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I really think you should be talking to Flyboy about the base philosophy here, Angel.
Ironically, my point was that Flyboy's suggestion that when people talk about Brixton in terms of being "rough" or "dangerous" or "dodgy", they may be falling into a trap he has observed elsewhere where these terms are used as a euphemism for "black", and conflates blackness with criminality, in a social construction that not only criminalises black people, but also assumes that blackness is by its nature criminal, causing all sorts of further problems (one of the results of which is probably, realistically, crime) had received a number of responses which essentially said, "well, I'm not racist", which, while good to know, was not exactly the point. Whether Flyboy's political correctness had in fact gone mad at that point rather fell by the wayside.
I picked up your comment that Brixton was a multi-cultural society, which listed many different nationalities living and working together, and then picked out "yardies" (who are, as you pointed out, primarily black. An interesting question would be whether they are also a *metaphor* for black, hence the "yardie-style cup of tea, anyone" syndrome) and Eastern Europeans as the most visible malefactors, because it was, as I said, a hostage to fortune.
btw, nnother interesting thing about Yardies - from Vincenzo Ruggeiro, A drug culture without a drug economy (1993):
A dealer suggested that even so-called "Yardies" (alleged professional criminals and illegal immigrants from Jamaica) would find it hard to put some kind of order into what seems a very low-profile and confused economy (Headley, 1992). He hypothesised:
The Yardies don't have a chance to develop their business because other gangs of white professional criminals would not allow them to. 1 also suspect that the white gangs themselves fuelled the panic about the Yardies, because they saw them as dangerous competitors. They must have informed the police, who in fact got information about the Yardies that they would never have picked up by themselves.
This informant added that traditional white groups already involved in the underground economy contributed to the creation of the Yardie phenomenon and the scare attached to it. He concluded that'this country is a bastion of racism', and the blacks are nor even given the opportunity to improve in alternative or illegal businesses.
This is no doubt out of date by now, but it presents some interesting avenues for consideration... |
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