Feeding My Ignorance

Over recent times I have become even more aware of how much I don't know - there are lots of things that I have learned about. To quote just one - until this week I had no prior knowledge of "Black Wall Street" and what happened there 99 years ago.

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No matter how good a history curriculum is in schools there is no way that you can learn about eveything that has ever happened and - rightly - I think in most cases 'local' history is emphasised. Whilst I think that is right it definitely has its downsides! Coming through the Scottish system - and not taking the history option throughout my schooling (at a certain point you had to choose between history and geography) means that whilst I have a sketchy idea about Scottish history - a patchy idea of British history - and a threadbare knowledge of world history (seen through Scottish eyes) - there is definitely a huge amount of world history that I am completely unaware of.

That despite learning more about the world after I left school. Regardless, as with everyone else, I view the world through lenses that have been crafted by "what I have learned". I would suggest that the less that anyone has cared to learn about, the less their worldview is likely to be accurate (whatever accurate means in that context, since often things are open to interpretation anyway). Thanks to the Dunning Kruger effect that also means that they are more likely to be convinced that their view of the world is the only viable one.

Black Lives Matter has come to the top of the agenda in the last few weeks - and of course they do. Speaking from my own position of relative ignorance I wonder just how few people outside of the US actually know the real significance of WHY that is such an important statement. Yes, here is the UK we have in our history much to be ashamed of with regard to slavery but it does not give us much of an insight into the US perspective on this. Its not that we downplay it - it is more that we do not realise what a big deal it really is.

I remember watching the events of the 1960s, MLK, Black Power, Civil Rights and thinking that it was right that it was happening but certainly not understanding why. I didn't comprehend the extent to which racism was embedded in the US.

It wouldn't be right to push the analogy too far, but there are some lessons that I perhaps should have learned from the sectarianism which is/was equally embedded in the culture where I grew up. There was a really bad case of "usandthemism" between the protestants and the catholics. I think many would not equate this at all - but in a least one respect it was very much the same. We grew up in Glasgow rarely mixing with "the other side" - protestants and catholics lived close together, but went to different schools.

I heard someone tell a story the other day about how he had grown up in a culture where dogs were not routinely kept as pets - this now causing him a problem because he does not have the innate ability to discern whether a dog is a threat or a friend. So it is with people you don't "grow up with" - some of the problem with race in the US is about the fact that some white people treat all black people as potential threats. I certainly didn't think all catholics were threats as I grew up - but I can see how this conditioning could result in that attitude.

In some ways I was fortunate - through my music I eventually found myself in a place where everyone was integrated and I made good friends with many catholics - but perhaps I shouldn't have identified them as such - so the argument goes - as they are just other people. I don't really go along with that. We are all labelled as part of many groups based on all sorts of criteria and I see no intrinsic problem with identifying people as catholics or muslims or women or black or asian or blonde or Scottish or English or whatever.... That is, after all, just who we are. Where any problem arised is when you feel the need to judge people on the basis of these many categories - I hope that is something I have never done.

Whilst there are many people - in all countries - who would definitely be rightly called out as bigoted - and they should be ashamed of that - the specifics of this issue is very different from country to country. There is also modern forms of slavery all round the world that are hard to eradicate and often it suits most people to ignore them. Again we come up against the black/white divide with no shades of grey in between when in reality there is a continuum that needs to be addressed and, perhaps, we need to again move the line between what we treat as slavery and what we treat as 'reasonable behaviour'.

Everyone who is employed is to a greater or lesser extent a slave. The more you are paid for that employment in general the less likely that you are treated as a slave. There are plenty of people around the world who are "employed" but really are no better than slaves. There is an element of exploitation in much employment. It is absolutely impossible to properly define what any given job is worth. That means that the remuneration can only be based on some arbitrary set of rules. The minimum wage is an attempt to stop the most blatant abuses of those rules at the bottom of the scale - but we all read about the excesses at the other end of it.

The concepts of fairness, trust and the like need to be built into the system. Yes, I know that those are always going to be hard to define and measure - but in many ways that is the point.

This is all going away a little from what I intended to write about - but it puts it into context - we have problems in this country - every country has problems - the problems are not always the same - and I am sure that most of the folks protesting around the world have little idea about the situation in the US as it really is - and how they got to this point. This makes some of the protests - in my eyes - rather hypocritical.

Marcus Rashford was rightly praised for fighting his corner for school meals - but professional footballers as a whole have got a bit of a cheek to think that having "Black Lives Matter" on their shirts and taking a knee before the game makes up for the fact that the obscene amounts of money swirling around in professional sports could be put to much better use in general. This is as true in the US as it is everywhere else.

What is different in the US to here is that the history of slavery in the country is not something that is "in the past" - despite the civil war "abolishing it" - it is very much in the present. The civil war put "an end" to slavery but ever since there has been plenty of examples of mistreatment of the Black community. Yes - I sort of knew that all was not perfect in the US with regards to race relations - you would be fooling yourself to think otherwise. But I was largely ignorant of the full extent to which it is systemically built in to the culture there.

The Land of the Free? Not so much - the US has almost one quarter of the whole world's prison population! It also stands head and shoulders above every other state in the proportion of the population behind bars. There are better dissections of that than I can give you here - but part of the reason for the high prison population is the systemic racism.

What is the point of this post?

It is to reinforce the point that many are making regarding the fact that the Black Lives Matter protests are very much connected to the pandemic - because the systemically racist system ensured that some parts of american society were inevitably going to suffer more from both the disease and the economic issues caused by it. There are no easy answers, but those not fully aware of the situation - and I include myself in that number need to be careful about jumping to conclusions and assuming that racism in the US is the same as racism here in the UK.

Modern day slavery in all its forms needs to be stamped out - that will be far from easy because in all societies the system is set up to be biased against those affected - the "privileged" do not necessarily see the issues - not because they don't care, but because they are systemically blind to the problems.

One final point (which I may come back to) - You can't fix just one thing.