Black Lives Matter.

Yesterday I was dismissed as being a white, heterosexual male, the most privileged group in our society. Most British fathers I know are and I find it nothing to be apologetic about. But women have ‘me too’, homosexuals have gay pride and now ‘black lives matter’. We’re the only social group left that doesn’t have a social media victim banner. And we’ve missed the boat on that one. ‘Proud white fathers’ would probably be met by universal derision, though I’m still proud to be the father of three. I was accused because I introduced some nuance into the BLM debate. That nuance apparently indicated I wasn’t 100% behind it. I find that strange. Nuance is only thinking, peeling the onion, finding complexities, implications and different perspectives. It’s definitely not being an apologist. I would be failing my privileged education to do otherwise. And white America takes some peeling. They arrived as immigrants around 1600 and in the next two hundred years decimated the indigenous native Indians, and the British slave trade supplied the southern states with free black labour until 1865. White America is built literally on stolen land, slave labour and stolen birth rites. As a result they hold a deep fear of the ghosts of those barbarian deeds. Hopefully BLM can make a difference. But how? In rodent experiments researchers gave rats drugs. They got high and aggressive, the rats that is. The researchers then gave the rats activities to do and the rats stopped using the drugs even though they were still freely available. Blacks even after gaining liberty remained poor, poorly educated and with high unemployment for generations. Gee Officer Crupky sums it up beautifully. They along with native Indians and poor whites become ‘trouble’ that ‘must be policed.’ Yet many live good lives and, given opportunities, prosper. Given all this BLM demos and knocking down old statues, in the UK at lest, seems a cost-free comforting emotion, a Facebook emogie. What’s needed is empathy, better education, opportunities and employment. In this pandemic some rough sleepers were housed in unused uni halls of residence and an unexpected almost miracle occurred. They dropped their alcohol and/or drug habit naturally. You might say they were re-civilised by their surroundings. Rogers would say it’s our natural inclination to grow. But that growth costs money, time and effort far more than a demo and knocking down statues. So are we prepared to give our money, time and effort to people who, in many cases, are angry, belligerent and telling us to fuck off? Statues don’t do that.