[Politics] White working class failure

[Harry Wilson's tackle]

But that is surely the perception that the concept of 'white privilege' engenders?

Yes. The result being working class kids not getting as much support as they need because they are white and therefore not expected to be disadvantaged.

White privilage is another bit of terminology I'd like to see flushed down the bog of history, though.

 

[Brovion]

No, that is the perception of white privilege that has been promoted by some to get certain sections of society all worked up.

White privilege means nothing more than the 'privilege' of not being discriminated against based on the colour of your skin. Nothing more. It does not mean that every white person has it easy, the only people promoting that meaning are those looking to diminish the cause for equality by seeking to create division.

Yes correct, however it's still bollocks. Saying to poor white people "You're lucky - you could be black!" is all part of keeping the working class divided and in their place. It's like the Victorian era where factory workers would hear it for six days from their bosses and from the pulpit on Sundays: "You're lucky! Be grateful for what you've got, others have it much worse."

EDIT: I'll add this from Stiff Little Fingers' song 'Silver Lining':
"All of us cannot come first,
Yes what you have is second best.
But it might be a good deal worse,
Third World peasants get even less!"

 

[GT49er]

No, that is the perception of white privilege that has been promoted by some to get certain sections of society all worked up.

Sigh........

Yes - it is a perception; some people perceive it. It doesn't matter who's 'promoted' it - if anybody has - or whether you think it's right or wrong: it is a perception.

 

[Randy McNob]

I'm not surprised either.

Society is totally focused on racial and sexual equality - it is trying to make up for decades of neglect in a short period of time. This is a good thing, but in applying almost evangelical focus it is neglecting the opportunities for white working class kids and the mental health of adult men.

I think this is one of the reasons why some people boo taking the knee, why some people voted Brexit and why the Red Wall voted for a Tory party promising to get tough on immigration.

how much is down to an inherently racist media who push divisive agendas?

 

[beorhthelm]

the problems for underachievement are deep or superficial, either way not explored properly because we wont have open honest debates. according to twitter this issue is just another facet of white privilege, so more of the same.

 

[Chicken Run]

There’s a well known white working class member of this forum who resides in East Germany that doesn’t seem to have done to badly for himself [emoji6]


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[ConfusedGloryHunter]

Let me google what abreaction means first.

 

[GT49er]

Yes. The result being working class kids not getting as much support as they need because they are white and therefore not expected to be disadvantaged.

You could almost substitute 'white' with 'English speaking' there. Enormous amounts of resources - SEN and Teaching assistants - goes in to helping children whose first language is not English - or even have no English at all (and yes, quite rightly, that's obviously needed). There's an infants school twenty minutes walk away from me, near the city centre, which has thirty three languages - just think of that - thirty three! Not all BAME, of course - a significant minority is from the predominantly white countries of Eastern Europe - but it's easy to see how a kid who speaks pure Glawster isn't so readily identified as being in need of extra help
.

White privilege is another bit of terminology I'd like to see flushed down the bog of history, though.

Hear hear.

 

[Tom Hark Preston Park]

Yes. The result being working class kids not getting as much support as they need because they are white and therefore not expected to be disadvantaged.

White privilage is another bit of terminology I'd like to see flushed down the bog of history, though.

At what point did 'white working class kids' become some kind of genuine generic thing?

Pathetic

 

[Tom Bombadil]

My experience of secondary school both when i attended and with my kids in our current area is that there is a significant chunk of the white working class who treat education with an attitude of inverse snobbery. Now i don't want to paint everyone with the same brush because it's obvious to me our habit of splitting everyone into working and middle class greatly oversimplifies a complex picture. Too man times thirty years ago and today i have seen parents belittling children who put in the effort. Part of this I think ties into the expectation of plentiful semi skilled jobs that are no longer there and part of it is some mislaced pride in an imaginary working class identity.
I guess what i'm trying to say is that this problem won't be solved by pointing fingers at some imaginary homogenous class group but by addressing all the interlocking factors that lead to fewer opportunities for the less well off and admitting that the term working class ( and middle class) if it's still useful at all covers a diverse group of people with greatly varying values and attitudes

 

[Swansman]

Its not really the working class failing, its the middle and upper class. The whole underlying belief that "well we dont see dirty, drunken, smoking kids on the streets any more so there's no problem like that and we can all move along and try to deal with identity / race / gender politics" is just a failure from the upper classes to understand the struggles and needs of the modern working class. In response, the working class are going to vote for the "go-****-yourself" option of the Trumps of the world, and the middle-class liberal journos and experts will be surprised and angry with them, writing things like "maybe you should need to do some test to be able to vote" and shit like that.

If the upper/middle class had the ability to see the world from other eyes than their own, these problems could have been solved a long way back, but for whatever reason they are clearly incapable of this and it will get punished. Perhaps they got too much to do or they are too full of themselves, either way the middle class are able to think no further than the average newspaper so whatever is brought up there is also on the mind of the middle class. Class struggle is rarely brought up - the oligopol owning the media dont want it on their agenda, the people owning the big companies advertising in the media dont want it. They give you a cookie every now and then - "maybe you shouldnt be able to say n*gger on Twitter" - because talk is cheap while giving the working class equal opportunities to thrive in society is expensive and would have to happen on the expense of those at the very top.

Until this ignorance changes, and it may never, the failures (and more so the struggles) of the working class are going to continue, and as we can see from everywhere throughout history, its going to be continue to be the biggest threat to the so called liberal democracy. One way or another.

