I'm far enough away from these issues to admit that I don't have anything like concrete knowledge on the subject, but I feel like I should mention some of the more obvious counterpoints to some of the things he's said in this video. Otherwise I'd get that dirty echo chamber feeling, and no amount of showering seems to wash that away. Could be I'm just a masochist, though, who enjoys arguing.

I think there's racism in every culture. I think it's often much more subtle than described in the video, often even subconscious. I also think that modern western culture is among the least racist cultures to have ever existed, despite our many complaints.

I guess I'll talk about Libya first. The west (the white people he was talking about) is continuously demonized for supporting tyrants and the like. Yet when they participate in overthrowing a clear example of a extravagant super villain tyrant, they are demonized for that. I'm not saying they didn't have other motives, I'm just saying that it's an example of a tautology. No matter which choice they make they are labeled racist.

Now, when beleaguered folk make a desperate attempt to dangerously cross a sea, well knowing the risks they are incurring, it is again the fault of the Italians for not rescuing then with sufficient alacrity. Yes, many of them are coming from countries the west had a hand in destabilizing. But it would be pretty racist for you to demand that the Italian navy take full moral responsibility for the actions of other western nations, simply because they are white too. Also, if the only number you pay attention to is the number that drown, your bias is showing.

Next the issue of the Commonwealth. It seems absurd to expect the UK to treat former colonies populated by citizens that had moved there the same as former conquests that have since shrugged off the yoke of empire. The justifications for this discrimination would seem to be a combination of racism, cultural chauvinism and sober pragmatism. The latter two factors clearly scale with the gap between the culture of the colony in question and the home country, and probably ought to in some sense.

The incarceration thing is tougher to poke holes in, and clearly a much more touchy subject. Once could argue all sorts of justifications for why more members of ethnic minorities are apprehended, but it's nebulous and smells of bias and chauvinism, at best ending in a chicken vs egg conundrum. But once you're in police custody, I think can agree on demanding a higher level of equality of outcome. So I checked out a charity called Inquest who had compiled pretty comprehensive stats on police custody deaths since 1990. Here's a link: http://www.inquest.org.uk/statistics/bame-deaths-in-police-custody
To summarise, since 1990, ethnic minorities have made up a total of 153 out of 1557 deaths in police custody, or roughly 10%. Given that they currently make up 13% of the population, that seems to be well within an acceptable range of results, so I was confused at first. Then I thought maybe he had misspoken and had meant to say state custody, or inmate deaths. So again I looked for some numbers, and again Inquest had the most comprehensive data, broken down by year and ethnicity etc. Again here's a link: http://www.inquest.org.uk/statistics/deaths-in-prison
It shows 453 out of 3963 prison deaths are suffered by ethnic minorities. This seems almost perfectly in line with the 13% population of said minorities. So again, I'm a bit confused by the point he's making.

All of that said, I think I agree with the sentiment of his presentation, which perhaps confuses me even more.

Having only ~300k people and being almost universally ethnically homogeneous kind of makes it easy to actually make decisions. I mean hell, they have an anti-incest app to check if the person you're dating is related to you.

Meh, you know what? I've written at least 20 responses to this varying from out right rage to calmly explaining how fucked up that view is.

But I'm way too fucking tired. Go nuts. This is hilarious and hey, fuck all those ignorant ass ethnicities if they can't take a joke, right?

@artician
Yeah, I'm always amazed when someone does get arrested and films it, and when they do get their phone back the data is untouched. There are apps out there that will upload your footage to a server, so knowing that maybe the cops know that and trying to delete it would only make them look even more guilty. Or maybe they are just so arrogant that they think it won't matter anyhow.

@bobknight33
If the cop they had on the show is correct then it doesn't matter what their unstated reason was. They broke police procedure by not telling them why they were being pulled over.
I suspect they didn't say anything because they really didn't have a good reason to pull them over, and when they saw that that they were being recorded they decided it was just better to keep their mouths shut.
Anything you say can and will be used against you, funny how it works both ways.
The cop they had on the show sounded fairly reasonable right up until he blew up over the race card issue. We need to stop fooling ourselves into thinking that things like race, class, gender, or ethnicity doesn't play a role in how we see each other, only then will the race card be shuffled out of the deck permanently.

