(Untitled)

[me_ves_y_sufres]

This is intended as a question asked totally out of interest, and with no judgement implied, whatever your answers.

It goes out to all the people on my flist who identify as being interested, invested, involved or activists in one or more of the following areas:

• Tackling homophobia and heterocentrism. LGBT or queer rights, identity, representation

Comments

Re: Ramble...

[steerpikelet]

Hm. It's a good point and an interesting question. I do think imperialism is a different related issue, partly because it was not directly or only about race, partly because that kind of economic exploitation - the exploitation of low-paid workers overseas - is still very much current, despite the nominal disintegration of the British Empire.

OTOH, immigration is nothing if not keyed into race - just look at how the 'balanced migration' government splinter group draws up different charts for immigrants 'from america and europe' and 'from outside america and europe'. Just because we didn't directly employ vast quantities of non-white slaves to work British fields and mines doesn't mean our history of cultural abuse is any less - on the other hand, the way our culture envisions work, and the working class, is necessarily hugely different. And I do think that one big difference is that for Britain's working class, immigration is a far more pressing issue than skin colour alone, whereas (eg.) the US has a fairly good record on being positive about immigrants as long as those immigrants are *legal*. Illegal immigrants it's just as shitty about.

Re: Ramble...

[steerpikelet]

Some part of my ancestry compels me to say 'also, the Irish!' at this point. For so many centuries, the Irish were our perennial immigrant worker class. Much of the current feelings of the non-immigrant working class towards Muslim immigrants are precisely analagous to the way people treated Irish immigrants a generation ago. Down to the 'you're all terrorists' suspicion.

Re: Ramble...

[necaris]

The US is also worse on the definitions of legality and illegality, because those definitions get very fluid if you're not white (and most especially if you're Hispanic in any way).