Gary Younge || Contextualizing BLM

Take time to listen to this short lecture by @garyyounge. He does a strong job of contextualizing the current moment. A primer on this week’s news for those who need. There are triggering images, so take care of yourself as needed. Overall, a strong watch. pic.twitter.com/4g0Dpy8te0

— Ava DuVernay (@ava) August 27, 2020

So, poorer Brexiters voted to be worse off? There’s nothing wrong in that || Gary Younge

Many working-class leavers were not motivated by self-interest, but by values. Well-off liberals who back tax rises should understand that

By Gary Younge for The Guardian

In Uncle Tom’s Cabin, there is a moment when Augustine St Clare, who owns Tom, suggests that he is better off as a slave than he would be as a free man. “No,” insists Tom. “Why Tom?” asks St Clare. “You couldn’t possibly have earned, by your work, such clothes and such living as I have given you.” “Know’s all that Mas’r,” says Tom. “But I’d rather have poor clothes, poor house, poor everything and have ’em mine, than have the best, and have ’em any man else’s.”

… infantilising people in the name of their own advancement is a bad thing – it is counterproductive. When you start from the premise that those who disagree with you are acting illogically or are too unsophisticated to understand their own interests, no meaningful political engagement is possible …

… It is mythical about the past: those who evoke the wars conveniently forget that they could not have been won without allies. Those who evoke the empire conveniently forget that it could not have been maintained without brutality (as the current furore over Winston Churchill’s legacy illustrates). It is obtuse about the present: countries evolve, borders shift, identities develop. Our royal family is German; our favourite food is Indian; …

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The mythification of the past.
I remember this old crass crank who obliquely took a jab at me, after telling that he will be going to Iceland on holiday, that Iceland was also colonized, all this making an indirect reference to a post on my blog (I never told him I have a blog). I ignored him, if he is not a coward he would have at least debated me.

My year of reading African women || Gary Younge | The Guardian

My year of reading African women, by Gary Younge

Shamed by a gap in his reading, the Guardian writer vowed to read only fiction by African women in 2018. After 19 novels spanning Nigeria to Ethiopia, he shares what he learned

At last year’s Guardian Opinion Christmas party – modest affairs at which those who want to dance are outnumbered by those who want to talk by at least five to one – I met Chibundu Onuzo, a Nigerian author.“We share a publisher,” she told me.“I’m sorry,” I told her. “I haven’t read your book.”Chibundu waved away my apology with generous indifference. We carried on chatting and were among the pioneers on the dancefloor.

Chibundu did not appear bothered by my ignorance of her work, but I was. I can’t say exactly why. There are lots of books I haven’t read. But in some small way that gnawed at me in the days ahead, I wondered not only why I hadn’t read her but why she wasn’t on my radar.

Feeling it was time to fix my radar, I decided, when it came to fiction, to read only African women for a year. The motivation was not virtue but curiosity. I wondered what I had been missing out on. …

The US Has Little Credibility Left: Syria Won't Change That || Gary Younge

Gary Younge:

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Obama would enhance US credibility not by drawing lines for others to adhere to, but by drawing a line under the past and championing a foreign policy that bolstered international law and acted with the rest of the world rather than ignoring it. "The noble art of losing face," Hans Blix told me shortly after the Iraq war started, "will one day save the human race."