In the spirit of the wet parrot squawking, the next few posts centre on race. When I look back to MLK and the Civil Rights Movement, Rock Against Racism and the hope and optimism of Two Tone, it’s hard to understand how far we’ve travelled in reverse. Smarter people than me may tell me I’m full of shite but I think we began to engage reverse gear with Reagan and Thatcher. They were the first politicians in the modern age to mobilize fear through intensely focused dishonesty and a ruthless disregard of empathy. The rise of untrammeled and conscienceless social media, the monetizing of cruelty, the castration of political and social humour and the looming inhumanity of AI and AGI have set human evolution back god knows how many decades. Right or wrong, here’s my two cents. It rambles hither and thither but race and society is a badly explored jungle. Getting lost here and there is inevitable:
Who the Hell am I to express any kind of opinion about Black and White and PC? Or is it Black and white and PC? Maybe one qualification or experience is that I grew up in Central Africa, in a very remote area in which I was the only white child. Hardly surprising that I thought I was an African. In fact, I didn’t have to think it. It was just a fact.
Until it wasn’t and it was made very clear that I could not be African and white.
I wrote about this is an autobiography/fiction crossover, Fishing For Crocodiles. I need to add that watching the post Mandela triumphant Springboks and now world champion Proteas, would anyone divide the players into black and white? They are patently and joyously South African. That’s a simple fact and it is not intended to make light of horrible status and economic differences which also exist there. South Africans are working on it, which is more than can be said for a lot of ‘white’ societies.
My adult life has been spent in the UK and the USA, with long periods of time in the Colombian melting pot. I’m depressed and saddened to see that when it comes to color blindness (to use an old-fashioned phrase that seems very appropriate today), we’re locked in reverse and stomping on the accelerator. Conscienceless profit driven social media have enabled bigots of all sorts to find each other and unleash their fear and hatred. They have been given permission to do so by hate- and fear-exploiting politicians, autocrats, influencers and tech bros. One might think that AI and AGI will reverse the process but since their development is largely in the hands of the same shameless zero empathy billionaires who control social media, and since the foundation of AI and AGI is the scraping of uncountable quantities of existing data and victor-written history, almost all of it seen through the white Western telescope, I don’t hold out much hope there.
Part two posts shortly