Is it a crime to lip-sync trap on TikTok while Somali?
Were you guys raised by wolves?
You don’t have to bully people for being poor and unattractive to make your point on immigration. You can campaign for reduced immigration without mocking individuals for how they look or how they sound.
I don’t dismiss the Yookay aesthetics account. It catalogues a snapshot in history from the point of view of the anti-immigration radicals. It is fascist propaganda, but it is also a work of art. Whoever is behind it is an aesthete and an intellectual. The videos are handpicked lovingly (or hatefully, depending on your POV). The imagery is powerful.
I can’t argue about the ones that depict violence or criminality. But some just show individual people doing Internet things while brown/black.
The latest video du jour was of a young Somali lad doing a TikTok dance while lip-syncing a trap song. TikTok is filled with youth doing trap lip syncs in random places. Why was this boy singled out? He is not doing anything illegal; if anything, what he is doing is extremely… western. Trying to become a trap content creator is typical of youth growing up in impoverished areas or dysfunctional inner cities long mismanaged by successive governments.
The guy tragically saw the reaction, which must have been hurtful. In a response video, he is visibly upset and says he is not a refugee or an immigrant, as people accuse him of being, but was born here. He is not eloquent and struggles to express himself, but he is clearly British-born and raised. He uses British slang and sounds like many white boys one would find in the area he lives in (from his video, I think it is Slough or similar). People mock him for his hair (he is balding at the top), but from the pitch of his voice, you can tell he must be very young, early 20s at most.
GBnews shared his video, and Patrick Christy’s made the guy sound like he was threatening or terrorising the English town he took the video in, because during the TikTok dance, he makes gun signs with his fingers. There are millions of TikToks of white boys doing gun signs with their hands, but the poor lad looks unmistakably Somali, so he was fair game for the Xitter meat grinder.
A right-wing commentator, evoking her Arian tresses and superior to Somalians looks, shared his video begging for people like him to be deported :
She found it funny when the guy responded in a video where, to me, he looked close to tears. In another video, he is explaining how he understands why people found his video weird, but that he is a content creator and people took it out of context- which they did. He scrolls through the racist abuse he got and apologises to other Somalis for making them look bad. He says, ‘these people think we marry our sisters or our cousins or whatever, but we obviously don’t do that’.
This habit of singling out random brown/black people for mockery is heartbreaking, if you extend your empathy to people beyond those you want to fuck, like I do, because whoever this boy is behind the awkward TikToks, his friends, his family and other people of Somali origin do not deserve to be witnesses to this display of hatred towards their tortured nation.
There was a time when left-wingers would share videos of ‘white trash’ as proof that red neck white Americans and Ukip voting Britons are stupid and of lesser genetic stock. This was criticised because people could see it for what it was: snobbism. These people don’t speak and look the way they do because of their race, but because of their class. This boy, too, is being mocked for being low status.
“Stella, why do you care what some random racist zoomer is posting on Xitter?’
The non-radicalised, cool-headed immigration sceptics are an increasingly shallow pool of people in Westminster. The older ones are usually more measured. Presumably, because they have seen the waves come and go one too many times, they know how fast satire becomes dog whistle, and dog whistle becomes a sirene call.
The whole point of the Human Carbohydrate project is to keep the friends close and the enemies closer. I write mostly to make people feel good. But sometimes people need to feel bad.
Aren’t you ashamed of yourselves?
Last I checked, lacking eloquence, charm, and beauty is not a crime. If it were, people like these, who bully individuals to justify their radicalisation, should be behind bars.
I research different cultures a lot, and a common comparison to British culture is Japanese culture, for its focus on politeness and etiquette. However, dig deeper and you’ll find that whilst there are similarities, the fundamental operating systems of the two are highly distinct.
In Japan, the fundamental core of politeness seems to be deference; the communication that one is aware of their position in the hierarchy, has the requisite degree of respect for those above them and more experienced, and is ready to fulfil their position in whatever system is in place. In other words, the goal of Japanese politeness is fundamentally to say “I know my place”, albeit usually in a less oppressive way than it can sound.
British politeness is different however, and the difference is most notable when you look at the classic 18th and 19th century ‘gentleman culture’. These days it’s masked by differences in language - people will hear the (autistic) Duke of Wellington criticise Napoleon’s “ungentlemanly manners and poor breeding” and think this is just standard aristocratic snobbery, similar to how the French would (and arguably still do) sneer at people for their choices in clothes, food, media etc. However, look at the context of the remarks however, and you’ll find that they aren’t in response to him not angling his cutlery correctly or whatever, but instead to him having hurled a bunch of abuse at his generals and staff and cancelled his planned birthday presents for his brother who had just lost Spain. This was effectively Wellington saying that this was a massive dick move, and his remarks about Napoleon’s ‘poor breeding’ was his way of saying that Napoleon was essentially a colossal bellend (which frankly he was). You’ll find the same in most other areas of British society at the time, where calls for ‘manners’ were really just a way of telling people to be nice, and this feeds through to the modern day. Unlike Japanese principles of deference, fundamentally British systems of politeness are constructed so as to be able to communicate what is needed to be communicated without causing any unnecessary offence - in other words, to not be a prick.
It’s funny how many of the people you describe would likely spend so much time banging on about supposed ‘British values’ when they seem to have forgotten the core one of politeness. I’ll join you in wishing the British-Somali lad all the best, and have no doubts that if he were still around today, Wellington would most certainly join us in telling the haters to f*** off back to France where they belong.
Humans first reach their conclusions ("them tribe not my tribe! Them tribe bad!)
Then they find the justifications. "Them tribe dance funny! Them tribe dance too good! Them tribe cultural appropriation!" It doesn't matter. Any stick to beat a dog.