Black Lives Matter: Stop UK racism, for good

UK Racism Must End

 

We exist in a world that is riddled with abuse, in many forms. The colour of a person’s skin, or their religion, or what they look or sound or perform like are all used to target people with abuse.

One of the most recognisable, and certanly one of the most worrying category of abusers are those people that identify, among other things, as racist. And let us remind ourselves that when we consider racism in the context of Black Lives Matter, the racist can also be referred to as a white supremacist. The abuser may not realise this, but that is what they are. The terms racist and white supremecist are synonymous.

And the racist person is everywhere. We see evidence of UK racism almost daily in the news. The racist individual will target an innocent person on public transport, or in the street, and of course on social media.

We all had to witness the despicable racism from some England football supporters towards Rashford, Sako and Sancho after the European soccer championship. These three young England players demonstrated bravery, commitment and loyalty. What do the abusers have to offer? Nothing.

The Marcus Rashford mural in Manchester was also vandalised with derogatory abuse following the Englad result. It is beyond comprehension why anyone would go to such lengths defacing a mural dedicated to a remarkable young man who has made such a difference to so many children living in poverty.

But what this recent abuse towards England football players has demonstrated is that the abusers are very much the tiny minority. The problem here is that this tiny minority of abusers are gifted a voice on social media.

Thankfully, the decent people among us gathered and showed their love for Marcus Rashford and deleted the racist abuser's attempt to attack Marcus' reputation.

 

Racism is a very old pandemic       

 

Racism is a different kind of pandemic. One that we have had to live with for centuries.

What is of great concern to me is that the incidence of UK racism, and the notion of white supremacy seems to be increasing. This trend should be in decline in 2021. Well, it should actually be something that we should read about in history books and be appalled by, but instead it is growing among us.

Much of the racist behaviour we see among white people is the consequence of having influential celebrity types abusing others with racist behaviour. People like Mark Wahlberg, who is famously known for some appalling racist behaviour. But also, of course, Donald Trump, who is the ‘poster boy’ for the white supremacist.

The Guardian newspaper in the UK last year reported that “White nationalist hate groups have grown 55% in the Trump era”. This is an alarming statistic. Especially as racism should have been in decline for many decades as the more impressionable among us become educated over time, and better understand the history behind racism.

And eventually stop treating others as inferior.

It is impossible in this article to properly pay the respect due to the Civil Rights Movement. I have written a brief article recognising the remarkable John Robert Lewis. It provides a small insight into what John Lewis had to fight for, and the deep-rooted prejudice that he was born in to. It would be hard for any white person to truly comprehend this.

 

Racist Hate Groups, and Social Media

 

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), based in Montgomery Alabama, was founded by civil rights lawyers Morris Dees and Joseph Levin Jr in 1971 to ‘ensure that the promise of the civil rights movement became a reality for all’.

The SPLC’s Year in Hate and Extremism 2019 report identified a staggering 940 active hate groups in the United States in 2019. This represents a noticable increase in the number of white-nationalist, anti-LGBTQ and anti-immigrant hate groups in that year.

It is getting worse still.

We cannot ignore the influencing factors that fuel this community of people who abuse others because of the colour of their skin, and the recent increase. Whether you were a supporter of Donald Trump or not during his presidency, this is a Trump legacy that is truly shameful.

There is a quote, which I believe comes from the late Charlie Murphy, which for me encapsulates the Trump era very well. Charlie said that “Not all Trump supporters are racist... but all racists are Trump supporters".

Here in the UK, I read accounts every week of black football (soccer) players being racially abused on social media. This is certainly not a new phenomena. Soccer in the UK has been a breeding ground for the racist for decades.

A few weeks back an extraordinary thing happened in the UK. English football players announced a four-day boycott of Facebook, Instagram and Twitter to send a clear message to these social media platforms. Max Rushden’s article in The Guardian provides the details, but the message is clear to social media and Facebook in particular. Deal with the racism and abuse that appears on your platforms.

