Londoner and Grime godfather Wiley tweeted about the riots, “I think urban people just hate the police and they wanna test them”, and, “the bottom line is young urban Britain don’t give a fuck about nothing”. But who are these “urban people”? “Urban is like any colour who likes black life or music or style.” Oh. Hey, wait a sec… Guards! GUARDS!They wouldn't lose it, either.
Only an idiot would accuse Wiley of being racist toward himself. Evidently, then, there are plenty of idiots with Twitter accounts, because accuse Wiley of racism is exactly what they did.
"As one young girl who lives in outer London said of her eight-year-old cousin who lives in inner London, 'People say he speaks like a black boy, but he just speaks like a London boy.' The message is that people are beginning to sound the same regardless of their colour or ethnic background. So we prefer to use the term Multicultural London English (MLE). It's perhaps not as catchy," she says, "but it comes closer to what we're trying to describe."From here, which draws on a bit of research from here, I believe. It's worse than Starkey thinks, those crafty little buggers are simultaneously becoming Jamaican, Bangladeshi and South American!
The mixed race group is the fastest growing ethnic minority group in the UK and is expected to become the largest by 2020.I don't think that means there isn't racism aplenty in the UK or, as it says here that it's grounds for complacency, but there has also been significantly more integration than elsewhere, which does imply a bit more progress than some other Western nations.
Britain has one of the highest rates of interracial relationships in the western world.
If government watchdog figures are right, mixed race Britons will overtake Indian people to become the UK's largest ethnic minority group within 25 years, reaching 1.24 million.
Starkey's ignorance is hardly work of historyposted by TheophileEscargot at 1:55 AM on August 25, 2011 [3 favorites]
In David Starkey's regular appearances on BBC's Newsnight, Newsnight Review and Question Time, he is introduced as "the historian, David Starkey", just as Emily Maitlis introduced him on the Newsnight discussion of the recent English riots. As a group of professional historians, academics and graduate students, we therefore feel it is reasonable to critique his contribution as that of a historian, rather than a celebrity.
According to the BBC, the aim of the discussion was to examine "the causes of the recent riots and looting". One might therefore ask the following question: if a historian is to be involved in a discussion of rioting in modern Britain intended to explore issues of race and class, why choose one whose education, research and publications are at such a remove from these topics? In our opinion, it was a singularly poor choice: Starkey has professed himself to be a historian of elites, and his academic work has never focused on race and class - in fact, he has rejected those approaches. We are thus unsurprised by the poverty of his reductionist argument, which reflected his lack of understanding of the history of ordinary life in modern Britain. It was evidentially insupportable and factually wrong...
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posted by knapah at 2:28 PM on August 17, 2011 [2 favorites]