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Over the past week or so, the Thoughts From the Criminology Team has taken part in the #amplifymelanatedvoices initiative started by @blackandembodied and @jessicawilson.msrd over on Instagram. During that time we have re-shared entries from our regular bloggers @treventoursu and @drkukustr8talk as well as entries from our graduates @franbitalo, @wadzanain7, @sineqd, @sallekmusa, @tgomesx, @jazzie9, @chris13418861 and @ifedamilola. In addition, we have new entries from @treventoursu, @drkukustr8talk and @svr2727. Each of these entries has offered a different perspective and each has provided the starting point for further dialogue.
We recognise that taking part in the #amplifymelanatedvoices is a tiny gesture, and that everyone can and should do better in the fight against white supremacy, racist ideology and individual and institutional violences.
Although this particular initiative has come to an end, the Thoughts from the Criminology Team retains its ethos, which is ‘to provide an inclusive space to explore a diversity of subjects, from a diverse range of standpoints’. We hope all of our bloggers continue to write for us for many years, but there is plenty of room for new voices.
By now, we’ve all seen all 8 minutes and 46 seconds of
A Minneapolis officer using his full-body weight
To press his knee on a handcuffed Black man against the ground.
Several cops stood around, rather calmly shooing bystanders away.
With the cop’s knee on his neck, we watch a grown man cry out for his momma,
Which some have said showed the man was already crossing over to the other side to see her.
The killer cop, the one pressing his knee on Floyd’s neck, was training the other cops.
These junior officers were just days on the job, so
It’s safe to assume the head officers was showing off his skills:
He may have thought that he was showing the rookies how to put down a n*gger!
He actually showed them how to perform a. Modern day lynching.
The Minneapolis mayor didn’t bother watching the video until Mr. Floyd died.
Da mayor’d been told about the incident while the man lay dying in the hospital and
The murderous cops roamed free.
This is what’s carefully declared in a public radio interview.
Da mayor can’t be fake in the face of this very disarming journalist, who is also white.
There is absolutely no anger in the journalist’s voice.
Da mayor was animate that this was a pattern, when
The journalist disarmingly confronted him with statements by local Black leaders who’ve told Da mayor the city would burn if the cops’ behavior continued unabated.
Oh, now Da mayor wants to separate himself from 45!
45 is calling for complete suppression,
Even bullying governors and mayors into said suppression.
Folks in his flock are breaking ranks, denouncing his deployment of the military against Americans.
Social media rated 45’s words incendiary.
Facebook employees even staged a walk-out!
George Wallace couldn’t tweet in those days!
Yet, then and now, all your silence is complicity.
Silence = Death!
The journalist presses on: You were warned.
Da mayor conceded: He’d ignored explicit, non-violent warnings, neglected evident signs.
Chronic poverty kills.
Police murders maim families.
Racist stereotypes murder souls, and
Breaks the social contract.
The journalist asks Da mayor if he felt any responsibility for the riots.
Again, there is absolutely no emotion at all in the journalist’s voice.
He asks flatly, fumbling through his words, just as he always does.
He simply applies the critical questions to this issue, just as he has countless other topics.
This has gone on for years.
They’ve covered this issue before, but not like this.
Are they only covering it now because of the horrific video of Mr. Floyd’s murder?
Now, they want to uncover the truth that’s been staring them in the face all these years.
We watched Rodney King get beat, and
We waited a year for the trial on mediocre charges, and
We rioted when the officers who beat him were set as free as Emmet Till’s killers!
NOW, now, now THEY wanna stop the violence!
Where were you back when?
Even this liberal journalist can’t claim to have raised the alarm before today.
These murders eerily echo one another.
Amadou Diallo was at his front door.
There are no videos of the 1999 incident.
No 9-11 calls to replay.
Just giant headlines: 41 shots!
We DO even have surveillance footage of the 2014 murder of 12-year-old Tamir Rice,
Shot playing in a park.
