the brilliantly leaping gazelle

In a recent post I suggested that an exculpatory narrative has become so embedded in our society that for some it is a default setting with which to interpret the world. The notion that the colour of ones skin is largely, if not exclusively, the determining factor as to whether or not one has an adverse experience in any given situation. 

I’m not denying that racism exists and can be expressed in many ways. I’m not a fool. But that this belief is not ‘just’ confined to some among certain groups that might have direct experience of racism and is arguably much more socially problematic as a result. I refer of course to our public bodies and institutions, media and other dissemblers of information that imagine 21st Century Britain to be a racist hellscape. 

This thinking inexorably creates in those who believe Britain is but a jackboot away from a nightmarish apartheid regime, a suspicion that there is always a hidden explanation behind the ‘official’ version of any event negatively impacting a non-white person, especially if that event involves violence. That the ‘official’ version exists only to deflect blame, to protect the guilty, obfuscate reality and to act, quite literally, as a white-wash. 

That the ‘truth’ is now nothing more than an increasingly contested fabrication to be disputed over by various interest groups. That whoever can shout  the loudest and for longest will have a greater influence in controlling the direction of such a contest.

The last few days have afforded me a particularly blatant example of how all of the previously mentioned factors – how the perpetuated narrative of a Britain being a racist hellscape feeds a distrust of the ‘official’ – can be weaponised by those who are only too keen to see Britain as a racist hellscape. 

I refer of course to the incident at Manchester Airport after video emerged that appeared to show an armed police officer stamping on a suspects head. Despite this video clip being less than thirty seconds long and therefore only showed what we were meant to see, nonetheless the ‘racist hellscape’ industry was soon working overtime.

The less credulous might have remembered the last time another short video clip purported to show another example of heavy handed policing. Remember the ‘openly jewish’ brouhaha of a few months ago? 

According to ‘The Guardian’, ‘Footage released by the Campaign Against Antisemitism last Friday (19th April) showed its chief executive, Gideon Falter, being told by a police officer that his “openly Jewish” appearance risked antagonising pro-Palestinian marchers. This precipitated claims Falter was prevented from going about his business simply because he was a Jewish man in the vicinity of a pro-Palestinian demonstration.’

The reaction was predictably calm and sober. ‘Fury as Met Police officer is filmed accusing Londoner of being ‘openly Jewish, was ‘The Daily Express’s’ take on it. ‘PM refuses to back Met chief over ‘appalling’ treatment of Jewish man’ was what ‘The Daily Telegraph’ added. . To add more confusion to an already confused situation, ‘The Independent’ reported that the’ Met Police apologise for earlier apology about ‘openly Jewish’ comment”

And so it was with tedious inevitability that a video clip which had been drastically shortened so that it to showed just what what it had been intended to show – that the police were anti-semitic – turned out be nothing of the case. A longer 13 minute of the same exchange appeared on ‘Sky News’ showing the officer patiently explaining that his concern was that he had seen Falter acting in a way that led him to believe quite reasonably that he was trying to provoke a confrontation with marchers.

But by then the shorter clip had done its job, had proved once again that the police were just fascists with a warrant card and that they couldn’t be trusted. And the same thing happened again with the Manchester Airport incident. A short video appearing to show one thing was subsequently contradicted by a longer video showing the incident in completely new light. 

The fact that both of the shorter video’s were so quickly seized upon and widely proclaimed to believed to be evidence of a police ‘ist’ by the press and social media is evidence of a society that can all too easily be manipulated. Of a society in which people are increasingly willing to interpret that society through the reductive prisms of identity, difference and otherness. But a society that is seemingly predisposed to disbelieving authority cannot be too surprised to learn that ’Police officers quitting in record numbers’ as ‘The Daily Telegraph’ reported three days ago.  

I’m no fool. Racism exists. Just as do unintended consequences.