I wonder what is called cleverness - as been attributed to David Starkey. If he was clever, he would have come to that debate with better (clever) argument to the audience instead of the rhetoric inflammatory acclamation he's got to offer. I would rather say that he has become racist over the years. Racism is contagious... ;)

You really have to go to these places and experience the feel on the streets there...Most of the area's in London that were targetted are very very scary places to walk around if you are not black.. I know because I've lived in a few of them and visited others....  Looting culture has influenced all the children in the UK because they have seen it played out time and time again from newreel from other countries... Most of these looting sprees are played out in countries where black people are doing the looting....So yes to a degree this is of black culture in their eyes..And most of the kid's burning out cars/ businesses/houses etc and looting are black. Get off the race black verses white crap.. Kid's in the UK mostly get along well in mixed race areas.... The gangs however who fight and kill each other on the streets are MAINLY not ALL black kids, killing there own colour, because they come from a different African country!  So you tell me who is the racist?? 

You condersending fool..So his grammer was not so clever....SO... Do you think belittling him for it makes you better?.....The man was talking about kids being influenced by other kids... The UK kids looking up to the black kids, copying them following their styles their music the lyrics etc etc.. When a black guy can sing a song and call his friend a nigger in it and it's ok but if anyone else says it he will put a bullet in the persons head. We have serious double standards going on... Black gun culture has indeed taken over in parts of London and for the most part the black people dont like it either! Are they racist because they have a problem with their neighbour? You throw out that word because the man is white. Look within before you stike a blow to another... You know exactly where I'm coming from..!! 

Hey Wendy,

In as much as I do not duel in racial issues, and will not continue to debate it here, I will just chip in the same phrase I used earlier... Racism is contagious. RACISM IS NOT ABOUT WHITE OR BLACK.  It exit in all colors, shape and ramification of human endeavor.

Peace! Bola

'condersending' sic condescending

'grammer' sic grammar

Chris Rock's excellent tutorial to when white people can say the 'n' word...

Yours,

(the uppity) Translator

Ugh. Wendy your comments really disgust me.

The comments made by Starkey were crass and unwarranted and quite frankly pathetic. Your attempts to equate looting with Black people and Black culture is somewhat F*ç'?#! offensive. (I try not to get angry on these forums, but seriously YOU are the prejudiced, ignorant, condescending fool!)

I suppose the student riots in the UK last year were influenced by Black culture?

Excuse me while I PMSL!

What can you say about the violent football yob culture - which the UK is unfortunately so well known for - Guess the yobs were trying to copy Black culture??!

Your argument is so fundamentally flawed. Shame on you.

Rioting also took place in Enfield, and if you are from London or as you say lived in London, then as you should know, not many Black people in Enfield…. Fact. So then, what would your agument be there?

At the end of the day the riots were carried out by mindless criminals regardless of their colour, race or ethnicity.

It’s important that we are all conscious of ignorant people and foolish historians who attempt to create divides and selectively label people as good vs. bad based upon race and their prejudices. Some people are too quick to forget that it is such ideologies that have led to the genocide of millions of innocent people throughout history, -during WW2, during wars in the Balkans and in parts of Africa.

To make violent culture synonymous with all Black people is nothing but ignorant and promoting a hate culture which we all should stand against regardless of what race, nationality, colour, ethnicity creed we are. 

Just a reminder for all of us; let's avoid personal insults while debating on these forums.

With all due respect Nefertiti, you don't need to remind 'all of us' that personal insults are unnecessary on this website. But thank you for posting, i know you meant well and your contribution is very positive. perhaps you could be a little more specific next time rather than painting us all with the same brush?

And as for certain other posts that have appeared on this thread I'll just say this...A young gentleman (Mr. Nabil Abdul Rashid) made the valid point that people of African descent living in London don't charge white people into museums to see things they have stolen from cultures and civilizations all around the world. I think anyone who wishes to blame 'black culture' for the riots needs to take a step back and just think for a moment about the world we live in and how we got to where we are. England as a nation is responsible for horrendous and shameful international looting across the centuries. This is a country that stole PEOPLE let's not forget. some black or white kid pinching a widescreen tv from Curry's but leaving the remote control behind is just dopey and sad. Trained soldiers selling human beings into slavery over the barrel of a gun? Now there's a proper example of a weaponized culture wrecking the planet. Starkey should have reminded us all of the history of English imperialism and it's love affair with theft on an epic scale rather than attempting to muddy the waters with his tabloid, knee-jerk sloganeering.

well the BBC are so much up the backside of the govt you cant really take them seriously

Define black culture for me....

The ghetto, niggah, imma shoot you crap ingrained in everyone's minds thanks to Hollywood and the brain cell killing US media??? (and it seems now british media) That's the incorrect answer.... that would be mainstream ghetto American culture.

Africa is part of black culture? (I hope all of you are aware Africa has over a thousand different ethnic groups and a multitude of languages, so many they haven't even been recorded completely!) so Africa is anything but a single culture!!!

english speakers... define black culture please!