How does 'take down that old flag that represents a painful time in history' equal 'ethnic cleansing'?

I really would love to understand the logic.

Less an ethnic cleansing, more of an ethnic enema.

Having to "clean up" your racist mindset is not what they mean by "ethnic cleansing "...

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You know, I read a recent interview with John Oliver where he is very emphatic that his show is "comedy" and that, despite what people want to read into it, he is not making political statements. I think if I had watched this video before reading that interview I would have scoffed (as others here already have). But it's pretty clear to me now that he and his writers know exactly what they are doing.

Basically, this video is the result of John Oliver saying, "You know, when you think about this history of racism in American cinema you can find some pretty fucked up stuff. How can we make a joke out of that?"

It's not designed to be an actual literary critique, it's meant to use the facts to play up a punch line. I'm pretty sure John and his writing crew know that "The Last Samurai" does not refer to Tom Cruise's character (i.e. just because the character is trained how to use the sword and armor does not automatically make him a samurai), but it's easy to see how they can make a joke out of the ambiguity of the title and Americans' tendency for self-centeredness (I'm sure there are people in the U.S. who think the title does indeed refer to Cruise's character).

I actually don't have a problem with actors "playing outside their ethnicity" (whatever the hell that is supposed to mean). I'm reminded of the recent controversy about the video game Uncharted 4 which has a white actress voice-acting the role of a black South African character. The Creative Director responded to the controversy by pointing out that a white character is voiced by a black actor in the same game, and that the decisions were made based on the choosing the best actor for the role--not on what the actor looked like in real life (read more about the story here).

As CG progresses and digital characters become a norm, I think this is an issue that's only going to get greater in the film industry. In our demand for political correctness will we demand that the actors physically resemble the characters they are portraying onscreen? That seems a bit absurd to me. But so too is the idea of excluding people for consideration from roles based solely on the color of their skin.

As psychologist Nicolai Sennels explains, "Mohammed, the prime example for Muslims, married Aisha when she was six and had intercourse with her when she was nine. Besides, according to the Quran (4:24), Muslims are allowed to have sex with female slaves[.]" In addition, "uncovered women are in many Muslim cultures seen as a kind of prostitute, and if a man is aroused by such a female, then – partly due to the corrupted logic of responsibility within Muslim psychology – the female is blamed for being raped (and will therefore often face execution)."

Andrew C. McCarthy, in his book entitled The Grand Jihad, described rape by Muslim immigrants as the "unspoken epidemic of Western Europe." Six years later, it continues to expand and sweep across the continent. Ingrid Carlqvist documents how Sweden is now the rape capital of the West, and when "Michael Hess, a local politician from [the] Sweden Democrat Party, tried to warn his nation that 'it is deeply rooted in Islam's culture to rape and brutalize women who refuse to comply with Islamic teachings' he was charged with 'denigration of ethnic groups'" – a crime in Sweden.

According to Islamic clerics, a woman who fails to wear a headscarf is asking to be raped. Consequently, in the eyes of Muslim men, Western women are seen as "promiscuous, loose, and willing," and since no one in the Islamic community refutes this, they engage in the violence and abuse of power that rape represents. In Australia, Lebanese gangs threaten policemen's wives and girlfriends with rape. In 2006, the mufti of Australia, Sheikh Taj al-Din al Hilali, maintained that "women who do not veil themselves, and allow themselves to be 'uncovered meat,' are at fault if they are raped."

In Rotherham, England, some 1,400 British children as young as 11 were plied with drugs before being passed around and sexually abused by Muslims. As shocking as this was, it is the fifth sex abuse ring led by Muslims

In Nigeria, Boko Haram seized 300 schoolgirls in order to sell them on the open market.

In Pakistan, the police do nothing as Hindu and Christian children as young as 7 years old are gang-raped and sold as prostitutes or slaves to wealthy Muslim families. From 2011 through 2014, approximately 550 Egyptian Coptic Christian girls were abducted and sexually abused by Muslim men.

