A speech by one of Britain’s most vocal politicians addressed the ongoing civil unrest in the United States following the death of an unarmed Black man in Minneapolis…
Workers Party Britain leader and former British MP George Galloway held an online discussion earlier this week on the dynamics of race relations in the US.
Galloway’s ‘Anguish in America’ speech addressed numerous concerns on systemic racism in the United States to audiences attending the online speech, and was followed by discussions from attendees.
The speech comes as dozens of cities across the US remain under lockdown following mass demonstrations and riots, with further ongoing rallies taking place in London, Paris, Berlin and numerous other countries.
Sputnik takes a closer look at the highlights of the speech.
Galloway began by speaking on numerous examples of state force oppression, including the Yellow Vests in France and Miner’s Strike in 1984.
“I’m making the point that you don’t need to be Black to be oppressed, repressed and brutally quashed by the ruling elite and its system,” he said. “I was at the front of brutal repression by the British state forces of an overwhelmingly white, working-class uprising in defence of their families their communities, their work, their livelihood.”
But America’s “extraordinary ethnic complexity” included millions of Africans taken as slaves on vessels made by shipbuilders in Bristol, Glasgow, Liverpool and London, among others, he said.
Speaking on America’s system of chattel slavery: “The slave owners would make an inventory of their assets, which would include the number of cows that they had, the number of sheep and the number of slaves—usually in that order.”
Despite the end of the slave trade after the Confederate defeat in the American Civil War—one of the world’s bloodiest conflicts—the US Calvary launched pogroms against indigenous American Indians in Western territories, he added.
“[America] is breathtaking, but this Garden of Eden, because of how it was obtained, and how it was built, has been cursed from the beginning with the scars that we are seeing lividly exposed this week on the television,” he said.
Jim Crow laws established in southern US states continued in the 1960s, despite officially ending after the Civil Rights Act 1964 and Voting Rights Act 1965, he said, citing examples in the entertainment industry at the time.
“Black people could legally piss in the same pot as white people by the end of the 1960s, but it would be viewed askant if they did, and what Malcolm X called the “internal colonies” of the United States, the ghettos overwhelmingly populated by people of colour… are continued as colonies,” he said.
Mr Galloway explained how workers in the US, namely those of colour, were “overwhelmingly” exploited and received widespread discrimination “at every level”, including earning the lowest pay and “least secure terms of employment”.