=======

To me what they call black culture on the english speaking countries sound more like your typical mainstream American Nowadays British ghetto gangstah wannabe culture..... I wouldn't call that black culture at all much less asociate it with Africa.... That culture to me is  just as anglo as they come.

In my country 30% of the population is black and they don't act like that.... except if they speak english and have contact with the english speaking world, then they want to emulate da gangstahs!!!

In Africa I don't recall Africans acting like that, the only Africans I saw acting like that were Africans who were very influenced by the anglosphere!

I refuse to call it black culture, blacks are very diverse culturally and linguistically......  call it by its name.... MODERN DAY MAINSTREAM ANGLOSPHERE CULTURE!

Looting culture has influenced all the children in the UK because they have seen it played out time and time again from newreel from other countries...

==========

WHAT?????? are u serious?

England is the motherland of the rioting culture!!!!! if anything is the rest of the world the ones who learned how to riot from you, not the other way around!!!

Shoot even centuries ago when the Americas were colonies of Europe (mostly Spain and England), Spanish colonial cities on the caribbean would get constantly looted and rioted on by english pirates, they would steal from chickens, to women, to gold, to african slaves from the Spanish!!!

I was checking the history of rioting in england and it seems every couple of years there is a new riot going on somewhere in the UK.

let's be realistic here!

"Riots are the voices of the unheard." Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

What is "black gun culture" and how is it different from "white gun culture" or any other "gun culture"?

Good question.  I think news feeds from Norway would provide some insight into how some use guns and bombs.

I can't even bother to listen to the whole ludicrous vacuous racist pseudointellectual verbal diarrhea coming out of Starkey's mouth - does it originate somewhere in a primitive part of his brain?

What is white culture?  What is black culture?  What is white?  What is black?  Was Elvis, The Beatles and The Stones white or black culture?  For a so-called intellectual to use such terminology illustrates to me his shallow and racist thinking most likely uninformed by any contact with the people about which he speaks.  Reminds me of Edward Said's criticism of English and American Orientalists who couldn't speak a word of Arabic, made sweeping (ideological) claims about the Arabs and Islam without applying the 3 criteria of what evidence would you need to make such a claim, how would you get such evidence and have you done the work to do so?

His critique of rap makes me wonder what he thinks of the blues, jazz, reggae etc.

Shocking but not surprising from establishmennt white (pseudo)intellectuals/academics.

To answer your question - you!  It's so insidious you don't even recognise it.  How do you know only blacks in these areas feel safe?  Have you canvassed whites and blacks?  Think any blacks feel unsafe?

Britain has a fine long history of looting well before there was post-colonial immigration (of all colours):

"What’s a riot without looting? We want it, they’ve got it!  You’d think from the press that looting was alien to British tradition, imported by immigrants more recent than the Normans. Not so. Gavin Mortimer, author of The Blitz, had an amusing piece in the First Post about the conduct of Britons at the time of their Finest Hour:

“It didn’t take long for a hardcore of opportunists to realise there were rich pickings available in the immediate aftermath of a raid – and the looting wasn’t limited to civilians.

“In October 1940 Winston Churchill ordered the arrest and conviction of six London firemen caught looting from a burned-out shop to be hushed up by Herbert Morrison, his Home Secretary. The Prime Minister feared that if the story was made public it would further dishearten Londoners struggling to cope with the daily bombardments…

“The looting was often carried out by gangs of children organized by a Fagin figure; he would send them into bombed-out houses the morning after a raid with orders to target coins from gas meters and display cases containing First World War medals. In April 1941 Lambeth juvenile court dealt with 42 children in one day, from teenage girls caught stripping clothes from dead bodies to a seven-year-old boy who had stolen five shillings from the gas meter of a damaged house. In total, juvenile crime accounted for 48 per cent of all arrests in the nine months between September 1940 and May 1941 and there were 4,584 cases of looting.

“Joan Veazey, whose husband was a vicar in Kennington, south London, wrote in her diary after one raid in 1940: “The most sickening thing was to see people like vultures, picking up things and taking them away. I didn’t like to feel that English people would do this, but they did.”

http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/08/12/riots-and-the-underclass/

Immigrants are to blame for all the problems and Doug Stanhope has an explanation for it and Nationalism as well.

The 'N' word from Dave Chappelle

Another example of BBC quality reporting (and the disrespect shown  Darkus Howe).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7B0_utcdeY

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darkus_Howe

He should sue the BBC and Fiona Armstrong aka Lady MacGregor of MacGregor for defamation of character...

Hello everyone,

Violence in a society is just the mirror of how it is unfairly governed and ruled. Why would people take the risk of being violent ?
if they feel and see they have equal chances to professionnaly and socialy move up like any other persons, they won't.

When violence reaches a certain scale it is not anymore because of this guy or this social class or this area - it is a general social frame that constrains people to resort to violence.

Actually, we know the answer, invest in education for every one... it is still the best way to improve our "democraties". The alternative is to go back to archaic reflexes of accusing others and saying, it is their fault, they are different. Now days and since some time, we know that we are the product of our education and environnement.

