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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   24742 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 16, 2023

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Cocacolonisation at work?

Or, why what happens in America is (unhappily) a big deal globally

This is Black History Month. How do I know this, since I'm not an American and this is very much an American, indeed a North American, indeed a USA American invention?

Because the classical music station of our state broadcaster is currently celebrating it, for the second year in a row.

What does Black history have to do with Ireland, given our demographics (data from the 2016 census as the ethnicity report from the 2022 census isn't out yet)?

Ethnicity Ethnic composition “White Irish” remains by far the largest group, accounting for 3,854,226 (82.2%) usual residents. This was followed by “Any other White background” (9.5%), non-Chinese Asian (1.7%) and “other incl. mixed background” (1.5%). The 19,447 persons with Chinese ethnic/cultural background made up 0.4% of the usually resident population, while those of mixed backgrounds (70,603) constituted 1.5%.

Birthplace The vast majority (94.1%) of White Irish people were born in Ireland. Of the 5.9% (226,078) born elsewhere, 121,174 were born in England and Wales and 53,915 were born in Northern Ireland.

Over one in three of those with African ethnicity (38.6%) were born in Ireland (22,331 persons), along with 31.3% (2,126) of those with “other Black backgrounds”. Among those persons with Chinese ethnicity, over half (55.7%) were born in China, with 8.3% being born in Malaysia and 6.4% born in Hong Kong. Of those with “Any other Asian background”, 22.4% were born in India, followed by 16.1% in the Philippines and 13.7% in Pakistan.

But hold hard there, the Republic of Ireland is no longer nearly 100% milk-bottle white! We have Actual Real Black People living in our cities and towns now! So why shouldn't the state broadcaster recognise our diverse citizenry?

No problem there - except that the black people in Ireland are from Africa (mainly Nigeria), black British, Afro-Latinos, etc.

One in three of those with African ethnicity (38.6%) were born in Ireland (22,331 persons), as were 31.3 per cent (2,126) of those with other Black backgrounds.

The remaining Africans were born primarily in Nigeria which accounted for 27.2 per cent. Those of “Any other Black background” were born in a range of countries including Brazil (17.4%), England and Wales (7.1%) and Mauritius (3.2%).

But the musicians, singers, composers being celebrated for Black History Month are North American; today, for instance, the clip was about Robert McFerrin (father of Bobby).

I'm happy to learn about African-American musicians, but uhhhhh.... why are we learning about North American and not, say, Malian griots or Malagasy valiha players, since those are much more relevant to the black people living in Ireland? Part of it is probably that the snippets are shared from American sources, and that for mixed race Irish people they would more naturally look to Britain and the USA. So we get Aretha Franklin and Scott Joplin, not Rakotozafy.

But it's a great (or terrible) example of America being the cultural 800 lb gorilla. Our betters have decided that now we are a socially liberal multicultural modern economy country, we must celebrate diversity and inclusiveness. Which means the American version of same. Why aren't we getting Asian History Month, Polish History Month, etc. programmes? Well, I'd love to know the answer to that one myself.

Huge pet peeve of mine. I've written about it here, here and here.

RTÉ delenda est.

Our betters have decided that now we are a socially liberal multicultural modern economy country, we must celebrate diversity and inclusiveness. Which means the American version of same. Why aren't we getting Asian History Month, Polish History Month, etc. programmes? Well, I'd love to know the answer to that one myself.

Short answer: the Irish PMC consumes so much American news and entertainment media, and spends so much time on American social media, that they have come to believe that, on some level, they actually live in the US, and any issues which are assumed to be important in the US must be equally important in Ireland.

What's RTE?

Raidío Teilifís Éireann ("Radio Television Ireland"), the state broadcaster.

Black history month is not for black people, it's for white people. It's for whites to celebrate non-whiteness. What matters is how whites see non-whites, and they see them mostly through American media. By "whites', I don't mean people with light skin, but rather a certain class of people--mostly light-skinned--who are very profoundly conscious of "race". Black history month exists because white people demand it, but this weird fact is just more obvious in Ireland than in the US.

