Yasmin Alibhai-Brown is a British journalist and author, who describes herself as "a leftie liberal, anti-racist, feminist, Muslim...person" (Wikipedia). I don't agree with everything she says, but she can be an independent thinker, so I do sometimes agree with what she says.
About 10 days ago, in the aftermath of the Tyre Nichols killing, by five black officers from the Memphis Police Department, she wrote an article exploring why ethnic, gender and sexual diversity is no guarantee of a just society (i newspaper, 31/01/23).
It's a longish article, and it's behind a paywall, so I've quoted the paragraphs that sum up her article. I've highlighted text to give an additional representation of what her article is about.
Tyre Nichols’ killing by black police officers illustrates why diversity is no guarantee of a just society
Nichols, 29, died after a savage assault by five police officers who had pulled him over on 7 January. He was less than 100 yards from his home. They beat and kicked him for three minutes. It was filmed. He pleaded for mercy, cried out for his mother.
Three days later, he died. He was black. His assailants were black. One of the men convicted after George Floyd’s death in 2020 was half Nigerian, the other of South East Asian background.
How did this happen? Why?
[...]
Since Nichols’ homicide, social media has been awash with white indignation, fury and also inappropriate schadenfreude; those against the global Black Lives Matter movement are crowing, while racism deniers are having their day. Legitimate questions are being raised in Britain, too, by dismayed anti-racists of all backgrounds.
But it bears repeating that if an organisation is institutionally racist, the fact that black officers killed a black man does not mean it cannot be a racist crime.
What do we think and say when black and Asian people with power victimise people of colour or when females in charge callously disregard the pain and plight of women and girls? Or when those who break through and get into previously white/male controlled institutions absorb sickening attitudes and become willing operatives of unjust systems?
[...]
In 2005, she [Dame Cressida Dick] – then an assistant Met commissioner – ran the operation in which Jean Charles de Menezes, a 27-year-old Brazilian, was mistaken for a terrorist and shot dead at Stockwell Tube station in south London. In her four years as head of the Met, the number of reported rapes, teenage homicides and domestic violence all rose. Sarah Everard was murdered by a policeman known to be a violent misogynist; those attending a vigil for her were intimidated and terrorised by Met officers; the toxic, racist, sexist and homophobic ethos of Charing Cross police station was exposed; 326 Met staff were accused of domestic abuse between 2017 and 2020, but little action was taken; two female officers who alleged they had been raped by a colleague waited three years before he faced a misconduct hearing; a black school girl was strip-searched in school.
All that and worse happened under [Dame Cressida] Dick’s watch.
Let’s broaden the remit to the most cold-blooded home secretaries we have had – Theresa May, Priti Patel and now Suella Braverman – all female, two of them brown people. What drove, or drives them, to be this way?
In my view, history provides some clues. Throughout the centuries of colonialism, Europeans could rely on helpful natives, who were ambitious or believed the white man’s supremacist myths. My own father was one of those. He always said that Indians and Africans needed to think and act like “the great British people”. The Suffragettes were obdurately opposed by countless women who believed in those same myths. Black slaves were captured and sold to white traders by African profiteers. In the US, a small number of black scholars through the ages have tried to positively spin that story. Some even suggest it was “good” for those who ended up in the “civilised” West.
In contemporary Britain and America, culture drives the obscene behaviours which fail, oppress and violate so many humans. [Sir Mark] Rowley (Cressida Dick's replacement as Chief Commissioner of the London Metropolitan Police) has accepted that. Dick never did. [Theresa] May, [Priti] Patel and [Suella] Braverman never will. It’s as if once in that club of power, they feel the need to show that they embrace and propagate its values more ardently than those who “naturally” belong. Jobsworths feel that too. Racism, prejudice, misogyny, homophobia, classism and immigration persecution are embedded in many key institutions.
Few dare to expose the iniquities. Tyre Nichol’s black life did not matter to black officers; Cressida Dick was more protective of her officers than of the women whose lives they destroyed; Braverman, a child of migrants, seems to want to show she can be more brutally anti-migrant than any white man.
For the actual harm they do and for dashing our collective hopes for a better society, these assimilationists should never be forgotten or forgiven.
https://inews.co.uk/opinion/uncomfortab ... ty-2117590
