Search Results for: nesrine

The dust briefly settled, only for it to be kicked up once again. Donald Trump’s flurry of executive orders – causing chaos on everything from foreign aid to world trade – is rapidly rocking and reshaping domestic and foreign policy. And the temptation is, yet again, to think of Donald Trump as an exogenous shock to US democracy. But look closer, and you will see not a rogue president taking a hammer to a hitherto stable political order, but a history of the erosion of norms that paved the way for him.

Political norms are the scaffolding of democracy, enforced not by the law, but by a sort of social consensus. They are not codified, strict mechanisms for regulating political facts – such as the separation of powers – but the agreement that such things should be respected and observed.

Obviously, only a conservative about those things that the progressives have managed to make seem normal but a conservative all the same. Fun, eh?

So here we are. Kemi Badenoch is the leader of the Conservative party. That’s another couple of firsts that the Tories have beaten Labour to. So far, the Conservatives have elected the first Asian leader and prime minister, and the first female Black leader of any major British political party.

But as these firsts started to come quicker and closer together – we now have a brown party leader handing over to a Black one – two things have happened. One, the politics of the party has become more unhinged and its electoral record has tanked. And two, the profile of these mould-breaking new leaders has become more extreme. The two are not unrelated to the success of ethnic minorities in the Tory party. I am sorry to point this out, because there is a sort of ritual now that must be observed when the Tories do well on diversity: you must not speak ill of a person of colour who has been elected to a position of leadership for the first time, and the significance of that moment, above all else, should be respected.

Wrong sort of Black, d’ye see?

‘Here, there is no future’: ethnic cleansing and fresh atrocities drive exodus of thousands from Darfur
Almost a year since conflict reignited in Sudan, its terrified people are crossing borders to Chad and beyond. An increasing number are trying to reach Europe as food supplies dwindle in the refugee camps and the eyes of the world look elsewhere

The Guardian has an Anglo Sudanese columnist, one big on telling us all about racism, migration, oppression and even slavery. Don’t we all look forward to her story of why her own Arab Sudanese are being so beastly to the non-Arab and blacker Sudanese?

Twice a week, a group of women gather together in a nondescript house in Ardamata, on the outskirts of Geneina in Sudan’s West Darfur state, to tell their stories to each other, cry, and drink coffee.

The women, who work or used to work in education, are all survivors of an ethnically targeted campaign of rape and sexual abuse carried out by fighters from Arab militias backed by the Rapid Support Forces paramilitary group on 5 November, after the fall of the army garrison in Ardamata.

Most of the rape campaign’s victims were from the Masalit community, a darker-skinned ethnic African tribe that made up a majority in Geneina before they were largely driven out during fighting that began in April last year.

Given that she is Arab Sudanese she will be exploring this bit of oppression from her own hinterland, yes? Rather than just the usual chuntering on about how Jews and Whitey can just be so awful, y’know?

Look at how the 1% are doing right now, and tell me the system isn’t rigged
Nesrine Malik

Ahem:

But a roaring 20s is actually happening, just not for most of us. According to Oxfam’s annual inequality report, released to coincide with the World Economic Forum meetings in Davos, the richest 1% of people have captured nearly twice as much new wealth as the rest of the world combined since the pandemic. Their fortune soared by $26tn, increasing their share of new wealth from 50% to two-thirds.

Who are the global 1% by wealth? To use a round number, anyone with $1 million in assets.

For no, the report is not about the 1% of each society. It’s about that global 1%.

So, the global 1% includes Polly Toynbee, Will Hutton and Katherine Viner. It includes every GP in Britain retiring early because they’ve hit the pension pot limit – which is currently a little over $1 million, that limit.

Actually, it includes pretty much anyone who owns a flat or house in SE, maybe even South, England mortgage free and also has a decent defined benefits pension. Be a lot of mature nurses and schoolteachers in that group then.

It’s housing equity plus pension pot plus personal belongings plus financial assets minus debts. $1 million. Which includes most British professionals and an awful lot of middle middle class types in their 50s and 60s.

It’ll also, soon enough, include Nesrine Malik. Buy a place in London, keep paying into the Guardian pension fund, write a couple of medium selling books and she’ll be there, right enough.

Woes, eh, we have met the global 1% and it is us.

