the times | Thursday October 15 2020 1GM 25
Comment
Talk of ‘white privilege’ is divisive drivel
With working-class white boys now trailing everyone else, it’s time we moved on from racial grievances and faced reality
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reform, or the concept of improving
legal institutions or race relations.
They want it all blown sky-high in
the mad and forlorn hope that out of
the ruins will emerge some magical
new society.
For the rest of us of — all colours
and backgrounds — ever more
division doesn’t seem a very
constructive way to proceed,
especially when there has already
been considerable improvement.
Britain’s reforms since the 1980s, a
decade scarred by racism, have been
imperfect, because human beings
and politics are imperfect.
Catastrophes such as the Windrush
scandal bring shame on the country.But British race relations are a
story of improvement. The work of
British Future, the think tank run
by Sunder Katwala, shows that the
level of perceived social distance
between ethnic groups is much
lower than it was 30 to 40 years ago,
for most people, and strikingly so
for the under-forties. Some ethnic
minorities have advanced more
than others; now white working-class
boys need attention. It is a
complex picture.
Improving equality of opportunity
is surely the productive way to think
about these thorny problems,
rather than as an endless fight
between groups claiming ever
more grievances.against more conflict and
resentment. “If we are now going to
start teaching them in school that
not only do they have to overcome
the various economic and social
barriers within their community, but
they also need to start apologising
for simply belonging to a wider
group which also strips away their
individual agency, then I think we’re
just going to compound many of
these problems,” he said.
The angry phrase “white privilege”
has deep roots, stemming from the
development of “whiteness studies”
in the US in the early-20th century
by scholars seeking to explain the
power dynamic in a deeply racistsociety. In the 1960s, the Marxist
academic Theodore W Allen defined
“white skin privilege” in terms of the
“invention” of the white race as a
tool for oppression on class grounds
by a ruling elite.
The idea has grown since then and
become increasingly dominant. The
grading system for white privilege is
conveniently vague, though. It can
be constantly redefined by
campaigners to mean whatever
they want.
I can see what is in all this conflict
and fear for the Marxists at the more
extreme end of Black Lives Matter.
Then, and now, terrible conflict is
always what they want. They were
not, and are not, interested infurther behind. There will be more
money and reforms aimed at
improving attainment.
There is enough energy left in the
decades-long wave of education
reform in England to think that
solutions such as more vocational
education can be found. The
academies programme has
transformed ethnic-minority
prospects in schools in poor parts of
London. These pupils are the leaders,
entrepreneurs and public servants of
the future. But if, having improved
life chances in one area, we nowsaddle the white working-class with
yet more guilt and shame, this
process is unlikely to have a
happy ending.
And surely that is the big risk with
the identity-obsessed politics
advocated by young social justice
campaigners who attack “white
privilege”. It will fuel the fires of
division rather than open the way to
more improvement.
The academic Matthew Goodwin,
appearing before the committee, got
to the heart of it when he was asked
about “white privilege”. He warnedT
he conceit in the 1983 film
Trading Places is that a
poor hustler can swap
places with a patrician
commodities dealer and dojust as well. The dastardly, racist
Duke brothers, owners of a
Philadelphia-based financial empire,
set up a cruel nature v nurture
experiment for their own
amusement. Eddie Murphy plays the
panhandler plucked out for upward
social mobility and Dan Aykroyd is
the entitled Wasp (White Anglo-
Saxon Protestant) poltroon thrown
from paradise down into the slums.
Thanks to racial epithets included
in the script, the film now carries
one of those warnings on streaming
services to remind us that in history
not everyone thought like us,
funnily enough: “This film has
outdated attitudes, language and
cultural depictions which may cause
offence today.”
The device used was not entirely
original, of course. It borrows from
Mark Twain’s The Prince and the
Pauper (1881), a story of two boys
born on the same day who switch
places and learn great truths about
the wickedness of poverty and the
advantages of privilege.
This week MPs began wrestling
with the contemporary version of
this dilemma, when the Commons
education select committee launched
its inquiry into “left-behind white
pupils from disadvantaged
backgrounds”.
White working-class males in
Britain have traded places with
ethnic minorities and are now the
group most likely to fail
educationally and to struggle in life.Only 13 per cent of male, white
British pupils on free school meals go
on to higher education.
This is not, to put it politely, the
dominant contemporary narrative in
the year of Black Lives Matter, with
its middle-class hand wringing,
denunciations of “white privilege”
and the tearing down of statues.
But after watching the first round
of the committee’s evidence this
week I wonder whether the root of
the problem we face is now as
much philosophical as it is about
practical reforms.
On the practical front, no doubt
the committee and the government
will propose new schemes to stop
white working-class boys fallingMarxists at the fringe
of Black Lives Matter
want terrible conf lict
Iain
Martin
@iainmartin1