If we use SWPL as a working definition of who is white, then the biggest beneficiaries of Black History Month are black-skinned white people. I am half-serious about this.

I would be interested to know the actual reason for why things like this happen - like, for instance, is your local radio station copying content from some American station, and doesn't have the infrastructure to come up with their own content that month? Is the person in charge of programming at your local station just so culturally Americanized that this seems natural to them and they can't think of why it shouldn't be this way? Do they think that their audience is sufficiently Americanized that they'll be interested in this content?

Because yeah, this does seem pretty silly, but as an American I really have no idea how or why these things happen in other countries. I don't actually really want American culture to have this much influence around the world, including the cultural and political elements I like and agree with, a lot of it is so specific to our history or politics or other contingent factors that I wouldn't expect it to be useful elsewhere unchanged.

Whilst I profoundly hate that the West has taken to celebrating a racist holiday -- And specifically hate how easy it has been to convince people to do it -- it still seems a bit silly to criticize people for worshiping the holy ethnos wrong.

Aren't they more right to worship the mythical American negro instead of whatever sort of real people exist in the actual country they live in? After all this is a holy celebration of the former, not the latter. The sort of people who are in position to celebrate black history month do not give a slightest fuck about Africans qua Africans. Most likely they don't even know anything about them. But they do care a lot about having those fancy values from America about being antiracist and intersectional and inclusive and progressive.

This was never for or about anybody from or living in Ireland. You are specifically worshiping Americans and the glory of their current empire. Trying to spin it off to your local real people is a futile attempt at subversion. At best you're just signalling you're not on board with the program completely. Which is the most dangerous place to be, ideologically speaking.

Are the people erecting statues of George Floyd in Afghanistan actually more clear minded than people like you who notice that it doesn't make any sense? I'm not even sure at this point.

Aren't they more right to worship the mythical American negro instead of whatever sort of real people exist in the actual country they live in?

I would have said it's typical college student white liberal activism, though some of the people involved appear to be mixed race. But it makes no sense to celebrate black Americans, for 'now that we have our own black population', given that most of the black people here are now coming from Nigeria.

It makes no sense except as copying the Yanks, which makes the entire bit about "black people living in Ireland" nonsensical, as it's got nothing to do with the black people living here who come from Brazil and Nigeria, not the USA.

You are specifically worshiping Americans and the glory of their current empire.

Let's be blunt, that's it in a nutshell. But objecting to that would be racist, because we're celebrating Black people, so how dare you point out the contradictions?

I still find this criticism very weak. The few black people I've interacted with have all, without exception, been Americanized just as much as our white liberal activists are. Even more so, to some extent, since they are actively looking for black American culture. There is no hint or trace of them being from Ghana or Kenya, despite some of those guys having lived there for 10+ years before coming to my country.

Why wouldn't black history month in Ireland or wherever else celebrate the biggest cultural icons that actually resonate culturally with black immigrants? They don't consume media from Africa. They consume black media from America just like everyone else.

Beyond all of that the key line to point out here is that ingroups and outgroups always come first. Black people living among white people see themselves as different. The lives of blacks in Ireland have much more in common with blacks in America than blacks in Africa since blacks in Ireland are dealing with the same outgroup in similar conditions. That struggle resonates and relates both emotionally and physically.

If you in any way cared about privileging the position of blacks in any country you should immediately go to the winning formula. Which is the US one.

They consume black media from America just like everyone else.

A quibble, but many young black people in Ireland have great admiration for black British rappers like Stormzy or Dave. Ireland even has a thriving drill scene (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A92_(group)) which draws as much, if not more, influence from UK drill as from Chicago (which is even mentioned on the Wikipedia page for UK drill).

And where do black British rappers get their ideas from? The idea of 'British rap' is inane. The poetry and rhymes can be British. Or stuff like Cockney. 'British rap' is American. From the song structure, lyrics and style to everything else.