The boycott from the English players began at 3pm on Friday 30 April 2021, and ended at 11.59pm on Monday 3 May. This period covered a full fixture programme in the men’s and women’s professional game at a vital stage of the season.

But why should these sports personalities have to go such lengths to protect not only themselves, but their families and friends from abuse on social media?

It is because the social media platforms are ineffective at stopping the abuse on their platforms, racist or otherwise.

 

Social Media Indifference

 

Facebook is very well known for its abusive online content, and it has a responsibility to the welfare of its online community. It is also a business that feeds off its subscribers, like a parasite. Facebook makes obscene profits as a direct result of the posts from its subscribers, good and bad.

Facebook has a lot to answer for. This may not seem relevant to the fight against racism, but it is important to understand how capable social media is a filtering bad content. And identifying the source of the bad content. 

Any abusive content on any social media platform is unacceptable. So how do these social media giants address the conflict between the content on their platform, and their profits?

Facebook will respond to any criticism by saying that it spends a lot of time and money ‘trying’ to moderate the content on its platform.

The reality is not so convincing.

Facebook engages with companies like Cognizant to provide temporary staff to act as Facebook moderators. The income for Cognizant to simply put low paid people in seats will be considerable.

Cognizant will expect the people they employ as moderators to review Facebook content, much of which will be harrowing.

Cognizant will pay one of their temporary Facebook moderators what is condidered a low wage in the country that they are working.

A Cognizant Facebook employee will be paid something in the region of $28K. Casey Newton's article in TheVerge.com titled 'The secret lives of Facebook moderators in the US' is a clear example of what these Cognizant employees must tolerate.

Neither Cognizant nor Facebook will be interested in the trauma experienced by their moderators from the horrific content that they must view. Cognizant wants only to make a profit. Facebook wants only to try and convince us that it is a caring platform.

A social media platform should not be outsourcing the moderation of its content to a third party service provider. They must take responsibility for the content that they share with the rest of the world. All of these social media platforms are immensely wealthy businesses.

They can afford to pay the price for their responsibility to keep their community safe from abuse.

To put this in to some sort of perspective, Facebook’s income for the first three months of 2021 was $26 billion. The profit from this income is more than enough to ensure the safety and wellbeing of its subscribers.

 

Facebook Moderation Neglect

 

I have mentioned Casey Newton already, he has a good insight on this topic. To fully appreciate what an horrific experience it is to moderate content on Facebook, please take a look at this second article from Casey, if you have the stomach to do so. It is very disturbing.

There is a tech industry dedicated to artificial intelligence (AI), and some very clever analytic technology that can help filter out the content that should never be shared. Cambridge Consultants produced a report for Ofcom on this very subject.

So how can Facebook, which has a net value of $280 billion, be incapable of trapping racist content when it is submitted? It may not be easy to do, but it is certainly achievable if the commitment is there.

It would be fair to say that social media in its current form is a threat to the safety and wellbeing of societies around the globe, and is supporting racism in all of its forms. Social media has a single objective – to make a profit from the information that their subscribers post.

The negative fallout for these social media companies is merely an inconvenience.

The UK government has vowed to press on with plans for "ground-breaking" new online harms legislation in 2021, making tech companies legally responsible for the online safety of their users and make them accountable to a regulator - Ofcom in the UK. This legislation covers any abusive content.

 

Online Racist Groups and Internet Openness

 

So we have seen that the misguided notion of white supremacy is supported by the social media service providers, including Facebook. These social media platforms encourage the fringe neo-Nazi organisations, neo-fascist organisations and the traditional racist individuals and white supremacists, by providing them with a ‘legitimate’ online account.

This makes social media an enabler for racism.

The Internet claims to be ‘open’, and the social media platforms base their principles on this ‘openness’. There is no accountability to the platforms or their subscribers. The responsibility to address any online abuse falls on the regional authorities (police).