 

[Baker lite]

There’s a well known white working class member of this forum who resides in East Germany that doesn’t seem to have done to badly for himself [emoji6]


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Seems that most of us that attended Patcham Fawcets school of hard knocks seem to be doing ok[emoji6]


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[zefarelly]

You could almost substitute 'white' with 'English speaking' there. Enormous amounts of resources - SEN and Teaching assistants - goes in to helping children whose first language is not English - or even have no English at all (and yes, quite rightly, that's obviously needed). There's an infants school twenty minutes walk away from me, near the city centre, which has thirty three languages - just think of that - thirty three! Not all BAME, of course - a significant minority is from the predominantly white countries of Eastern Europe - but it's easy to see how a kid who speaks pure Glawster isn't so readily identified as being in need of extra help
.

Hear hear.

Go back a few decades and the discrimination, or piss taking in the playground was regional dialect more than different language. some of the 'foreign' kids at my school spoke better English than half of the yokels/locals

 

[Harry Wilson's tackle]

At what point did 'white working class kids' become some kind of genuine generic thing?

Pathetic

It's in the news (see original post).

But....I agree, it shouldn't be a thing. But....that's partly because I don't think colour (or gender or ethnicity or culture) is a thing (or should be) in the world of education or work (or anything societal); equal opportunity, with accomodation for disadvantage (within reason, of course - see the Peter Cook and Dudley Moore Tarzan sketch for the limits of reason). A thing does becaome a thing, though, if people decide it's a thing, pathetic or not.

 

[silverwizard]

Interesting debate. In my experience of working with primary age children and their parents, one factor which stood out was that parents of ethnic minority children had high expectations of our education system and their own children to achieve high standards. They had high career aspirations for their children and the children themselves would echo these. It’s as important for teachers to have high expectations of their pupils. I have witnessed the positive impact a dynamic skillful teacher with high expectations can achieve in raising standards.
This is a complex, multi faceted issue and I wouldn’t pretend that high expectations are all that is needed. Social and historical factors play a role as well and will need to be considered when planning strategies to bring about change.

 

[Chicken Run]

Seems that most of us that attended Patcham Fawcets school of hard knocks seem to be doing ok[emoji6]


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That was the beauty of PF, classless, quite literally[emoji6]

The only class system in place was how classy the weapon you made in metalwork was that you took onto Hollingbury GC to meet those Stringer snakes [emoji23]


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[zefarelly]

It's in the news (see original post).

But....I agree, it shouldn't be a thing. But....that's partly because I don't think colour (or gender or ethnicity or culture) is a thing (or should be) in the world of education or work (or anything societal); equal opportunity, with accomodation for disadvantage (within reason, of course - see the Peter Cook and Dudley Moore Tarzan sketch for the limits of reason). A thing does becaome a thing, though, if people decide it's a thing, pathetic or not.

people like to pigeon hole, or those with less imagination are happy to be told which pigeon hole to put people in. pathetic in itself.

 

[Robdinho]

Sigh........

Yes - it is a perception; some people perceive it. It doesn't matter who's 'promoted' it - if anybody has - or whether you think it's right or wrong: it is a perception.

Sigh....

You didn't say a perception, you said the perception, which is quite different. I'm saying the people promoting that as the perception are more concerned with sowing division than actually improving the situation.

Let's not forget that a large part of the reason for lack of opportunity for poor white working class people is the policies of successive Conservative governments; it couldn't possibly be that they are now trying to distract from that by blaming the use of language like 'white privilege', could it??

 

[Harry Wilson's tackle]

Interesting debate. In my experience of working with primary age children and their parents, one factor which stood out was that parents of ethnic minority children had high expectations of our education system and their own children to achieve high standards. They had high career aspirations for their children and the children themselves would echo these. It’s as important for teachers to have high expectations of their pupils. I have witnessed the positive impact a dynamic skillful teacher with high expectations can achieve in raising standards.
This is a complex, multi faceted issue and I wouldn’t pretend that high expectations are all that is needed. Social and historical factors play a role as well and will need to be considered when planning strategies to bring about change.

I wasn't going to bring it up immediately (or I'd have got a TL-DR comment from THPP) but this has been my experience too. When I lived abroad the second generation children of first generation immigrants (Chinese in this case) did far better at school than locals of longstanding (the indiginous people where I lived were First Nations Métis, or 'red indybums' as we would have called them when I was a kid, so the locals of longstanding to whom I refer were the descendents of jocks and English in the main). I'm told that the third generation of Chinese has begun to behave like those of longer standing, opting for liberal arts degress instead of medicine and laws

Vancouver was so rich, however, in the early 80s, that the white working class (redneck) element seemed quite content. I wonder if this has changed?

 

[Thunder Bolt]

I worked two evenings a week at a youth club on a council estate in Yorkshire from 76-93. Boys that had Dads in engineering or similar trades were told they could get apprenticeships by their Dads, so followed suit (until that avenue dried up in the 80s).
Very rarely did anyone stay on after 16 to get any further exams because there was no encouragement to do so. Families needed money coming in, even the meagre earnings of a trainee.
Then there were the one parent families where there was no encouragement at all, even to attend school regularly.
Obviously there were exceptions, and I met some brilliant kids,like the 18 year old, who lost his mother to a brain aneurysm, fought to keep his job, the council house and his two younger brothers together. He succeeded.