Research conducted by the LSE last year looked into why almost half of people in middle-class professional jobs identified themselves as working class, even when a quarter of them had parents who had done similar jobs. The study identified a “grandparent effect”, by which people from privileged backgrounds over-emphasised the working-class credentials of extended family members, even though they have little impact on an individual’s life chances.

Right, so it’s the nuclear family that matters to education, wealth, how you get on then.

It took me a while living in this country to figure out what was going on. It wasn’t class oversharing, but class discounting – a way for people to establish that their status, whatever it was, was earned and not bequeathed. Britain is a country of enormous wealth, much of it inherited. In fact, inherited family wealth is fast becoming, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, the most important determinant of how well-off a person will be later in life. Britain is also a place where the alumni of a small number of expensive schools and exclusive universities hold a wildly disproportionate share of the nation’s power, wealth and top jobs.

But if it’s the nuclear family that matters, not the wider one, then that’s not a class is it?

Class means nepotism and all that – exactly the thing she’s just insisted doesn’t matter.

Sigh.

Oh, and if we do want to think about class perhaps we could consider Hilary Benn? Third generation Cabinet member, fifth generation MP. Now, that’s class effects for you….

A fresh wave of terror is being wrought in Darfur by the Janjawid militia which is capitalising on the withdrawal of peacekeepers after the revolution in Sudan.

Witnesses and victims report a revival of the group’s “slave hunts” in which girls and women have been rounded up, atrocities committed and communities looted by armed gangs on horseback, camels and in 4x4s mounted with guns.

The largest gathering of Arab militias in a decade was reported in Tawila, North Darfur. Analysts believe the Janjawid are taking a last chance to grab land, labourers and sex slaves while Sudan’s transitional government negotiates peace deals.

These are Arab Sudanese preying upon blacker Africans.

Ms. Malik is Arab Sudanese and takes great effort to write about how we British have hereditary guilt for our treatment, two centuries back, of blacker Africans.

I do so look forward to her article on this subject.

Another piece today about how terrible the UK is with its racism and treatment of blacks and all that.

This from:

Nesrine Malik is a British Sudanese columnist and features writer for The Guardian. She was born in Sudan and grew up in Kenya, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. She received her undergraduate education at the American University in Cairo and University of Khartoum, and her post graduate education at the University of London.

Now, I don’t know, obviously, but that would to me indicate Arab/Muslim background, not southern Sudanese black and Christian/animist.

And given what the Arab/Muslim Sudanese have been doing to the southern, black, Sudanese these recent decades it would rather grate if she were here lecturing us and not making the same sort of comments – perhaps a little stronger? – about
back home. Has anyone, for example, seen her decrying the taking of slaves in Darfur by the janjaweed?

Enquiring minds want to know…..

A Sudanese – Arab by background I think – telling us how appalling is American racism.

Sure, it exists and it ain’t good. But the source does grate.

Here is Nesrine:

The RSF originated in the west of the country, among the formalised remnants of Arab militia which in the early noughties, in partnership with the government, brutally suppressed rebellion by marginalised African tribes. The group is now repeating the ethnic warfare that the international criminal court determined constituted genocide at the time: targeting victims based on their ethnic profile, killing thousands from non-Arab communities, burning their infrastrucure, and pushing hundreds of thousands of survivors into Chad in order to claim their land and prevent their return.

She’s still not strong enough about this, is she? Reality being that the Arab north – or significcant elements of it at lesat – have been oppressing, murdering and enslaving the largely black south and west for generations.

But, of course, it’s the British and their racism which is to be pointed at.

‘If you are black, you are finished’: the ethnically targeted violence raging in Sudan
Refugees tell of attacks on darker-skinned people and non-Arab groups by Rapid Support Forces and its allies in Darfur

That column from Nesrine on the vile racism of her origin country. She’ll look up from her complaints about Britain and deal with matters closer in time and place.

Right? She will?

Yep, real soon now…..

The tragic parable of Rishi Sunak: driven by success at all costs, then undone by his own myth-making
Nesrine Malik
The PM’s unbending belief in Britain as a meritocracy blinded him to the realities of race, class – and his own flawed project

Which does mean that if Britain’s not a meritocrsacy then and therefore Nesrine’s there on the basis of race and class.

Nice to know……