The surveillance video is lengthy, and
From the video we can see from his movement and stature.
He’s playing with what we now know was a toy gun, and
On the 9-11 call, we hear the caller calmly explain:
Probably a juvenile, you know.
“The guy keeps pulling it out of his pants…is probably fake, but you know what? It’s scaring the sh*t outta me”
“He’s sitting on a swing right now, but he’s pulling it in and out of his pants and pointing it at people… He’s probably a juvenile, you know?”
This (white) man can’t even talk to a (Black) kid.
The dispatcher fails to announce ANY of these details, save for:
‘He’s in the park by the youth center…’
Apparently, that was all they needed to hear: Black guy, gun.
Recall Tamir was twelve, Black, brandishing a toy gun in the kids’ area of a city park.
We see cops rush up on him in the park and shoot Tamir dead within seconds.
In dispatch recording after the incident, when officers are standing just feet away from Tamir’s body, they say: “Shots fired. Male down. Black Male. Probably 20.”
Later officers claimed to have commanded Tamir to show his hands in those split seconds.
Two officers responding to a routine, white citizen’s call about a potential Black threat.
But we know it’s BEEN going on since emancipation.
‘Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck.’
Originally posted on Thoughts from the criminology team:
Damilola is a 2017 graduate having read BA Criminology with Sociology. Her blog entry reflects on the way in which personal experience can inform and be informed by research. Her dissertation is entitled Life in the UK: The individual narratives of Nigerians living in the United Kingdom and…
Originally posted on Thoughts from the criminology team:
Chris is a BA Criminology graduate of 2017 and was motivated to write this blog through the experience of his own dissertation. His dissertation was on the Experience of Hate crime: Exploring professional perspectives of racist hate crime against ethnic minority. The issue of racially motivated violence…
Whilst cancel culture has been badged on celebrities that have said something offensive or inflammatory in the past, often when they were young and stupid, seldom have I seen cancel culture done on works of literature. Essentially, cancel culture is a medium of boycotting someone (now something) we disagree with for a past misdemanour or an opinion we don’t like. Yet, this month was the first time I had seen “cancelling” enacted on a work of literature. This reiterates a time when Britain actually banned books. One such example being when Penguin were taken to court over D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, accused for being too sexual.
Moreover, books like To Kill a Mockingbird being taken off US school curricula, ironically the go-to text of the 20th century about racism is by a White person (but that’s another conversation). The fact of the matter is I thought book boycotts were something that didn’t happen in this country, well not in my lifetime anyway, nor my parents’ life time. That when we disagreed with something we dismantled it point by point. Another example would be David Irving who has also published books and in 1996 took historian Deborah Lipstadt to court for calling some of his statements and writings, “holocaust denial”, in her book Denying the Holocaust (1993).
But it was on a sunny May day when I happened to get a text from Criminology’s @paulaabowles with a link to a Huffington Post article calling for Amazon to pull a text from circulation. The text on display, was a collectable edition of And Then There Were None. The title on display is the original, then Ten Little Niggers. Over time it’s had many titles and is now called And Then There Were None. Obviously, the original title is overtly racist and its imagery plays up stereotypes of Black people, very much in the style of blackface minstrelsy, something that was on BBC TV until 1978!
However, studying Creative Writing as a Black student (of which many of my modules were English Literature), I think the reaction to this article is emotional; impulsive; and rather quite unnecessary. On my degree, there were books that I would call racist texts, including Dracula (Stoker), The Island of Doctor Moreau (Wells) and Heart of Darkness (Conrad). The use of the slur on this book has sparked outrage amongst Black writers and activists. But what they are doing is putting modern values onto a text that was published in a time when the British Empire still held weight.
Before Indian partition; before independence movements took hold; before the Suez Crisis, and my family’s countries’ calls for independence – not until 1966 (Jamaica) and 1974 (Grenada), both within living memory for many people.