Why do we accept that these hugely profitable social media organisations create unrest and conflict, with no accountablity for the online abuse on their platforms. Not to mention that we (the tax payer) have to pay the cost of dealing with the consequences of this online abuse?

Social media embodies and almost encourages a web (no pun intended) of intolerance and abuse that is fostered by many offensive online groups and individuals. This is as a direct result of the social media monolith's desire to make a profit from their subscribers by collecting as much personal data as they can. What the data contains is secondary to their profit agenda.

 

What Makes a Person Hate Like a Racist?

 

When considering the difference between the online groups that promote and encourage racism, it is quite subtle, but they are all essentially a collection of intolerant and uneducated people.

We must look more closely at the names for the racist groups and try to understand the mindset of the people who support their contentious philosophies. It is clear that the meaning behind these philosophies is based on a history that is not relevant today - an ideology that is trapped in the past.

So let’s start with ‘neo’, which comes from the Greek word ‘neos’ meaning new or young. Not surprisingly, a group with ‘neo’ before the name is a new group representing Naziism or fascism or whatever it is that they aspire to.

Naziism of course represents national socialism, and this is associated with the totalitarianism movement known as German Nationalsozialismus. This movement was led by Adolf Hitler. You must wonder who in their right mind would still follow the deranged ideology of Hitler.

Fascism is also a far-right national socialism movement, starting in Italy in the early 20th century and associated mostly with Benito Mussolini. The term fascist is derived from the Italian fascio, which means ‘a bundle of sticks’. This symbol suggests ‘strength through unity: a single rod is easily broken, while the bundle is difficult to break’.

Hitler and Mussolini are two people who inflicted unspeakable horror on the world. The racist movements today follow the very same ideology. .

The term ‘white supremacist’ identifies a white class that blindly sees a person of another nation or colour as inferior, because of the history that has sadly brought us to where we are today.

Elizabeth Martinez has written on many topics. I was consumed by her piece on what White Supremacy really is. From a US perspective it really does provide a succinct description.

Influential writers such as Ta-Nehisi Coates and Ibram X. Kendi, a Boston University professor, identify white supremacy as an “explanatory power that cuts through layers of euphemism to the core of American history and culture”. It speaks to the reality, they say, of a nation built on slavery.

The same can be applied to the UK’s colonial past.

What is most alarming is that there are so many of these dangerous and intolerant racist groups out there. They overlap somewhat across the different racist categories, but if you take the Wikipedia list of ‘white nationalist organisations’, there are a frightening number of them. This is something that we should be genuinely worried about.

Germany has at least 17 groups that identify as white nationalist organisations. Spain hosts a frightening 57 neo-Nazi groups.

 

How do we Stop the Racist Among us?

 

A study published in June last year called "The Psychology of American Racism" by Steven O. Roberts, a Stanford psychologist, and Michael T. Rizzo, a New York University postdoctoral fellow, addresses the path of an individual to racism. The American Psychological Association provides access to this study. Roberts and Rizzo conclude that there are the following 7 factors, (summarised):

• Categories – humans will group people into categories by race at a young age.
• Factions – categories lead to factions, and a strong loyalty to the group that you are in.
• Segregation – being segregated from another group hardens one’s opinions.
• Hierarchy – gives power to people and makes a group feel dominant.
• Power – allows a group, white people, to build a society that benefits only them.
• Media – sustains racism with a white majority cast, making white seem the dominant race.
• Passivism – the false belief that racism is not a problem, making people passive when discussing race,  Probably the most harmful factor of all.

Part of the problem in eradicating racism is getting people and organisations to take it seriously, and not to pay lip service to what is a serious and disturbing problem. Large corporations are content with a hearty nod to diversity, and a pat on the back for themselves. But many of these same organisations are being run by privileged white people. Sadly, that says it all. We must work together in not only eradicating racism but educating those who are trapped by their white history. And starting the education early, to stop the categories from forming in the first place.