika Mallory, Linda Sarsour and still have concerns vis a vis antisemitism with part

@JBickertonUK @PBS Of the leadership of black lives matters.

There is one more person I wanted to mention which I learned about in Henry Louis Gates Jr @PBS documentary reconstruction. His name was Isaiah T. Montgomery.

@JBickertonUK @PBS Isaiah was an active African-American politician in the Republican Party and the founder of Mound Bayou, Mississippi an all black community, founded to protect the community who did not want to be treated inferior but with dignity.

@JBickertonUK @PBS Isaiah was the sole African American political representative to participate in the 1890 Mississippi constitutional convention.

He realised he would not be able to stop the disenfranchisement of african Americans particularly when it came to voting.

On the surface

@JBickertonUK @PBS He pursued what appeared to be an accommodation and understandably he received a lot of criticism from many African-Americans who thought what he was doing was capitulating and appeasing.

As with so much of life and history it was nowhere near that simple.

@JBickertonUK @PBS Isaiah was adept just like Booker T. Washington of having the ear of key white American politicians, industrialists, education leaders and philanthropists.

He was also adept at saying what he believed they wanted to hear and white Americans in general.

@JBickertonUK @PBS He believed it would take a long time for centuries of systemic racism to lead to a change towards African Americans and he wanted a change in the quality of life for African Americans through the system of the time of separate but equal. He used this to support black communities

@JBickertonUK @PBS Black businesses, black farmers etc who otherwise would have received no support whatsoever and many of whom were more impoverished than they were under slavery.

Many of these black communities remain today and generations of families have lived in the same house.

@JBickertonUK @PBS In an ideal world you do not want separate communities, businesses etc, but the reality is we live in a deeply imperfect world.

Indeed, this is why many eastern European Jews like my Dad's ancestors moved to the east end and stuck together in Jewish communities

@JBickertonUK @PBS And anglicised their names. This was not out of a hatred of their fellow Brits, but a realistic fear about institutionalised antisemitism- which was not overblown when you look at the 1905 Illegal Aliens Act, which as a then Liberal MP rallied against including how it had

@JBickertonUK @PBS Unleashed virulent antisemitism. They wanted dignity, to empower themselves by running their own businesses (in my grandad's case a hair dressers), in others dry cleaners etc. There is also the psychological fact that people who have a shared affinity tend to stick together

@JBickertonUK @PBS In the USA there are also areas where the communities are white. The difference is they are not called such and the institutions do not have a history of working against them.

I wish the USA was colourblind and communities and businesses could be so too.

@JBickertonUK @PBS The reality is we are nowhere near that in the USA.

I will be honest until recently I did not listen to the stories of African-Americans anywhere near enough if at all.

Coming from a Tory background I believe I had a cognitive bias against things like affirmative action

@JBickertonUK @PBS A deference to power, a complete tin ear, I simply did not listen, emphasise and get to know the African-American story.

I also believe there was a reticence on mine as relationships between African-Americans and Jews especially at a leadership level are to put it mildly tense

@JBickertonUK @PBS This is not helped by the likes of Blasio putting communities at odds with each other and the use of terms like white privilege (which I personally hate) by former leaders of the Women's March.

Neither is it helped by groups like the Zionist Org of America and the likes of

@JBickertonUK @PBS Mort Klein feting and inviting people like Bannon, taking a delight in insulting African-Americans and frankly help perpetuate deep seated racism in the Jewish community which many African American Jews continue to preach.

As an Adide as a Sephardi Iraqi Jew I do not

@JBickertonUK @PBS Consider myself as white, and I personally see the Jewish people as a people hood and nation and don't see us as white. That said I do believe that all human beings are equal in the eyes of God and abhor racism towards white people and believe it exists. I also think we have to

@JBickertonUK @PBS Acknowledge that being black in America puts you at great disadvantage in a way being white does not. That simply is not right.

@JBickertonUK @PBS Part of the problem I believe the United States and ironically similar to antisemitism in Iraq (although thanks to state sponsored antisemitism there are now a negligible amount of Jews in Iraq is that unlike say Germany after the Nazi era where there is and remains a

@JBickertonUK @PBS Institutions led denazification effort, there has been a similar co-ordinated leadership led attempt at even having the difficult conversations which will help destroy the roots of 400 years of racism in the USA.

@JBickertonUK @PBS There has been no truth and reconciliation process similar to what South Africa had under the leadership of Mandela and De Klerk.

@JBickertonUK @PBS The Civil Rights Act was passed and officially African Americans are equal to everyone else in America. For sure the situation has improved since the era of Jim Crow, but institutionalised racism has remained particularly in areas like criminal justice

@JBickertonUK @PBS The situation has worsened significantly since 2016 as you have a President in Trump who divides not unites people. A President who threatens to use a sedition act from the 19th century to use the U.S. Millitary against it's own people. A person who continues to give power

@JBickertonUK @PBS to white supremacists in key administration positions both formally and informally - I mean just because he believed in the the rule of law despite being an out and out racist Sessions was fired - that tells you a lot. No other President in living memory has been so open

@JBickertonUK @PBS In inciting white supremacists many of whom he sees as fine people. It is no wonder why George Bush Jr, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama have all spoken out in recent days.

