Categories: uncategorized
Date: 22 September 2005 21:20:56
This weeks search around the media links has led me to two articles in The Voice; one focusing on Handsworth 20 years after the riots and the second a contempory report on why a leading spokesperson on ethnicity is calling for US style affirmative action legislation.
They are interesting articles, because in an age when class appears no longer to be seen as a relevant social characteristic they are articles which focus on the disadvantages and problems faced by a particular group of black youths - the working class. In fact in the second article Ken Livingston's advisor on race Lee Jasper has said, "Go to Atlanta and New York and you see a thriving black middle class. You don't see that here." This is surely an acknowledgement of the fact being working class is a major source of disadvantage in todays society.
This is significant because if there was the move to the type of affirmative action being described it would be the poor white youths left behind. These white working class youth are exactly the people whose feelings of fear and resentment are being preyed upon by those groups determined to cause division and racism within our society. They are using ethnicity as the scapegoat when actually it is the more structural issues of class inequality causing a great deal of their problems. As such we need to see that ethnicity is not the only source of disadvantage, but class which has gone out fashion as an explanation, in our post-modern world, is still a major issue - we are not all middle class now and the underclass is growing.
This is why we need to take on board the discussions in the article about Handsworth & what is being said about unemployment, the taking away of local amenities so young people have nowhere to go & the development of a dependency culture. These are not issues specific to ethnicity but rather relate more specifically to class. Having said that I do not deny what Walby and others say that there are multiple oppressions and disadvantage caused by class status can be multiplied due to issues to do with ethnicity.
All that said, I would stress this is just the interpretation of a member of the middle class who is living in a relatively priviledged world & as such I am quite open to the fact that I may be interpreting the situation in an overly simplistic wooly liberal way.