Nicely succinctly summarised and I couldn't agree more other than to add 'opportunity' to 'education'.

In fact in many a western nation we will face a highly educated young class with little employment opportunity.  Already we see signs of frustration and discontent in the US where people are overburdened with student loans to pay (delinquent loans rising equally if not more so in private versus public universities) coming out of university with little or no job prospects.  They do what they are told and go back for a further degrees or skills upgrading to give them a better competitive chance and still they find no jobs because jobs are not being created (even at a rate to keep up with new job market entrants let alone sufficiently to replace the millions lost since 2008).

Not only are call centre jobs outsourced to India and other low income countries but even rather high tech functions like reading medical images are being done overseas.  Imaging is done in the US and the image sent electronically to India where lower paid radiologists interpret images and send back the report to US hospitals.

Even if we gave education (university and trade school) to the young of Britain and other areas of insurrection throughout the world, the lack of opportunity (jobs) will still be a spark to light the flame.

Violence flourishes where hope disappears, a consequence of the loss of self, the loss of identity, the loss of reference points, and that happens in unequal societies, regardless of its culture.

I also have the intuition that boredom plays a role. Maybe because hope disappears in two situation:when the surrounding or inner walls are so solid and so high that one feels totally overwhelmed or when horizons are so flat and so monotonous that they bear no promises.

Thanks Marksist for your post as it depicts very well that over nations, we are under the pressure of the whole world. This is just because all goverments, except a few ones (like Cuba, North Korea..) agree on the idea that the world is nothing but an open market, therefore, those who can't get in, then, stay outside.... But if you exclude more and more people from the market... why should they care for it ? The market is for objects, not for people to be sold for less and less, they are the ressources of our world. Emmanuel Todd thinks the world has to be organised  and balanced first within continents (USA, EUROPE; ASIAN, AFRICA...) then and in a second time, between continents, when they are about on the same levels to compete.

Hi Free, thanks for your post.

It gives a view on two levels of violence, the one that is structural and like a response to how leaders organise our society and the other one, is more individualistic, when,inside of onself, we do not see any horizon or we feel it is so flat, boring. Then, attacking others can be seen as an ultimate answer and exictment.

However, I wonder to which extend it is not sometimes connected to such or such society and to our modernity ?

For example, how can we understand there are so many children and teenagers stabbing their peers in England ?

In France, we have some teenagers who commit rapes in group.

There is a disintegration of culture or/and a moving culture wihtout direction on the horizon.

Rene, very briefly. I really don't know if we can say that there are (only) two levels of violence -- structural and individualistic. I'd rather say that violence is a hydra with many heads with no “head of heads”. I mentioned boredom and despair, but I can also evoke education (violent parents), culture (Hell’s Angels), personal factors (schizophrenia), addictions (withdrawal symptoms), fanaticism, in particular religious (do I need to mention Al Qaeda?), to name only those that came to my mind, but I could find many more.

Hello Everyone,
I meant to say they are 2 levels of seeing violence (individual or socially structured) but then, I agree with you Free, that they are many factors that cause and allow violence to increase, to get out of control, to explode, etc. The image of a multi heads hydra is a good one. Actually, as long as men/women suffer from frustration, they may resort to use violence to release it. So the end of it in not in view yet.
But I do see only two levels on which we can act : the individual one (psychotherapists or so) or the social one (politically or so). Maybe there is an intermediate level : the family one.
But when it reaches this level of statistic (the number of revolts, riots, demonstrations, uprisings etc. has never been so high, it is far more important than it was in 1968), it is a mistake to just accuse a specific group of people (You do not - it was not your point). Yet, good analyses,  reasonable and realistc approaches are to be found.  I still believe in human kind ;-)Thanks for your comment dear friend ;-)

Did anyone remember the future champion ice skater who was turned in by her mom for looting. Duh, she was not black and her family are still well off. 

Did anyone else see the Indonesian or Thai kid who was beaten up then thought he was going to be helped by some other idiots only to have his bag ripped off by a bunch of hoodlums balck and white. 

So clever is the landuage and delivery used on the BBC but to be real, all of those looters should have something better to do in their lives. Perhaps we can send them to lands where men, women and children need to walk 20 km to get a bucket of not so clean water so they can learn the value of life.

What has changed is that the embittered snarling that was once confined to pub corners and fuming blogs now stands a chance of becoming government policy. Irrational screaming has become legitimate, and it's in this context that we should see David Starkey, the historian.

The riots were caused, apparently, by "Black culture," according to Starkey--and we can get around the fact that some rioters were white by saying they'd turned Black, and get around the fact that most Black people don't riot by saying they've turned white.

You could use that logic to prove that being Welsh causes boats to capsize, or that everything alive is a penguin. Take away the title historian, and he's one more purveyor of loud incoherent gibberish.

http://socialistworker.org/2011/08/29/disciplinarians-on-the-rampage