Categories
Brexit Manchester race white supremacy whiteness

Etihad Man

What does white nationalism look like today? It looks like Etihad Man. A 41 year old ex-soldier in Northern Ireland turned civil engineering manager, whose idea of entertainment is physical and verbal racialized violence at the Etihad football (soccer) stadium in Manchester. He embodies how Thatcherism’s Great Moving Right Show turned into Brexit.

Man. Utd’s Fred being hit by one of several lighters thrown from the crowd at Etihad Stadium. Photo: Tom Jenkins/Guardian

On Saturday, as you can see above, Etihad Man was among a reassuringly similar group of (mostly) middle-aged (almost entirely) white Manchester City fans, hurling objects like lighters and water bottles at Manchester United’s Brazilian midfielder Fred, while chanting racist abuse. His team were losing.

Etihad Man outlined at right, 41 year old Anthony Burke

Anthony Burke, outlined above, happened to be photographed and video-ed while making so-called ‘monkey’ chants and gestures at Fred. No one chants by themselves, Burke was simply the most visible of the racist collective. As the video plays, you can lip read him chanting ‘You Black B*st*rd,’ together with the sweet white-haired older woman to his right (our left) and everyone else in shot.

Etihad Man was born in 1978, the year that Stuart Hall first diagnosed Mrs Thatcher’s ‘Great Moving Right Show.’ That movement has brought us to Brexit-Trumpism and doesn’t appear to be finished yet. It is embodied in Etihad Man. He lives in the suburbs. You know he voted for Brexit. He’s separated from his wife. He even has Black relatives. He wrote on Facebook: ‘Listen, I’m only racist c*** because I had a screen shot that made me look it.’ Never mind the video, then.

His well-paid job offers physical comforts. He must have paid at least £50 for his ticket–far more if it was being resold. He’s got a down vest and a nice jumper in case he gets cold. But jumping up and down like a ‘monkey’ will keep you warm too.

That’s actually his defense–he named himself and gave interviews. According to him, he was putting his hands in his pockets. Will it get him off? It might well–he’s out on bail already. But none of the others that share in his psychic rage at the sight of Blackness will be inconvenienced in any way.

For this segment of Middle England, the £50 race riot is the participatory equivalent of being at a Trump rally. Football crowds are self-directed with chants originating from the fans, not prompted by the club. And like the Trump audience, they’re enjoying themselves–only they get to direct their resentments and hatreds at an actual person, right there.

In class-ridden British stereotypes, ex-Army middle managers don’t throw objects and make racist chants. But they do. So while the response has concentrated on excluding one white person, the issue is all these white people in general. Or, more exactly, how does a city go from singing ‘Don’t Look Back in Anger’ together in 2017 after the bombing at Ariana Grande’s Manchester Arena concert, two miles away, to singing that?

It’s not all of Manchester, I know. But it is less than a week before a general election that has seen the Conservatives’ embrace of white nationalism return them to polling at the 43% level that elected Mrs. Thatcher on three occasions. According the right-wing ‘think tank’ Onward, this election was going to be determined by ‘Workington Man’:

‘an older, white, non-graduate man from the North of England, with strong rugby league traditions and a tendency to vote Labour.’

Almost immediately dismissed, Workington Man faded quickly and the alleged report is not to be found online anymore. But Etihad Man is all too real. Burke works for the Kier Group, a construction conglomerate who made £124 million declared profit on £4.5 billion revenues in financial year 2018-19.

Their webpage entitled “Quality, Diversity, Inclusion” features a group photograph of all white men in hard hats and hi-vis vests, cheering at the camera, as if a goal has been scored:

Kier Group: ‘Quality, Diversity and Inclusion

This idea of inclusion brings together the white nationalism of the football crowd with the Brexit-y uniform of the Yellow Vest. That’s right, the anti-Europeans have appropriated a European symbol of anti-austerity to indicate their support for the UK’s Brexit party of austerity.

Kier do quietly admit:

“We know things aren’t perfect yet – for example, we would like to see a greater number of women and people from ethnically diverse backgrounds fully represented in our organisation.”

One would be a start.

Etihad Man takes his whites-only football culture from work to football and back again. It doesn’t trouble him that his stadium is named after the airline of the United Arab Emirates, whose money has turned Manchester City from an also-ran into one of the top clubs in Europe. I wouldn’t turn up at the Etihad in a keffiyeh though, let alone a hijab.

The response from organized football has been to call for Burke to be banned and for ‘education.’ But Kick It Out, the official anti-racism group, make the limitations of this approach visible on their home page.

While there are three visibly Black British men in this banner, they are all cropped by the frame. Only the young Black woman at bottom left can be fully seen. Meanwhile five white people, including England captain Harry Kane, can be fully seen with two more cropped. It’s a step up from the Kier Group but not very far.

For Etihad Man loves Harry Kane, the white English center forward, wearing the Cross of St George beloved of white nationalists. Etihad Man might be part of England Away, the notorious England traveling fans who routinely vandalize European cities while drunk on cheap beer. He was definitely part of the Army in Northern Ireland, where he served with the Cheshire Regiment.

Etihad Man is already old news. Today’s headline in the Manchester Evening News is a ‘black alert’–it means that a local hospital can no longer guarantee patient safety because it’s so overcrowded. Did no one think for a minute about that name? More work for Kier Group, perhaps–they are in the top three health construction firms. All the people depicted on their Health webpage are visibly white.

Categories
Hunger strike Manchester Palestine

Don’t Look Back in Anger #Day40

Forty symbolizes the overcoming of hardship. The Israelites wandered for forty years, while Jesus spent forty days in the desert. For hunger strikers, forty days marks the passage into system failure–the hearing goes, sight fails, the body collapses. Despite everything, let’s hear the call from Manchester: “don’t look back in anger.”

The failure of the strikers’ bodies symbolizes the catastrophic failure of seventy years of counterinsurgency waged by advanced capitalism in the Middle East. At least, a failure on any human terms. Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn has used the Manchester atrocity to not only acknowledge this but to call for

the solidarity, humanity and compassion that we have seen on the streets of Manchester this week to be the values that guide our government.

These ideas have closed the gap in the opinion polls from close to 20% to just 5% in a few weeks. Meanwhile everyone here tells me it’s all about 2018 and 2020, while the Democrats continue to offer warmongering and neoliberalism lite.

At the vigil to mark the deaths of twenty-two people in the Manchester Arena, one Mancunian woman just began to sing Don’t Look Back in Anger by Oasis, a song that so evokes the Northwest of England. And everyone joined in.

My friend Paul, an activist-artist and a truly inspiring person, who has deep roots in Salford, Manchester’s working-class and immigrant twin city, puts this sentiment into words:

I worry that the very use of the word “Terrorism” suggests that there is a need to identify an enemy, rather than the impulse to reach out to a friend. What has happened is human tragedy; it reflects the pain and suffering of countless others in distant parts of the world. Our only answer is unity. We must resolve to stay true to this purpose.

I worry that we in the United States cannot find this humanity in ourselves any more as a collective. I worry that we exalt a leader who pushes his way to the front and boasts of abusing women. I worry that voters in Montana looked at a candidate assault a Jewish journalist and elected him anyway. I worry that my Jewish  peers can’t get past their anger to see that the new right are old-school anti-semitic.

Do we doubt that what happened in Manchester is not in very direct ways connected to the intervention in Libya? Do we not realize that a renewed willingness to kill civilians, which has killed 1793 people in Mosul alone since January (according to Airwars) can only make this worse?

How long can you occupy a country in anger? How many people have to die before your anger is exhausted? How many days are enough?