No. 101137Anonymous 15th February 2025 Saturday 11:26 pm101137How to deal with racists in society when they're also the ones stopping it
Apologies for the Sun link ¬.¬ but lately I've been in a bit of a quandry so I come here to vent and ask for advice: how do you deal with the fact the police, who have a policy where they arrest anyone they can for racist remarks, also have quite racist policies?
Now, I hate racism. Like, a lot. It's a pet hate. But there is something that deeply angers me when I hear stories about some OAP being arrested and in some cases imprisoned for racial abuse; upsetting or not, that's disproportionate, and as we know some prisons are run so poorly that people come out more racist than when they go in.
Why is it that the same police who arrest someone for saying the n-word, burning a Quran, or the Nazi Pug, the same people who routinely stop and search black teenagers to fit them up, or refer an angry young Arab man to a terrorism program?
Or Queensland State police of all people threatening antipodean comic Isaac Butterfield with arrest for a slightly dodgy joke? Or arresting a war ve for retweeting Lawrence Fox's homophobic post but not him, the celeb?
If it's guilty parties screaming loudest, why are they so hot on that kind of racism? If it's people who are actually quite anti-racist, why do they do the racist shit as well? What goes on in the mind of a bobby?
I assume the police have targets for how many arrests they need to make. Someone saying something illegal on social media is an incredibly easy win. On top of this, only right-wing news sources, which are often targeted towards people who don't think about these things too deeply, will ever report on these outrageous miscarriages of justice. I am therefore not 100% convinced that these things happen exactly as they are reported.
To address your other thought, yes, I wouldn't be surprised if the most passionately anti-racist people were also massive racists in a way that they might not even be aware of. Outspoken male fisherpersons turn out to be abusive predators suspiciously often, and that's quite analogous to what you're talking about. Also, if you weren't obsessed with race, you wouldn't constantly be noticing potential instances of subtle racism.
>If it's guilty parties screaming loudest, why are they so hot on that kind of racism?
Most people think they aren't being racist and that they have legitimate grievances, so would be very offended if you accused them of racism. There's usually a grain of truth in their views and they're quite right to be angry, but a lot of the time it's misdirected through either ignorance or others exploiting them.
For example, I wouldn't class myself as racist but I'm bisexual so I tend to be a little more guarded around certain ethnicities/cultures because they're more likely to be homophobic. Every single Asian I've worked with has been very homophobic, even if they appear to be very Westernised at a surface level. The most racist people I've worked with have also been Asians, they really dislike black people.
As ignorant as a lot of these racists are, the fact they were right about things like Rotherham means they feel vindicated for these views and that the people who oppose them are exactly the kind of people who enabled Rotherham to happen.
>If it's people who are actually quite anti-racist, why do they do the racist shit as well?
As otherlad says, everyone is racist or prejudiced to some extent.
I believe a fair number of people who act vehemently anti-racist don't actually care that much about racism, it's simply an excuse for them to feel morally superior to other people. It's all a political football for them. Often they're quite happy to infantilise other cultures.
You see this kind of thing in the Guardian all the time. They'll bleat on about the rise of anti-semitism in this country as an exercise to bash (white) British people as becoming increasingly intolerant, so they can lord it over them and feel morally superior to the plebs, but they have a massive blind spot over the fact it's largely the increasing Muslim population which is fuelling this. They'll go on about how we should allow people in migrant camps in Calais to come here because the women are frequently being raped and sexually abused, without seemingly being able to join the dots it's the male migrants doing the raping and most people aren't too keen on the idea of them coming here. A lot of intolerance is allowed in the name of tolerance.
In other words, there is a lot of bad faith on both sides but obviously it's more palatable not to be a massive racist.
>Why is it that the same police who arrest someone for saying the n-word, burning a Quran, or the Nazi Pug, the same people who routinely stop and search black teenagers to fit them up, or refer an angry young Arab man to a terrorism program?
They're just doing their job. That's the best answer that I can think of. They are still people, and they do have a job that they have to do, and that's to catch anyone (it's the courts that are meant to find out who the "bad guys" are) and make the public feel safe. Someone saying the n-word in public may make the public feel unsafe, especially if they're being aggressive and the area they're in has a lot of people who are not White. Likewise with burning a Quran.
Stop and searches are probably a little bit racist, but I can see the logic behind them, the people most likely to get involved in knife crime are Black, so if you were looking to maximise the amount of arrests you were going to make for carrying a knife (again, the job of the police is to catch suspects, not the bad guys, so obviously they're looking to make as many arrests as possible), you'd naturally target Black men more.
Young, isolated and angry people are the most likely to be radicalised, and that's true of any race or religion, so it's not really racist to refer a young, angry Muslim (male or female) to prevent because the possibility that they could get radicalised is 100% there.
The only thing that's actually silly in this list is the Nazi pug incident, for obvious reasons.
>Or Queensland State police of all people threatening antipodean comic Isaac Butterfield with arrest for a slightly dodgy joke? Or arresting a war ve for retweeting Lawrence Fox's homophobic post but not him, the celeb?
The war vet isn't rich and famous, and Lawrence Fox is. Classism, really, that's all it is.
Also, I think the picture you've used is a really shit one, honestly. Who is suggesting that Muslims saying "no to racism" is Islamist (that's what "political Islam" is)? It just seems like one massive strawman to me.
After the Black Lives Matter protests, a lot of US police forces basically decided "fine, we'll stop arresting black people if you're going to give us shit about it". The drop in arrests of black people was accompanied by a substantial increase in the murder rate. There's a bitter irony in the fact that the Black Lives Matter movement directly led to a lot of black people dying.
>>101145 Interesting. It's an important reminder that sometimes refusal to police a certain area can be a sign of racism, or at least can count as discrimination if the cops themselves aren't racist. You know the sort, who say 'we let them polic their own, we don't interfere, ethnic folkways and all that' in the vein of Sgt Colon from Discworld (from time to time at least). You know the sort - not bad at heart, but uncomfortable enough around 'the ethnics' that their actions amount to neglect of the vulnerable people in 'ethnic' areas on a par with the nastier cops who hate them. They're not quite as bad as the aggressive ones, obviously, but they'll still ignore a Muslim girl killed in an honour killing by her Dad. That sort of thing, which indeed does happen.
Bit of a no-win scenario for the cops though, innit? If you nick ethnics then you're a racist, if you don't nick ethnics then you're a different kind of racist. There's a perfectly reasonable argument that all sorts of complex socioeconomic factors need to be addressed, but the police are in no position to reinvent society.
>>101148 Yeah, that's about the size of it. Avenue Q is one of those American comedy things that makes me think of the pisstaking track names on David Cross's early comedy albums.