I suppose it is rather ironic that some of my favourite books ever written could in fact be labelled racist. As a boy, I read Enid Blyton. Now, I critique stories such as Noddy for its racist leanings. We all read Dr. Seuss as children, an antisemite. Do we have to cancel him as well? I love Cat in the Hat. Tolkien’s depictions of the orcish peoples in Middle Earth can be interpreted as a disdain for racial mixing. The Carlomens in C. S Lewis’ The Horse and His Boy (my favourite Narnia book) are most definitely based on colonial stereotypes of Arabs, and their interactions with King Lune and his Archenlanders are very much reminiscent of “Anglo-Europe and The Rest.”
Whilst I get the idea to take this book off Amazon, does that mean there is going to be a movement to go after authors who could by today’s standards be deemed racist? Not even alive to defend themselves. I question, that if we cancel these kinds of books, does this allow people to forget? The N-Word is not nice but people are not reading this academically, in the context that it comes from a bygone era. As early as the start of the Second World War when colonial sentiment was still valued around the world.
If we “cancel” it, is this simply picking and choosing what is / isn’t offensive enough? Despite their sentiments, I still read Tolkien and C. S. Lewis. In cancelling this collectors item Ten Little Niggers, we are picking and choosing what is offensive. This is everything that’s wrong with woke culture. It works until it doesn’t. I find it short-sighted that supposedly “woke” activists want to get rid of a text that could well be studied under decolonisation movements, not cancelled in hindsight of modern values.
This is one of the moments I find cancel culture and workness so toxic; I’m certainly one of those people that would read these sorts of books so I can learn about how different parts of that society thought about other races
This campaign against Amazon is impulsive, in an age where many are quick to anger without forethought, particularly in countries like Britain and the US which have selective memories about their history. We criticise the Nazis for book burnings and their propaganda machine, but have we looked outside recently? The moment we censor literature, is the moment we censor learning, particularly as books like this are historical fingerprints to an era where racial thinking ran brigand. A racial thinking born in colonial times, lending its ear to many issues we see today, including White Supremacy, ethnicity award gaps, stop and search and White Privilege.
Are we going to stop people reading The Jungle Book, or stop kids watching pretty much every Disney animated film made between 1939 and 2000? I could make a chunky list of problematic books and films but they allow us a doorway into history. History is facts (sort of) and facts don’t care about your feelings. Dickens wrote about what he saw (more social history than fiction). Books allow us to see how different peoples may have thought and felt about other peoples of the time. That there is a reason why Black soldiers were excluded from the victory parades in 1918 (for example).
The cancelling is a metaphor for a country that is denial of its past and present. As someone who grew up going to school being called nigger, as someone who was monkeychanted, I do not agree with cancelling this book. It allows people to forget how the British Empire won the war on race, sorely evident in the texts on university degrees. I feel these antiracism activists have acted brashly (this time) with no forethought about context, study, or history, since I believe if the British Empire was taught (especially racial thinking), we would not even be having this conversatioin.
But to be frank, when I see antiracism activists accepting MBEs and condeming stuff like this (trying to be “woke”), I think to myself are they this ignorant or simply, do they not care? And more importantly, how dare they speak for me
Northampton University…. In 2011, I first moved up to Northampton to study criminology and sociology. At the time I had never moved away from home before and it was a somewhat daunting experience. However, now looking back at this, it was one of the best decisions I have made.
Before I set out to go to university I had always said to my family I wanted to join the police force. I chose to study criminology as I believed this was going to help me with joining the police and also provide me with an insight as to what I was potentially going to be letting myself in for.
From studying criminology for three years I learnt about various ideas surrounding police and their interactions with communities, portrayal within the media and about the history of the police and how it has developed into the service we have today.
I…
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After I graduated I had a bit of tunnel vision of what I wanted to do. I wanted to either work with young offenders or work with restorative justice. Many opportunities actually came up for me to do several different things, but nothing really worked out and nothing felt right.
