Posted: 9/24/15 at 12:48pm
I would never, ever claim to understand the issues that the UK has regarding race and immigration. I just wouldn't feel like I had anything to add to an insider's conversation. I would never feel comfortable, for example, talking about British colonialism as it relates to India, which is the closest analogy I can come up with, but STILL is probably way off base. And you certainly aren't going to get me to defend any of the shows you mentioned. There are ways that racial issues play out here in the States on a daily basis that wouldn't be obvious to people who don't live here. Hell...it's barely obvious to people who do live here. We are a peculiar nation in that we are a democracy that was founded on the backs of kidnapped and raped Africans. When slavery was abolished and the South defeated, we didn't have any kind of major reckoning. Slavery just became Jim Crow and the Klan which then became housing projects and ghettos. We are a nation that decided to vilify and murder the indigenous people because of manifest destiny. We are a nation that put Japanese people in camps. We are a nation that refuses to fully take responsibility for all of these actions.
I really don't mean this to sound condescending. But you're telling us we're overreacting and its bullSH*T. And my response is, as people who live in this particular culture and deal with these issues in a concrete way, our ears may be better tuned to hearing the dog whistles this show is throwing off.
.jpg?format=auto&width=365)