@JBickertonUK @PBS Now finally as a sheriff in Atlanta who had been in the police over 20 years not only are police at the top levels speaking out in line with what many police think they are finally speaking to the communities who have been so damaged by years of systemic racism

@JBickertonUK @PBS Through this we can finally start the truth and reconciliation process based on building up trust and listening, acknowledging and emphasising with the justified pain so many African Americans feel.

It doesn't mean you have to agree with everything they say.

@JBickertonUK @PBS It doesn't mean you have to abandon your critical thinking facilities and pledge an oath of allegiance to the leadership of Black Lives Matter.

It does mean before putting out a statement like you did painting this as some far left thing

@JBickertonUK @PBS You like I've done ask why African Americans and so many active allies are protesting, why there is so much anger and rather than pouring petrol on to the fire, working on solutions, because polarising this debate as your tweet I'm sure perfectly unintentionally did

@JBickertonUK @PBS Polarises the situation further which just leads to more echo chambers more shouting and more anger and a dearth of listening, empathy, pragmatism, reconciliation and ultimately not taking sides but looking at solutions

@JBickertonUK @PBS I've started doing this over the last week and its deeply uncomfortable as its made me grapple with my total ignorance about African-Americans and my own hypocrisy.

@JBickertonUK @PBS One of the things I hate about antisemitism and most recently about institutionalised antisemitism in the UK Labour Party was the ignorance of the suffering and anguish of Jews, the assuming of what Jews think, not understanding how diverse the Jewish community is

@JBickertonUK @PBS Only looking at the tiny minority of Jews who confirmed their own biases such as Ken Loach, Jackie Walker, JVL and Tony Greenstein.

@JBickertonUK @PBS It was that so many people I saw as allies telling me who has had to deal with antisemitism all my life that I was going on about it disproportionately, that it was a storm in a teapot, overblown, make belief, that others had suffered more

@JBickertonUK @PBS As if antisemitism either only existed on the right, or had vanished with the Holocaust. Initially via facts proving this BS wrong aided by the likes of @daverich1, @supergutman and @DavidHirsh I tried to highlight that what they said was to put it politely truth twisting

@JBickertonUK @PBS @daverich1 @supergutman @DavidHirsh Selective facts, when in many cases it was a barrage of lies which denied Jews agency when it came to antisemitism, as if our voices were not important, that the actual people who experienced it had no clue.

There was no empathy, no attempts at walking a mile in our shoes

@JBickertonUK @PBS @daverich1 @supergutman @DavidHirsh No listening, no consideration.

That was why James people like yourself, @WasiqUK, @5Naureen, @BergdahlJB, @Welshbeard, @Asmaa96388862, @Naz_Faulkner, @MashJoy1, @mattforde and so much more I see as friends because when so many abandoned the Jewish community you walked a mile

@JBickertonUK @PBS @daverich1 @supergutman @DavidHirsh @WasiqUK @5Naureen @BergdahlJB @Welshbeard @Asmaa96388862 @Naz_Faulkner @MashJoy1 @mattforde In your shoes, spoke out when it would have been much easier and a quieter life to be quiet, often to the detriment of your own health. You didnt need to do it. You could have said a few nice words and said nothing else. I wouldn't and do not think any less of those who

@JBickertonUK @PBS @daverich1 @supergutman @DavidHirsh @WasiqUK @5Naureen @BergdahlJB @Welshbeard @Asmaa96388862 @Naz_Faulkner @MashJoy1 @mattforde Silently showed solidarity, but could not face the inevitable abuse.

It wasn't about agreeing with everything Jews like myself said. Indeed, what was great was the support came from a range of views. It was about being horrified by grotesque institutionalised antisemitism

@JBickertonUK It was about hearing the cries of so many Jews and seeing what you could practically do to challenge it and be part of the solution, so that the UK remains a place that Jews can call home.

Sadly myself and I feel yourself in your statement have not showed that sort of

@JBickertonUK Open hearted attitude to African-Americans.

I will live with the regret of not doing so to my dying day and am looking to change my ways as of now. That wont necessarily mean manning the barricades, it wont mean I abandon saying what I think. It does start with

@JBickertonUK Education on the African-American historically, now and in the future so that America can finall be in the words of Ronald Reagan that shining city on the hill for every single American.

Otherwise as George Santayana said those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it.

@JBickertonUK One of the greatest withering put downs I ever saw on Twitter came from the university academic and brainiac @EquusontheBuses.

Its the following tweet:

https://twitter.com/EquusontheBuses/status/1023552496441217030?s=19

@JBickertonUK @EquusontheBuses Education is key to everything, so just like I made a small step in the right direction with Henry Louis Gates Jr @PBS documentary series, I genuinely think reading from African-Americans will help you, just as people educating themselves on antisemitism by hearing the

@JBickertonUK @EquusontheBuses Voice of Jews and experts on antisemitism.

Now I will be honest i need recommendations especially on books and people to follow on Twitter to know where to start.

@EquusontheBuses maybe this something you can assist with! And views from across the spectrum welcome!

@JBickertonUK I appreciate this may sound like I'm lecturing you, I'm not. Its because I value you as a person who I see myself as no better than that I wanted to give a detailed response.

I will also admit what with chronic post COVID-19 fatigue and having to quarantine until Monday

@JBickertonUK I have a load of time to think.

Hear endeth the essay!

To be clear I will not be offended if you take what I say with a large pinch of salt and tell me to go forth and multiply!

The gif is probs you right now...

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