Katie Kenyon
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Stories (4/0)
Not Just America
While the Black Lives Matter movement has lead to greater acknowledgement of the need to address police racism and brutality, it has seen a frustrating division of opinion on the legitimacy of comparisons between US and UK police forces. Undoubtedly, there are structural differences between forces in the two countries (as there are between different forces within the countries), but ultimately they are all institutionally racist and rotten to their deepest core. I find it frustrating when, here in the UK, the angle that someone takes is ‘at least our police aren’t as bad as those in the US’. This is the position the BBC’s Emily Maitlis exhibited when discussing the BLM protests following the death of George Floyd in 2020. To be specific, on Newsnight she said to rapper and author George Mpanga (George the Poet), who’s friend, Julian Cole, a few days prior had had his neck broken by a Bedfordshire police officer, “you’re not putting America and the UK on the same footing…our police aren’t armed…the legacy of slavery is not the same”. The artist responded by saying that if this case of police violence against a black individual represents an ‘exception’, she would need to explain the myriad other cases of anti-black police violence, many of which have devastatingly resulted not only in life-altering injury, but death. Qualifying his remarks through the wider audience, Mpanga stated to Maitlis that he hopes “this is a learning point for the many people who think along the lines that you just expressed”.
By Katie Kenyon4 months ago in The Swamp
"All Lives Matter" and the deep-rooted, misled, abhorrent nature of this sentiment
As a white person, a quote from author Sheri Faye Rosendahl resonates with me: “The only thing that should come after ‘I’m not racist but…’ is ‘but racism is so ingrained in my society and culture that on some level I definitely am and need to do my part to destroy the system of oppression that people like me have created and benefit from on the daily’ ”.
By Katie Kenyon3 years ago in The Swamp
Neoliberalism and Minimal State Intervention
It is suggested that we are currently living in the "age of Neoliberalism," a political concept drawing on the traditional ideas of economic liberalism, believing that states ought to intervene as little as possible in the economy, allowing individuals (including corporations) to participate freely in the self-regulating market. There is an abundance of critical literature on Neoliberalism, most of which exhibits the incoherence of the claims of those economists who favour a limited state. I will be drawing on a number of these criticisms to demonstrate why the pursuit of neoliberalism as a set of political and economic principles by a given government is neither economically nor politically beneficial to the vast majority.
By Katie Kenyon5 years ago in The Swamp
People are Struggling to See the Danger of the Right
Worryingly, I have seen more and more people aligning themselves, knowingly or not, with views of the alt-right movement, often indirectly supporting the views of Trump. There’s a lot of reason to want to be part of a seemingly anti-establishment movement and it’s important to understand the reasons for the rise of populism, but people seem too often to just be misdirecting their confusion to support public figures like Milo Yiannopoulos, because people like this appear to have a strong message and confidence, which is understandably attractive at a time of political and social turmoil.
By Katie Kenyon6 years ago in The Swamp