I could go on and on, but the point is that in Islam, a women is considered to be a subservient and second class person. Men are supreme and women who do not dress appropriately (per Islamic standards) risk things happening to them. This is nothing new, it is part of their culture. Exposing them to women not raised in that culture is going to lead to incidents.

Now, please note that I do not think that we should not accept refugees. But I do think that we should make sure that women are aware of the situation and we should absolutely be enforcing the law in regards to the people breaking it, refugees or not.

In addition to not having guns, a large percentage of police that i've ever met have been fairly decent people - but i've never had to deal with inner city police or lived in a majority ethnic community. I definitely think that quotas and under-funding have had a negative impact though, since the times of the classic bobby on the beat. So whilst i'm grateful we're not getting shot, there's underhand influences at work including profiling and also things like kettling and agent provocateurs at peaceful and legal demonstrations.

@vil

The idea that quote unquote Europeans will ever be a minority in Europe is far-fetched. Certainly not from migration while higher birth rates for migrants tend to subside as they assimilate. People get this impression when migrants are overwhelmingly settled in small towns. By it's nature they form a larger portion of the population. In big cities, naturally they want to at least at first settle within their own ethnic communities. It gives people the impression there are more migrants than there actually are.

There's no doubt that many Muslims are culturally very different to Europeans. They come from poorer countries, with different cultural and historical backgorunds, different value systems etc. I don't have a good answer to how this can be improved but I think it's wrong to think they uniqely do not want to integrate. The incentive is always there to assimilate into working culture and earn what is surely much more than the basic social welfare net the governments provide. But it's unrealistic to expect ethnic neighbourhoods & communities not to develop. Here in Sydney we have separate suburbs known for Indian, Korean, Chinese immigrants respectively. I live in a suburb dominated by Lebanese immigrants (FYI I am a Russian immigrant).

Schengen or not, I still don't see a workable way to actually control the vastness of Europe/M-E borders. Kicking out a country like Greece for letting immigrants through would also have immediate costs. A realistic plan similar to that proposed by Merkel is to more equitably share immigrants so no individual country is overburdened. Kicking members out is hardly going to help that.

Again though, the main point is - you can't feasibly prevent migration or control borders without turning Europe into a police state. While I sympathize with the issues raised, as I said it's about finding the best solution of a difficult and unavoidable situation.

Right wing European politician who tell you otherwise are simply lying and misleading people into believing what they want to hear.

I think I can see where he's coming from with this, and the more open forms of racism there is an honesty that does seem less insidious. Open racism, like a fire in your house is not something you want, but at least you can see the problem right away and begin to address it (get the fuck out of the house!). But that more subtle form of racism is more like radon gas, can't see it, can't smell it, but it's slowly killing your ass (I feel terrible, I think I'll lie down and take a nap).

In America I think we've been living under the delusion that racism is a thing of the past, especially after electing a black President, but then we see how most of the racism has simply gone underground. And so, all that outwardly PC behavior is just for show, you can change how people act on the outside, but they're still the same on the inside and quietly act on those impulses, the rot is still there.

His examples of dirty jokes weren't even really genuine racism, amongst certain groups (guys in particular) razzing, busting your balls and such is usually a sign of acceptance and sometimes it takes on racial or ethnic tones, but with no real malice.

The decision not to show Carmen at the Sydney Opera House sounds like a classic case of PC overreach, how does not showing Carmen actually serve the anti-smoking cause? Let's ask how many kids started smoking because they saw that scene in Carmen? It's an absolutely useless and pointless gesture.

What the hell does ethnicity have anything to do with being an expert in peppers? Their fucking peppers man, it's not complicated, you don't need millennia of culture history to understand them.

That's pretty disgusting....but sadly not at all unexpected. Various factions have seemingly taken control of the bastions of higher learning and systematically destroyed what I always saw as their fundamental function, fostering an ability to logically think for one's self. Anyone not on the 'right' side must be on the 'wrong' side and not worth listening to...or worthy of allowing others to listen to, I guess. That ain't learnin'...that's just mutual mental masturbation.
It's pretty funny/sad/telling that supporters of Palestine are called anti-Semitic, since Palestinians are also Semites, aren't they? The word doesn't mean 'Jewish', it's an ethnicity that includes 'Arabs'.