BBC Black History Month

[stormymonday_2011]

Connoisseurs of the knots that the BBC ties itself in over all things to do with race and ethnicity will have been hugely enjoying the controversy that the end of the recent Black History month has generated

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3892820/BBC-branded-unbelievably-racist-black-people-chicken-video.html

Ironically few people bother to take the BBC to task for the equally appalling mauling historical evidence usually suffers in these programs to try to prove the long association of black people with Britain (as if it really matters in the modern world) or perhaps more pertinently the double standards they apply to judging historical processes where black as opposed to white people are involved.

A classic example is the role of 'Africans' in Roman Britain. In particular the recent plaque unveiling at Burgh fort in Cumbria where African soldiers serving in the Roman army were stationed in the Third Century BC gets some coverage

http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/proginfo/2016/45/black-british-forgotten-history

As one would expect the BBC ignore the fact that many of the troops from the  Roman provinces of North Africa almost certainly were not from sub Saharan Africa and that they only account for a tiny proportion of the Roman military funerary monuments dug up in Britain by archaelogists ( the evidence suggests that over time the majority of Roman soldiers serving in Britain were recruited in the Low Countries and from the Rhine valley). Academic issues aside, the BBC also manage to miss the underlying political reality revealed this evidence which is the role that African mercenaries played serving the Roman imperial war machine in the oppression of the native inhabitants of Britain in the past and the suppression of their culture.

The BBC Black History series is also strangely silent on the possible genocidal campaigns of the 'African ' Emperor Septimius Severus waged against British and Caledonian tribes between 208-210

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_invasion_of_Caledonia_208–210

At least BBC Scotland in 2012 pointed out the truth of what was going on

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-20579219

As does this article from Britsh Archaealogy

http://www.archaeologyuk.org/ba/ba6/BA6FEAT.HTML

Why is this something worth celebrating on TV let alone marking with a plaque ?

 

[spyguy]

Dare you to suggest a plaque commemorating the first mugging by a black man in London.

[Frank Hovis]

I worked with an otherwise clever woman who believed that a couple of those tombstones, from a transient merchant or soldier population in the later Roman Empire, demonstrated that Britain had had a sizeable black population for two thousand years.

I replied that it was more like from 1960.  

She was clever but was still swallowing the BBC propaganda whole.

[ChewingGrass]

History is written and indeed re-written and manipulated to prop up or support/substantiate the ideology of those who think they are currently in charge.

[ccc]

Just saw an advert - it's also their blackandbritish month too. Channel 4 are also doing a black cinema week. All this is getting a little nauseating.

One of the folk on the trailer for this blackandbritish week says "Everyone wants to be us".

I mean - wtf. Can you imagine if a white person said that to black people ?!

[Bloo Loo]

I thought the aim of the melting pot of multiculti was that your skin colour was irrelavent.

[ccc]

24 minutes ago, Bloo Loo said:

I thought the aim of the melting pot of multiculti was that your skin colour was irrelavent.

Clearly yes - if you are white 

[wherebee]

Said better than I ever could... 

 

[stormymonday_2011]

What irritates me is the suggestion that somehow this black history has been  suppressed. In fact the text books I read for my Roman Britain A level paper such as Ian Richmond's Penguin History mentioned the presence of troops and individuals from all parts of the Roman Empire being present in the UK.  Indeed, I think that far from being hidden black figures are probably overrepresented European art because they were seen either as exotic and unusual or as objects belonging to the patrons who commissioned the works. No one bothered to paint the the rest of the population outside the elites because native peasants were not deemed worthy of attention

With regard to the Roman period I just want to know why the presence of African troops in the Roman Army in Britain is any more significant than those from the Rhine valley or the Danube. We don't seem to be putting up plaques or celebrating the presence of the latter despite the fact they seem to have been much more common in Roman Britain.  Moreover, I don't see any reason to celebrate African troops propping up a Roman imperial system that plucked Caledonians by force from their native soil to be thrown to the beasts as entertainment for crowds in Libya and elsewhere in north Africa.

 

 

 

 

[juvenal]

I'd better not mention the million of more British and European men, women and children taken by Arab slavers and sold into slavery in North Africa. The so called 'Barbary Pirate' era. 

Time for some compensation, eh? 

[davidg]

I saw Mary Beard (I think that's what she's called) in Pompei on the Beeb a coupe of weeks back. She was having the "cast" of the remains of a volcano victim known as "The Moor" DNA tested to see if they could work out which bit of Africa he was from. The story being that the poor black guy had been left behind by his masters to suffer his fate of being buried alive after the Vesuvius eruption. The whole lefty clap trap story being it was the poor and infirm and slaves who were abandoned.

Mary was a bit pissed to find out the victim was as European as her. They then tested "The Cripple" - from the position of his body historians had decided he was a poor, lame beggar but various analysis showed he was probably young and fit and the "growth" on his leg was probably a bag that fell beside him when he was buried.

