41 minutes | Sunday, 15 January 2023
WARNING: THIS EPISODE CONTAINS CONTENT SOME PEOPLE WILL FIND DISTURBING.
After the last episode of OUTCAST UK we had to turn off comments on our George Floyd chat after the video got the attention of people on Tik Tok denying that it was a murder and making baseless claims to discredit the victim and the family. We made this bonus episode to comment on this initially.
Then it became important to also bare witness to the latest act of police violence against people of colour. In the United States, LA Police repeatedly tasered Keenan Anderson, an unarmed black man who later died in hospital, the latest in a wave of deaths at the hands of the LAPD in the first few weeks of 2023. The high school english teacher and father flagged officers down for help after a car accident. The same thing happened here, people began to blame the victim for their own death. There is a pattern.
In the UK the case of Ngozi Fulani being victim blamed after flagging up what many believed to be evidence of structural racism in the royal household, later having the charity commission investigate her organisation. According to The Voice "SISTAH SPACE boss Ngozi Fulani was cleared of wrongdoing by the Charity Commission, but some are questioning why the charities regulator launched an investigation in the first place. The announcement of the investigation by government-appointed quango last month came after a torrent of race-hate on social media aimed at Fulani, and criticism of her in mainstream newspapers." News of her being cleared by the commisssion was not picked up by most of the UK press.
What ties all these together? Victim blaming.
Then moments before we made this bonus episode, a man in Manchester tweeted about his experience of racism from cis gender white gay men in the city. We're commenting on all of this in this hot take on all the issues our last episode brought up and what's happened in the world this first half of January 2023.