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      • Getting on the Streets
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      • Kai Tak with Mrs Thatcher.
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    • Blue Lights, Sirens & Grenades
    • Drugs, Broken Kids & A Plane Crash
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    • Hong Kong's Best Insurance
    • Riding the Iron Horse
  • Crime in Hong Kong
    • Falling Crime Rates - Why?
    • Triads
  • History of Hong Kong Policing
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    • History 1945 to 1967
    • Anatomy of the 50 cent Riot - 1966
    • The Fall of a Commissioner.
    • History 1967 to 1980
    • Three Wise Men from the West
    • The Blue Berets.
    • The African Korps and other tribes.
    • Getting About - Transport.
    • A Pub in every station
    • Bullshit Bingo & Meetings
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Walter's Blog

"But how can you live and have no story to tell?" Fyodor Dostoevsky
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Reflections on recent events, plus the occasional fact free rant unfiltered by rational argument. 

"If you want to read a blog to get a sense of what is going on in Hong Kong these days or a blog that would tell you what life was like living in colonial Hong Kong, this blog, WALTER'S BLOG, fits the bill."  Hong Kong Blog Review

1/1/2019 1 Comment

You White People.

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I must start this book review with a confession. I’m a middle-aged white man. There, I’ve said it. And thus, according to this book that bestows guilt on me. Apparently, my modicum of success is down to ‘white-privilege.’ This social position stamps me at birth. 

For the author, Ms Eddo-Lodge, this is my ‘original sin’. To be born white and so pronounced with liability for all the bad stuff that’s happened to black folks down the ages. I was not aware of this status given my origins in a northern English working-class family. An outside toilet and a tin bath in front of the fire aren’t immediate signs of privilege.  I may be wrong.

Thus, I’m most grateful to this middle-class author for pointing out my entitled position. Ms Eddo-Lodge is a journalist who works for several national newspapers and writes well. She’s also an avowed feminist, who appears on TV shows and lectures around the country. 

Thanks to her, I can now atone for the sin of ‘white-privilege’ to accept responsibility for terrible things. Of course, I wasn’t alive or in any way controlling of those circumstances - but I should make amends.  

OK, I'm disingenuous. This book is a must read if you wish to grasp the emotions around race relations. The book is weighty on feelings, alternating between states of fury and despair. It’s UK centric but has echoes across all societies. Despite the title - paradoxically - the author is talking a lot to white people about race. She now has a substantial platform for her views. Along the way, the author makes assertions that are unsustainable or dishonest.

It’s important to assert that I don’t accept a few of the concepts used to anchor the arguments against nasty white folks. For example, the male patriarchy is a fallacy of the feminist movement. If the male patriarchy is so dominant why are the majority of street sleepers men? Men fill the prisons and are three times more likely to commit suicide. The data is clear. Men are having a rough time. 

The most bizarre position the book takes is around ‘white-privilege’. Again, it's not something that I can say I recognise. And by that admission, Ms Eddo-Lodge adjudges me a sinner. Because if I don’t see that, then I can’t reform. This castigation somewhat reminds me of the terrible dictates of certain religions. Born a miscreant, judged a wrong-doer, even as a babe. All zealots resort to such language and protestations.

The book narrative takes in much of black history in the UK. It's peppered with statements that if you switched the word ‘white’ for ‘black’, this could provoke outrage. In Ms Loyd’s world whites, especially men, are fair game for attack. Thus we get.

“ … glut of middle-aged white men currently clogging the upper echelons of most professions.” 

She allows herself this vitriol because whites have had it too good for too long and even poor whites haven’t suffered like her people. This is whiny, regressive stuff. 

It’s no surprise that in a majority white country middle-aged white men are in such a position. The bile here ignores the years of struggle and personal stories that these men underwent to get there. To batch them together in such a lazy manner and deduce their success is due to ‘whiteness’ is deceitful. There is much like this in the book.
​

Ms Eddo-Lodge is no fool. She doubles back on herself later in the book to shore up her defences. On page 115, about half-way through, “When I write about white people in this book, I don’t mean every individual white person. I mean whiteness as a political ideology.” 

Well, that's fine having spent the first half of the book slagging off all white people. I suspect the realisation dawned on her that she’s also at fault for making sweeping judgements. She then gets into class issues to acknowledge that discrimination flows across ethnic lines, class and culture. She admits black people can be racist against whites. She then doubles back again. We get a wild theory that the white community is conspiring against blacks -  “It like they [whites] all learn lines from the same score sheet.”

She documents instances of debating white people and faltering. Every one of her failures is a conspiracy. When she’s defeated it ‘the misappropriated use of freedom of speech’, while criticism of her is a ‘take-down’ - a word she uses a lot. Dare anyone to suggest her position is untenable. 