The Italian historians then explained to Beard that probably the majority of victims were local householders who stayed to protect their property, people who had invested a lot and had also lived through previous eruptions and that any slaves would have been sent away for their protection as they were valuable.

 

 

[davidg]

On and just to hit the Beeb with a huge cluestick, everyone in Europe was black when the first settlers walked out of Africa when the glaciers receded and as I told a black guy at work the other week, the future of Europe is white - it is too far north for people to maintain their black skin pigmentation for too many generations. His offspring will eventually be as white as white. He was ranting at that - told me he didn't believe evolution, it was white man's voodoo.

[Marshmellow]

13 minutes ago, davidg said:

On and just to hit the Beeb with a huge cluestick, everyone in Europe was black when the first settlers walked out of Africa when the glaciers receded and as I told a black guy at work the other week, the future of Europe is white - it is too far north for people to maintain their black skin pigmentation for too many generations. His offspring will eventually be as white as white. He was ranting at that - told me he didn't believe evolution, it was white man's voodoo.

The future of Europe is not white

Noone is dieing from a vitamin D deficiency

The future demographic will be based on birth rates only

Its a politically correct myth that the first humans were black and that everyone else 'evolved' from them. The first humans were covered completely with hair, and probably with 'white' skin.

[Frank Hovis]

10 minutes ago, Marshmellow said:

 

Its a politically correct myth that the first humans were black and that everyone else 'evolved' from them. The first humans were covered completely with hair, and probably with 'white' skin.

Or rather nobody actually knows; the evidence is vanishingly small.

The "out of Africa" story seems to be based upon preservation of evidence more than anything else.

The one recent change is that the old orthodoxy that Homo Sapiens supplanted Homo Neanderthalis in Europe has now gone as there was significant evidence of interbreeding.

[oracle]

8 hours ago, stormymonday_2011 said:

Connoisseurs of the knots that the BBC ties itself in over all things to do with race and ethnicity will have been hugely enjoying the controversy that the end of the recent Black History month

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3892820/BBC-branded-unbelievably-racist-black-people-chicken-video.html

Ironically few people bother to take the BBC to task for the equally appalling mauling historical evidence usually suffers in these programs to try to prove the long association of black people with Britain (as if it really matters in the modern world) or perhaps more pertinently the double standards they apply to judging historical processes where black as opposed to white people are involved.

A classic example is the role of 'Africans' in Roma Britain. In particular the recent plaque unveiling at Burgh fort in Cumbria where African soldiers serving in the Roman army were stationed in the Third Century BC gets some coverage

 

 

whoa.

so hold on a minute.

2000 years ago we were under occupation by them??

so invading africa and exploiting it for all the mineral resources back in the 1800's was sort of payback them innit?

 

we're still waiting for reparations from the french and germans for 1000 years of being under the thumbs of their respective monarchies!

[stormymonday_2011]

30 minutes ago, oracle said:

whoa.

so hold on a minute.

2000 years ago we were under occupation by them??

so invading africa and exploiting it for all the mineral resources back in the 1800's was sort of payback them innit?

 

we're still waiting for reparations from the french and germans for 1000 years of being under the thumbs of their respective monarchies!

That is not really the point I am making

It is just that BBC Black History Month is guilty of highlighting certain facts while ignoring other historical evidence that is inconvenient to its narrative. In fact it is behaving in just the same way as British imperial historians did in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Constructing a meaningful account of the role of blacks in British history prior to 1500 is largely myth making and wish fulfillment. Certainly, if you look at the evidence from Roman Britain contrary to the accounts you often see on the television it was not a particularly multicultural. In fact outside London and the south east or major military sites it was not even very Romanised. 

The British Museums A level notes offer a rather useful reality check on much of what is presented by the media

https://www.britishmuseum.org/PDF/british_museum_roman_britain.pdf

Most of the inhabitants of the Roman province of Britain still lived in pretty much the same way as their Iron Age predecessors. Romanisation was largely confined to the upper classes. The Roman army and administration in Britain particularly in the first two centuries of Roman rule contained people from a wide variety of ethnic backgrounds but there were relatively few civilian immigrants outside towns like London. By the late third and fourth centuries even the Roman military in Britain was largely recruited locally.

The truth is that if you want to explain the presence of Black people in Britain you need to look at the rise and fall British Empire not its Roman predecessor for your answers but then that is going to move the story much more recently which is not what BBC Black History Month wants. Instead it is trying to construct some sort of fantasy foundation story a bit like  the Brutus of Troy myth that found its way into many early British histories

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brutus_of_Troy

 

[richc]

I almost posted something on here a couple of weeks ago about Radio 4's Black History Month programmes: "Britain's Black Past".

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p04b8cms

Doesn't look too black to me.

Of the 13 programmes, 12 of the show's about Britain's Black Past are actually about American and South Africa topics (how many black Americans or South Africans or their descendants actually live in the UK?  Does it even break 1,000?).  The one British topic is Lenny Henry discussing British black actors.  Does the BBC think that all black people are interchangeable? 