That seems awfully pedantic. Hip hop may have originated in the US but that doesn't mean it can't be reinterpreted in other cultural contexts to the point of becoming a distinct genre/cultural form.

No one would say that anime is an American artistic medium just because many of the earliest anime artists were inspired by Disney. No one would say the French nouvelle vague is really an Anglo-American movement because many of the directors were inspired by Hitchcock, Welles and Jerry Lewis. If you want to claim there's literally zero musical difference between Dizzee Rascal and Snoop Dogg, well, I don't know what to tell you.

No one would say that anime is an American artistic medium just because many of the earliest anime artists were inspired by Disney.

Thank god no one said that.

If you want to claim there's literally zero musical difference between Dizzee Rascal and Snoop Dogg, well, I don't know what to tell you.

No one is saying that and you are being a little shit throwing these irrelevant arguments at me. There are 'differences' between American rappers in the US that dwarf whatever differences there are between most UK and US rappers. That doesn't change the fact that 'British rap' is completely derivative of US rap. From being a thug to singing a sob song about being black and oppressed.

Maybe instead of bringing up a bunch of irrelevant things that would make your point if they were similar to what is actually being talked about you should look at the thing actually being talked about and recognize just how derivative black 'British rap' is from US rap.

you are being a little shit

You are banned. Based on past warnings and bannings, let's go with 14 days this time.

Fuck off and don't call me a little shit

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This is Black History Month

No it's not. Black history month in America is February. Look it up

Seemingly we adopted it in October. Why? I have no idea. Some bunch in Cork back in 2010 for some reason, seems to be as far as it goes:

According to Ireland’s Great Hunger Institute: “Black History Month Ireland was initiated in Cork in 2010. This location seems particularly appropriate as, in the nineteenth century, the city was a leading center of abolition, and the male and female anti-slavery societies welcomed a number of black abolitionists to lecture there, including Charles Lenox Remond and Frederick Douglass.

“Following on in this tradition, University College Cork recently joined the international Universities Studying Slavery consortium. Amongst its concerns, this project addresses historic and contemporary issues regarding race/racism.”

That makes even less sense for a Famine museum (or whatever it is) to go jumping on the bandwagon, but I think the clue there is UCC: college students copying American radicalism.

Why October instead of February? Not a clue.

Why October instead of February? Not a clue.

It's part of the same grift, just a step further along than the Americans. If they did black history month in February everyone would say 'haha barmy americanised amadans, they're just copying the yanks the eejits*!' But since they did it in October, they generate interest, people bitch about it on social media and argue about it, and say 'hey dummies, black history month is supposed to be in February!', legitimising black history month as a concept.

*to be sure, to be sure.

Also there is the long running joke that the American black history month is in February, the shortest month of the year. The Irish are giving it a month with the full 31.

Was this whole thing just a marketing campaign by the Cork Tourism Board that got out of hand?

That makes about as much sense as any other explanation I can think of.

Why does a country which doesn't have a significant black population and no colonial history whatsoever dedicate a month to celebrating the achievements of people who have more melanin than the average? What could be behind this particularly strange new custom?

Maybe if we unlock the key to this mystery, we can then explain why the Japanese love baseball. I always felt the two questions intimately related somehow.

But as you soundly point out Japanese teams don't play in MLB, so we'll probably never figure it out.

I always thought the Japanese love of baseball was a holdover from the post-war American occupation. But Ireland was never formally colonised or occupied by the US, so the influence of American culture on Irish society has always been faintly baffling to me in a way that the historical influence of British culture certainly isn't.

the influence of American culture on Irish society

My own idea is that it's our history of emigration. The "American parcels" from family members in the USA sending home second-hand clothes etc. for the family at home. The remittances. The 'returned Yank'. American politicians doing trips back to The Ould Sod (Biden was the most recent). The people going to the US for summer jobs (and maybe overstaying the visa). Britain is closer, sure, but there's not the same historical resentment of 'former colonial power' for the USA. All this on top of consuming exported American culture the same as the rest of the world.