Overall, the presentation of 'black' and 'white' people as monolithic blocks is counter-productive. It goes against the stated aim of the book of overcoming race-based prejudice and inequality. The title alone indulges in the same labelling process. It assumes all white people are ‘not sufficiently woke’ or receptive to ideas about race relations.

Towards the end of the book, Ms Eddo-Lodge develops another tirade. This time the target is white-feminists accused of using the movement for their purposes. Ms Eddo-Lodge asserts these ‘white-women’ won’t accept ‘intersectionality’ in the feminist movement. In the process, they deny her a double-whammy of prejudice; being black and a woman. This somewhat esoteric argument wins her no favours.  To compare white-feminists to Enoch Powell, as she does, is nonsense.

Ms Eddo-Lodge talks of setting boundaries, because the debate has caused her emotional distress. We learn she suffers from depression. Well, here are my boundaries. Don’t come at me with ill-conceived labels based on your prejudices. You know nothing of my struggles, motivations nor sentiments. Thus to label me makes you as guilty as those who rant against black people.  

No doubt Ms Eddo-Lodge and her supporters will dismiss my criticisms. First, I’m a white man and second, I don’t get it since my 'white-privilege' makes me blind. Likewise, I can fire back. Ms Eddo-Lodge views everything through the double-distorting lens of racism and feminism. In her world every motive, every agenda, every move dictated by a prejudice. Thus the argument circles around. 

In the end, she offers no new solutions. Finally, she tells us some people opined the book didn't help the conversation around racism. I disagree with that sentiment. The book illustrates the irrationality of prejudice and the mirror reaction of hatred coming the other way.  

If nothing else, Ms Eddo-Lodge’s book sparks a discussion. That’s a good thing.
1 Comment
Gloria Bing
4/1/2019 06:48:15 pm

As Saint Jordan of Peterson once said “I don’t see white privilege; I see majority privilege”, i.e. if any identifiable group form a majority in a society it is their attitudes, customs and mores that will set the tone of the society. Ms Eddo-Lodge is fortunate that she lives in a society where the majority have, for some considerable time now, ascribed to such oppressive values as equality before the law, freedom of speech and expression, and a host of human rights not wholly accepted in many parts of this world even today. Sadly it is also a society which is becoming increasingly militant and authoritarian in its support of Ms Eddo-Lodge’s views.

I once tried reading this book, and frankly I couldn’t make it past the first arrogant, solipsistic chapter littered, as you rightly point out Walter, with all the usual non sequiturs of the progressive catechism. I quickly came to the conclusion that here was a woman who, because of the colour of her skin and the content of her ideology, is given access to channels of communication the vast majority cannot match, whilst unashamedly engaging in an extended blood libel against her fellow citizens. Privilege indeed.

I would be interested to know what the political ideology of “whiteness” looks like. I suppose it must be contained in a book with a title like ‘Das Whiteness’ by Carl Marxwhite or ‘Mein Whiteness’ by Adolf Whiteler. Has anyone got a copy? I suspect that what Ms Eddo-Lodge really means is that in a country which is majority caucasian, and has been since the last Ice Age, there are just far too many white people going about their normal business, having normal opinions, meeting together and making normal decisions, and they are not paying sufficient attention to Ms Eddo-Lodge and her personal issues.

In truth though I understand the root of Ms Eddo-Lodge’s mindset. Like many others who follow Walter I have lived as an ethnic minority in somebody else’s society for 30 years. As a European in an overwhelmingly Chinese city, and tied through marriage to a Chinese family, I came to the realisation many years ago that no matter how open and welcoming that society is, no matter how much the people I am with go out of their way to make me feel comfortable and at ease (as they almost invariably do) there is that awareness lurking at the back of my mind that I am not wholly “one of them”, not in with the in-crowd, not part of the Big Group. And I never will be because I never embibed the culture and what it means to be part of that extended in-group with my mother’s milk.

The effect on me is very mild - negligible, in fact - and fleeting, as I suspect it is on most people who value rubbing along with others and respecting the majority.

It seems that the one who is identifiably ‘different’ (for whatever reason) in any society has two choices: say to himself “Well, that’s the just the way it is”, choose to see all the positives and make the best of it; or, on the other hand, feel resentful that “they” are not doing enough to reduce the anxiety he feels at not being an insider. If he chooses the latter, then not only does he stoke up his own psychological dissonance but he also turns the individuals who make up the in-group into his enemies and oppressors...exactly as Ms Eddo-Lodge has done. She may dress it up in the cant of progressivism but what she is actually saying is “You should change everything to make me feel more comfortable.” But she was born in 1989 so is an archetypal millennial...privileged, entitled...

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    Walter De Havilland was one of the last of the colonial coppers. He served 35 years in the Royal Hong Kong Police and Hong Kong Police Force. He's long retired. 

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