The reason I went to that page was that during a discussion on Radio 4 they said that only one British citizen had ever written a slave memoir -- a woman who was a slave in America.  This is totally manufactured history.  There were several slave memoirs written by white British people who were held as slaves by muslim North Africans.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Pellow

[Errol]

I look forward to White History Month.

[spyguy]

3 hours ago, Marshmellow said:

The future of Europe is not white

Noone is dieing from a vitamin D deficiency

The future demographic will be based on birth rates only

Its a politically correct myth that the first humans were black and that everyone else 'evolved' from them. The first humans were covered completely with hair, and probably with 'white' skin.

You dont die.

Your bones get weak and theres problem with womens pelvis during birth - snaps like a twig.

North of Spain, the future is pastey white.

 

[SarahBell]

1 hour ago, richc said:

 Does the BBC think that all black people are interchangeable? 

Black means black.

[stormymonday_2011]

24 minutes ago, SarahBell said:

Black means black.

Does it though ?

The truth is Black history month is really about the history of blacks living in western societies and particularly about African Americans.

There is almost no interest in the complex ethnic, linguistic and religious history of Africa itself because that is actually quite a difficult subject.

 

[SarahBell]

Just now, stormymonday_2011 said:

Does it though ?

The truth is Black history month is really about the history of blacks living in western societies and particularly about African Americans.

There is actually almost no interest in the complex ethnic, linguistic and religious history of Africa itself because that is actually quite a difficult subject.

 

I was trying to make a pun on brexit meaning brexit.  But blackxit meaning blackxit looked a bit like blackzit and that's called a blackhead (unless they've changed the name of that too and call it an interactive spot now) 

Absolutely. Maybe they should divide up the year into continents and have continent awareness months?

Who will deny someone claiming to be black?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/11678667/Rachel-Dolezal-who-pretended-to-be-African-American-says-she-identifies-as-black.html

 

[stormymonday_2011]

1 hour ago, SarahBell said:

I was trying to make a pun on brexit meaning brexit.  But blackxit meaning blackxit looked a bit like blackzit and that's called a blackhead (unless they've changed the name of that too and call it an interactive spot now) 

Absolutely. Maybe they should divide up the year into continents and have continent awareness months?

Who will deny someone claiming to be black?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/11678667/Rachel-Dolezal-who-pretended-to-be-African-American-says-she-identifies-as-black.html

 

What these programs do not acknowledge is that there is a huge divide in the historical experience between blacks who ended up in the west because their ancestors were sold as slaves and those who have come here voluntarily. As a consequence there is no single black history anymore than there is a single white history.

BTW I was interested to note that in terms of territory Britain ruled more of Africa in 1959 than it did in 1807 when the slave trade was abolished in the British Empire

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Territorial_evolution_of_the_British_Empire#/media/File:British_Empire_evolution3.gif

In fact what is noticeable when you look at the historical process is how much the slave trade was tied up with the colonisation of the Americas. It don't think it is a coincidence that Britain outlawed the slave trade only a few decades after it lost its colonies in the American War of Independence. It had relatively little to do with the colonisation of the rest of Africa which mainly took place in the latter half of the nineteenth century. 

 

 

[MrPin]

11 hours ago, wherebee said:

Said better than I ever could... 

 

A very reasonable point of view. I am sure Mr Freeman is as peed off with PC stereotyping as I am.

Does the BBC remember it ran the Black and White Minstrel Show until 1978?

Now whilst I wouldn't call it a bad show, nice dancing and songs, etc, (My young sister loved it), I think it had had its day.

In retrospect it seem ludicrous.

I imagine a good 20% of my mates at school were black, and I really don't now what they thought of it.

I hope they mention the "Minstrel Show" in their Black History month, and I'd like to hear Lenny Henry comment on it, although I don't like his jokes.

 

 

[SNACR]

5 hours ago, MrPin said:

A very reasonable point of view. I am sure Mr Freeman is as peed off with PC stereotyping as I am.

Does the BBC remember it ran the Black and White Minstrel Show until 1978?

Now whilst I wouldn't call it a bad show, nice dancing and songs, etc, (My young sister loved it), I think it had had its day.

In retrospect it seem ludicrous.

I imagine a good 20% of my mates at school were black, and I really don't now what they thought of it.

I hope they mention the "Minstrel Show" in their Black History month, and I'd like to hear Lenny Henry comment on it, although I don't like his jokes.

 

 

The left liberal media establishment always basically stereotypes blacks and homosexuals as lefty liberals, like themselves, and it's always an hilarious car crash when that stereotyping is proved not 100% correct. In fact, I think there's several interviews with Morgan Freeman that go the same way, you can see the interviewer is on the brink of some sort of meltdown here

 

Here's an example of lefty liberals getting a punch in the gut from someone they assumed was a fellow traveller