BLACK NEWS UK SPEAKS ABOUT RACISM IN THE UK
Black News 
BLACK HISTORYBY ALTON ANDERSONFirstly, I would like to thank you for taking the time out to read my column, and introduce myself I am Alton Anderson of BLACK NEWS UK, BLM FESTIVAL,BLM FOOD BANK,BLACK AND BLUE PROJECT amongst other BLM iniatives.I am going to walk you through a brief history of racism in the UK. I could not start without first mentioning the Oxford Dictionary's first recorded utterance of the word RACIST OR RACISM, it was by a Man named Richard Henry Pratt in 1902 at the time he was railing against the evils of racial segregation.
He argued that segregating, any class or race, apart from the rest of the people, kills the progress of the segregated people, or makes their growth very slow, and that association of races and classes is necessary to destroy racism and classism.Although Pratt's intention may have been to regile against racism and its affects by name, he is much better remembered for a very different coinage.kill the Indian save the man....Pratt replaced the popular idea that some groups were natively inferior to others with the idea that some cultures that were a direct problem to him, needed to be corrected or destroyed, in other words he swapped biological determinism for cultural imperialism.Now over a century after he was first recorded using the word racist, we still ask the question......Is she or isn't she racist?- or is he or isn't he racist?In situations where no clear answer would ever present itself. We should and do argue about the composition of the accused soul and the fundamental goodness or badness therein. but those are thing we really can't possibly know to be gospel. And as we waste time litigating that question other more meaningful questions can and do become obscured.However, racism remains a force of enormous consequence in most of our lives, yet no one can be accused of perpetuating it without kicking up a grand fight, no one ever says "Yeah I'm just a little bit racist, I'm sorry" that's in part because racists, in our cultural conversations have become inhuman, they're almost seen as fairy tale villains and thus can't be real to the majority who indeed are ,perpetuating such ideals.THIER EXSUSE IS ALWAYS, IM NOT RACIST JUST BECAUSE I ESPOUSE RACIST VIEWS?In the century since Pratt used the word racism, the term has become an abstraction, but always buried somewhere underneath, it are actions with real consequences. Sometimes those outcomes are intended sometimes they're not.But it's it's the outcomes not the intentions that matter!. Now that's the history of the word and its affects on and by others.Now let's move on to the history of racism in the UK, although we start with the Windrush in reality, before it landed there was a population of around 30.000 non-whites among an overall population of 50 million in 1948 and there were a few ships before the Windrush earlier, but I wanted to bring your attention to the story of the WindrushOne misty morning in June 1948 a former German cruise boat, the Empire Windrush, steamed up the Thames to the Tilbury Dock, London, where she disembarked some 500 hopeful settlers from Kingston, Jamaica: 492 was the official figure, but there were several stowaways as well. Many of them were ex-servicemen, who had served in England during the war. The Pe omg new arrivals were the first wave in Britain’s post-war drive to recruit labour from the Commonwealth to cover employment shortages in state-run services like the NHS and London Transport.
One of them was a future Mayor of Southwark, Sam King, who had served in England with the wartime RAF. His family had sold three cows to buy his ticket which cost £28.10shillings in the old money (upward of £600 today). Looking back on the experience years afterwards – in Forty Winters On, published by Lambeth Council – he recalled that as the ship drew towards England there was apprehension on board that the authorities would turn it back. He got two ex-RAF wireless operators among the passengers to play dominoes innocently outside the ship’s radio room and eavesdrop on incoming signals. They heard on the BBC that Arthur Creech Jones, Colonial Secretary in the Labour government of the time, had pointed out that: ‘These people have British passports and they must be allowed to land.’ He added that they would not last one winter in England anyway, so there was nothing to worry about.
The newspapers were already keenly interested in the voyage of what they embarrassingly called ‘the sons of empire’ and the Colonial Office, the Home Office and the Ministry of Labour were busily engaged in trying to dodge responsibility for the newcomers, whose imminent arrival they viewed with alarm. Eventually the Colonial Office, defeated in these arcane bureaucratic manoeuvrings, reluctantly opened the deep air-raid shelter under Clapham Common and about 230 of the new arrivals moved into it. The others had organised some sort of job and accommodation for themselves beforehand. The labour exchange nearest Clapham Common happened to be the one in Brixton, in Coldharbour Lane, and it was this that made Brixton the first of London’s new West Indian ghettoes.
So, some faced adversity and discrimination before they even stepped off the boat.... in 1948
20 years past and things did not get better, in 1968 we had Enoch Powell's "the river of blood speech,
I would like to read you just a small part of Enoch's speech
"For reasons which they could not comprehend, and in pursuance of a decision by default, on which they were never consulted, they found themselves made strangers in their own country. They found their wives unable to obtain hospital beds in childbirth, their children unable to obtain school places, their homes and neighbourhoods changed beyond recognition, their plans and prospects for the future defeated; at work they found that employers hesitated to apply to the immigrant worker the standards of discipline and competence required of the native-born worker; they began to hear, as time went by, more and more voices which told them that they were now the unwanted. On top of this, they now learn that a one-way privilege is to be established by Act of Parliament; a law which cannot, and is not intended to, operate to protect them or redress their grievances, is to be enacted to give the stranger, the disgruntled and the agent provocateurthe power to pillory them for their private action."
Now some 50 years later, I would say this to Enoch if he were still here, yes you were right there have been many rivers of blood, but they have all been ours, in fact it sounds more like you were talking about us, you were right, indeed we need more, Acts Of Parliament to address the disparities that have been exasperated since your day, to where we find ourselves now in 2021, at 3 to 4% of the population yet when it comes to.Education our children are 3 times more likely to get excluded,
In employment--we have a 41% unemployment rate; we get paid 14% less and yes of course we are way underrepresented in management.
When it comes to crime 3 times more likely to get prosecuted, how can 3% of the population make up 25% of incarcerations?
Even living standards, for instance if you're an ethnic minority your 37% more likely to live in poverty....
105 of our Beautiful Black Women have been killed in the last year, at a rate 5 times more then other etnic minorities. WE ALL FEEL FOR SARAH EVERGARDS FAMILY< BUT WHAT ABOUT OUR MUMS< SISTERS<LOVED ONES THAT THE MEDIA/PUBLIC DONT GET TO SEE? THEY WOULD NOT DARE SAY THESE WOMEN WERE ALL IN GANGS SO THEY DONT MATTER< BUT THEY STILL DO NOTHING> NO JUSTICE NO PEACE!
These are all figures that we don't just hear but live daily....
So, what are we doing about it, well BLM as a movement in the US changed 40 laws over 26 states in the last year.
Which brings me to my concluding point.
Here in the UK we did indeed launch the 13th Racial disparity Commision in the last 2 and a half years, but to no availl. Headed by Dr Tony Sewell it's outcomes were SHIT and not in anyway credit worthy, which gave false evidence this year, in the form of data which was full of SHIT recommendations!
Poncing from previous commissions which had no teeth or wetherell to enact them, yet by some miracle we hope we shall see Boris DOING SOMETHING WORTH WHILE [ But we are not holding our breath] Which hopefully on a poor news week they will convert inadvertenly into new Acts of parliament and these news laws are given the confidence of the house and supply of monies to enact. [wishful thinking]
What we ultimately hope to achieve may be insignificant tiny and incremental,
but drops make puddles, puddles make streams, streams make rivers, rivers make seas that ultimately create waves of change, I commend this statement and article to you the people.
