michael Profile picture
Jun 13, 2020 4 tweets 2 min read Read on X
seen on Hackney canal #BlackLivesMatter #BLMUK ImageImage
need to make sure we're always connecting the above to the below Image
surreal experience around there. all the bougie canalside stuff reopening, no social distancing or masks and gloves. overhear 30 year olds talking about their buy-to-lets while walking past ppl sleeping in tents under an underpass.
btw, for more connections between "race", housing and policing, read this excellent @IRR_News report, "The London Clearances" irr.org.uk/app/uploads/20…

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More from @Sisyphusa

Aug 2
in the summer of 1919, anti-Black & brown pogroms spread across Britain's port towns. armed white mobs attacked small racialised communities in London, Liverpool, Glasgow, Salford, Hull, Newport, elsewhere. worker racism vs seamen spread as homes & communal spaces were targeted.
in Cardiff & South Shields sizeable Muslim communities had lived & worked sometimes for several generations. mostly from present-day Yemen, Somalia, Egypt, Indian subcontinent. Islamophobia didn't appear as it has for the past 30/40 yrs. The racism was colonial and anti-migrant.
those forms of racism can be similar to those that animate today - they can focus on "competition" in jobs/housing, on moral panics about race-mixing. A Cardiff newspaper, like all papers, authorities & rioters in 1919, were concerned about this. Image
Read 10 tweets
Jul 7, 2022
seeing a load of politicians, journalists, large institutions only now suddenly brave enough to ridicule Johnson the individual now that he's a diminished figure only underlines how effective the convergence of far right politics into the mainstream has been.
'Johnsonism', its discourses and policies and claims to power and legitimacy, has been widely supported and accommodated by powerful institutions across state, civil society, opposition forces because so many of its claims are the stuff of consensus
every reactionary violence & impulse, the sense of "why aren't they miserable like me", that stews in the ugly juices of British social life being projected onto a phantom 'Red Wall' or 'white working class' is no innovation of Brexit or Johnson, it goes back *at least* to Powell
Read 6 tweets
Jun 8, 2022
if you look through some of the British socialist publications around the time of the Boer War or in the lead-up to WWI they're full of nationalist conspiracy theories like Mason's about traitors to the left who show no allegiance, fears for national security and culture, etc.
these attacks generally targeted Jews & anarchists (at certain times perceived to basically be the same thing). But the targets were at least genuinely autonomous actors, who proposed diff practical forms or who ideologically challenged or frightened existing workers orgs/leaders
depressingly for us today this map of 'targets' is basically Labour politicians, social democrat influencers & Trotskyist groups who've basically been doing and saying the same things for fifty years, all of whom pose little threat to anything.
Read 4 tweets
Dec 19, 2021
on my run yesterday a saw wall-to-wall graffiti saying "covid1984" and i've been trying to figure out what bugs me about it so much
i think it's that whole forms of "anti-establishment" politics in Britain, including a lot of Orwell and a lot of Covid-period movements, are convinced that attacks on freedom & individual liberty are essentially against British or English culture and tradition.
Orwell feared Russian "totalitarianism" was an alien form that couldn't be allowed to usurp his patriotic sense of English socialism. Posh British radicals today see "authoritarianism" as inherently characteristic of "other places" that shouldn't happen here Image
Read 9 tweets
Nov 22, 2021
as you'd expect from Greenwald, someone who's made an entire career out of defending white supremacy and white supremacists, this much-repeated "gotcha" of recent days attempts to obfuscate the operations of white supremacy in US history. Image
white supremacy has worked to reproduce white domination in wide-ranging contexts. to take the land of Native ppl, to control the labour and bodily autonomy of Black ppl, to make racialised ppl's lives less free and less valuable, under the power of the state.
another consistent aspect of US white supremacy has been to discipline the behaviour of whites (also at times a changing category). White abolitionists were regularly murdered between 1830s-60s. Whites building alliances with Black ppl during Reconstruction were assassinated.
Read 6 tweets
May 16, 2021
my experience: i was in the thick of the march in London for ~5 hours yesterday. at one point i stood on a wall and watched its entire train pass by, 10s of 1000s of ppl, hearing the chants, seeing the signs & placards. i experienced one instance of antisemitism.
i chose not to say anything onhere yesterday because i didn't want it to give a false impression of a huge march that was not characterised by antisemitism but by a desperate desire to see an end to the suffering, oppression and colonisation of Palestinian people.
the experience was painful because i was penned in & couldn't move while a guy on a megaphone talked about how The Jews had been kicked out of every country they'd been in and then he denied the Holocaust. i was on my own & felt i couldn't say anything, that it'd be bad to do so
Read 10 tweets

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