I carried on working in retail till February 2018; I was honestly starting to lose hope that I would find something that I would enjoy. I started working for a security company that does many things; from employment vetting to gaining intelligence of various kinds. Although the role is not focused on the criminality side entirely, the theme is very much apparent. I find myself thinking about all the different concepts of criminology and how it ties in to what I am doing.
A big part of my role is intelligence and at first, I didn’t think I would enjoy…
View original post 288 more words
My paper, ‘beyond institutional
autonomy: a quadrumvirate interaction theory of civil-military relations’ was
accepted for presentation at the 2019 Biennial International Conference of the Inter-University
Seminar on Armed Forces and Society scheduled for November 8-10, 2019 at the
Hyatt Regency, Reston, Virginia. However, I am unable to attend the conference
because I was denied visa at the US Embassy in Abuja, Nigeria. In this entry, I
wish to highlight and add my voice to the concerns academics and non-academics,
especially those from the ‘Global South’ face in securing visas to enable them
attend conferences in the supposed ‘developed world.’ Hence, this entry is a
personal reflection on the US visa regime in Nigeria, and its nexus with criminology.
Individual visas are often issued
based on the merit of an application and the adequacy of the supporting
documents submitted by applicants who are also required to pay certain fees and
charges…
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When we think about race: the narratives, stories and experiences of people of colour are raised. And to be “of colour,” is essentially tied to anything from Black to Polynesian, Middle Eastern and Asian, including mixed-race. The perception of whiteness is the absence of blackness / brownness, that makes people that look like me up to nine times more likely to be stop and searched by police in Northamptonshire than a White person. But white is a colour too, is it not? When it comes to talks about “whiteness,” not a peep is to be heard from the people it impacts most, White European-looking people. Shocked? Not really! It can’t just be up to people of colour to talk to about whiteness. White people need to be talking about whiteness!
In the conversations about unconscious bias, as far as race…
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From a young age the Golden Rule is instilled in us, treat others the way you want to be treated. We follow the rule staying home to protect the NHS in these difficult times, we are all humans we want to be safe; we want to protect our loved ones and cover them with a blanket of safety. We supported captain Tom on his quest to raise money for the NHS, we have complimented his humanitarianism.
It has been a hard time for us all. But in a time of uncertainty we have come together as a community to support each other. We have all had a sense of worry, if we leave the house to buy the necessities, the fear of the invisible killer plagues us. We have all helped play the part in flattening the curve. We have felt sadness for the families that have become victims to this killer. But we have not lost hope, we are still hoping for a vaccination to be ready to protect us. Its great that we have the NHS to help us if we are attacked by this enemy. The police were given extra powers to prevent us from breaking the rules and whatever the opinion is of the police we have to acknowledge that these powers that they have been given symbolises law and order and the order being the contribution to stopping the spread of this horrific virus which in essence will help to protect us.
I am contemplating on this because although there have been bumps in the road throughout this lockdown, we all have the same goal……… to live. If we didn’t want to live we would leave our houses unmasked, ignoring all government advice. If we didn’t want to protect our loved ones and our community we wouldn’t support the NHS.
I am going into deep thought……….
Imagine a world where you are not protected, imagine being at war every time you leave your house, imagine a world where you are not safe in your house……..
Picture this an intruder walks into your house, is outraged by the colour of your skin BANG she shoots you in cold blood. The offender uses the excuse she thought she was being robbed, she thought you were the intruder. However, she was the one who let herself into your house. The media and the police sympathise with this woman, as she is a police officer. In their eyes she does not look dangerous, the victim of this crime is seen as a danger to society based only on the colour of his skin. She is not arrested straight away because she has a thing that is more powerful than anything in America, she has White privilege. Imagine a loved one is killed in this way and during the sentencing of the murderer, the judge hugs the offender as if she has done nothing wrong and disregards the feelings of your loved ones. How would you feel?
This did not happen during the civil rights movement, this happened in 2019.