Not to mention the J1 visas. I'd never thought of that angle.

But it's not just that - I've met my fair share of housebound autistic neurotic woke shut-ins who seem to have never ventured beyond the Pale and who speak in a manner indistinguishable from their housebound autistic etc. equivalents on the other side of the Atlantic.

I always thought the Japanese love of baseball was a holdover from the post-war American occupation.

People expect that, but it isn't actually, predates it by a century. And there were professional leagues in the 20s long before the second world war.

You had people saying "the game spread, like a fire in a dry field, in summer, all over the country, and some months afterwards, even in children in primary schools in the country far away from Tōkyō were to be seen playing with bats and balls." as far back as 1907

We had a big presence in Japan for a while after they opened up to us:

Horace Wilson, an American English teacher at the Kaisei Academy in Tokyo, first introduced baseball to Japan in 1872, and other American teachers and missionaries popularized the game throughout Japan in the 1870s and 1880s. Popularity among Japanese grew slowly and led to the establishment of Japan’s first organized baseball team, the Shimbashi Athletic Club, in 1878. The convincing victory of a team from Tokyo’s Ichikō High School in 1896 over a team of select foreigners from the Yokohama Country & Athletic Club drew wide coverage in the Japanese press and contributed greatly to the popularity of baseball as a school sport. The rapidly growing popularity of baseball led to the development of high school, college, and university teams throughout Japan in the early 1900s.

Ironically, while we already had pro teams, it sounds like the American org that became the MLB was only established in 1871, so our love of the sport really doesn't predate theirs by all that much.

Another interesting thing is that baseball was quite popular in England for a time before it faded away.

Rounders (the version of base ball that was codified in Ireland in 1884, so well after the Kinckerbockers codified American baseball and around the same time that the NL was formed) was one of the big team sports for schoolgirls in the UK (alongside netball and field hockey) and Ireland. It only went into decline in the 21st century once there was a serious attempt to push women's cricket.

TIL that the claim that Abner Doubleday invented baseball was a myth created to refute the idea that baseball was derived from rounders. Unsurprisingly, the truth is that both games derived from informal "base ball" games with uncodified rules that originated in England and were played across the English-speaking world - similarly to how Rugby, association football, and gridiron all developed independently from uncodified proto-football.

You're right, it's absolutely fascinating that baseball was ever popular anywhere.

Wow, I had no idea, that's really interesting!

Hey, Scott Joplin is great, argreed the rest of it is Americanised BS, but I guess colonies of the Empire must suffer the mandatory public venerations of IVPITER and JUNO...

JUNO

IVNO

My bad, don't know how I missed that.

IVPITER

IVPPITER

Romanes eunt domus!

People called 'Romanes', they go the house?

When I was looking at schools for my son in the UK, one of the easiest tests was looking at the Black History Month displays. If more than half the historical black people in the displays were American, I could cross the school off the list. (We cross-checked with other criteria - I was actually surprised just how perfect the negative correlation was between having posters of Rosa Parks and MLK and being an appropriate learning environment for a high-functioning autistic boy).

It is bananas when you consider who the actual black population of the UK and Ireland are. I'd really like to learn more about African music, and any continental African composers/musicians/singers in the Western classical tradition, but nope - you'll get Scott Joplin and like it!

And okay, Scott Joplin is fine, but for somebody from Nigeria, what has a black American to do with their history?

In all fairness, black American cultural exports are highly popular and influential in Africa.

And even more so in the Caribbean. Even in the 1980's, the dream of a sporty boy in the English-speaking Caribbean would have been to get picked for West Indies and beat England in a cricket Test match. Now he would want to play in the NBA, and unsurprisingly Windies suck at cricket.

When Black Panther came out in the UK, I found the racial politics of it to be cringe - Africa is a country and the global centre of Black culture is South Central LA. But based on who was whooping loudest in the cinema, black Caribbean Londoners loved it.

A healthy addition to their family's endowment.

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