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Split Thread Tearing Down Statues Associated With Racial Injustice

Edward Colston statue: Four cleared of criminal damage

Four people accused of illegally removing a statue of Edward Colston have been cleared of criminal damage.
Sage Willoughby, Rhian Graham, Milo Ponsford and Jake Skuse were charged after a monument to the 17th Century slave trader was pulled down and thrown into Bristol's harbourside last June.
It happened during a Black Lives Matter protest in the city.
Loud cheers erupted in the public gallery of Bristol Crown Court as the verdicts were returned.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-bristol-59727161

Gammons are rattled!
 
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theprestige said:
That sounds like it wasn't a BLM protest at all. But whose take is more authoritative here? The BBC's, which says it was a BLM thing? Or historian Kate Williams's, who suggests another rationale?
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You must have misread the BBC report or Williams’ tweets. The BBC report states “during a Black Lives Matter protest in the city”, Williams’ account does not disagree with that nor the BBC report with Williams.
 
jimbob said:
It was deeply unpopular, but nothing had been done about it for years.
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I think you've overstated the unpopularity. Most people really didn't give a toss about it. I've worked in Bristol for fifteen years (and latterly lived there) and it never came up as a topic of conversation with any of the Bristolians I know until it got pulled down.

The true situation is probably that there were a few people aware of the statue and the man's history who wanted rid of it and an extremely large number of people who didn't care one way or the other or didn't even know about it.
 
jeremyp said:
I think you've overstated the unpopularity. Most people really didn't give a toss about it. I've worked in Bristol for fifteen years (and latterly lived there) and it never came up as a topic of conversation with any of the Bristolians I know until it got pulled down.

The true situation is probably that there were a few people aware of the statue and the man's history who wanted rid of it and an extremely large number of people who didn't care one way or the other or didn't even know about it.
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Which raises a kind of theoretical question, which might also apply to some of the arguments regarding Confederate monuments. If you count the people who don't know about it, or simply don't care about it, you get a different ratio from that of the people who do. If a majority of those who actually paid attention to it opposed it, then perhaps we should count it as deeply unpopular even if it was not widely so.
 
arthwollipot said:
Do you think that only American black lives matter?
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"Black lives matter" is an activist catchphrase, referring specifically to the pattern of racial persecution perceived in many American police departments. Americans in communities where this is especially egregious have some excuse for protest, and even violent protest.

One hopes that the UK isn't facing a similar scourge, calling for similar civil unrest when civil solutions aren't working. Certainly a solidarity demonstration in the UK should not engender violent outbursts by those protesters in the UK. They're destroying their own city property in solidarity with American citizens in cities on the other side of the planet? That makes no sense. It's just looking for an excuse to bust things up. But slap "BLM" on it, and suddenly people come out of the woodwork from as far away as R'Lyeh to defend the behavior.

Or does the Avon and Somerset Police have a similarly egregious track record of lethally persecuting minorities, and thus the civil unrest and property destruction in Bristol actually has a local cause and is a reasonable local effect of that cause?
 
My point was that people of colour have been persecuted and discriminated against all over the world by white people of European descent, and continue to be. America may have been the trigger, but BLM all over the world. It's not an exclusively American phenomenon. BLM protests occur in Australia because of Aboriginal deaths in custody, not because of police brutality in America.
 
theprestige said:
Or does the Avon and Somerset Police have a similarly egregious track record of lethally persecuting minorities, and thus the civil unrest and property destruction in Bristol actually has a local cause and is a reasonable local effect of that cause?
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No. That is reserved for third world countries. Like the USA.
 
I would have thought that the fact that the statue in question was that of a slave trader in a city that was built on the slave trade, and that petitions and protests about it had been ignored for many years, was a good enough reason to tear it down. Seeing the protests in the US may have been the trigger for that, but it wasn't the reason.

And yes, institutionalised racism is sadly a problem in the UK police force too.
 
Pixel42 said:
I would have thought that the fact that the statue in question was that of a slave trader in a city that was built on the slave trade, and that petitions and protests about it had been ignored for many years, was a good enough reason to tear it down. Seeing the protests in the US may have been the trigger for that, but it wasn't the reason.
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In that case it seems inaccurate to characterize it as a "BLM" protest.
 
theprestige said:
In that case it seems inaccurate to characterize it as a "BLM" protest.
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I have to agree.

BLM is just one rallying cry for racial justice among many. It doesn't need to be repurposed for everything vaguely similar in other places or everything associated with monuments of objectionable historical figures.
 
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