Imagine going for a for some much needed exercise, you are jogging, listening to your music, taking in the fresh air. You are thinking about getting your physique ready for the summer. Two men hunt you down like cattle where they shoot you in broad daylight and they are not arrested straight away. instead your innocence is debated because you are a BLACK man that has left your neighbourhood and entered theirs…..
Imagine it is not a secret that your race can and is used as a weapon against you.
I have seen people gossip about the activities of others during lockdown. I have witnessed the police being called on youths that are skateboarding in a skate park. I have seen the outrage of the people who have been reported by the police for leaving their houses and seemingly not following the rules. Imagine going to the park, having a picnic, going for a walk and being told by a stranger they are going to call the police on you and they can use your race as a weapon, they know by telling the police the colour of your skin it will have an automatic punishment. After all, All Black people are criminals right?
Imagine the police are called on your father as he is suspected of committing a non-violent crime. He is handcuffed and pinned to the floor by a police officer. The officer is leaning on your father’s neck. He can’t breathe, he is begging for mercy, he is calling out for your grandmother, his mother…… he’s an EX con, a criminal, he took drugs, he robbed somebody, he went to prison. But I ask this should he have been executed?
Imagine the people who can see this crime being committed, imagine your 17 year old sister, daughter, friend recorded the execution of George Floyd and she could only record the crime because she fears that the other officers will turn their guns on her if she speaks out.…..After all we must protect the police from these ANGRY BLACK WOMEN they are a big problem with society……
Imagine being BLACK in America.
In recent months I have struggled to go on Facebook. The reason why is because, while many people enjoy the platform discussing current issues and sharing pictures, more and more I have seen subtle tokens of racism becoming more and more prevalent. I refuse to argue with morons who seemed to have lost all sense of humanity. It is gut wrenching when you have Facebook friends who think it’s acceptable to be outright racist. I understand we do not all hold the same values, I understand we do not all advocate for the the hurt and pain of others. But I do not stand with people who do not want to try and understand that their actions destroy communities. No, I’m not talking about the ones who use the sentiment #All Lives Matter, I agree all lives do matter. But there is a deeper message to the Black Lives Matter movement. And so many people of different colours have been understanding of this notion and want to get an understanding of the disproportionate treatment of the Black community and for that I appreciate your support.
I’m talking about the ones that use George Floyd’s reputation to try and denounce the feelings of the Black community. I’m talking about the ones who act surprised that police brutality against the BLACK community is not a new phenomena. I’m talking about the ones who have a problem with #Blackout Tuesday, #Black Lives Matter and the ones who have jumped on the band wagon to make their businesses and institutions look like they are progressive when they have done nothing but use oppressive practices keep BLACK people in their place. I SEE YOU!
It is very hard to understand how people have been so sheltered by this phenomena, even though social media has been covered with news footage of the Breonna Taylor’, Oscar Grant’, Ahmaud Arbery’, Jordan Davis’ the Tamir Rice’ murder I could go on……..
So, I’m going to round this post off by saying a few small words. For the ones who I have a problem with. I am not your bredrin, don’t use me as the Black friend when you run your mouth and show your true racism and need a token Black friend to save you from your mess. It’s cool when you want to dance to our music, eat our food, wear our fashion, appropriate our hairstyles and when you have a fifth cousin twice removed that has mixed race kids or you decide you want to experiment by dating someone that is Black I SEE YOU! don’t try and hide behind the smoke and mirrors and don’t use your relationships as a platform to validate your racism. You have no right to talk negatively about our oppression, you have no right to invalidate our pain. Don’t pretend you see us as your equal, don’t pretend we are accepted into your circle. Stay silent while we are being brutalised, stay silent while we are disproportionately dying of Covid! continue to stay in your bubble I hope you never need to call on the Black community to speak up for YOU! A lot of people have said 2020 is a year they will cancel, as it’s been a year of devastation, but I say 2020 has given me the 2020 vision to see people for exactly who they are.
Thoughts from the criminology team 