Thank you @RedToothBrush for possibly the most thoughtful post I’ve ever read on MN. I wish I had time to respond to each point (and some of the other excellent posts) at length, but too much going on today.
I will say though, as someone who has a foot in both the white working class and middle class worlds, and whose less advantaged white working class extended family would most certainly be deemed ‘racist’ by many on here, I’ve found it alarming for some time how class and the virtual death of social mobility within white communities is so frequently overlooked at a time when we’re obsessing over many other facets of identity politics.
I’m also very much alert to the fact that my own multicultural and predominantly middle class circle - who regard me as ‘one of them’ and don’t know my wider family background - very evidently hold the white working classes they see around them in disdain.
As someone involved in education, I do wonder how things like the current curriculum decolonisation agenda in schools will play out - certainly in my own DD’s primary it often manifests as replacing white role models with a very narrow subset of black ones in topic areas such as science and history, and a constant underlying narrative that these people were held back by the greed, ignorance and cruelty of white people (all white people, not just the ruling classes). Given that there’s a large subset of disadvantaged white working class kids within the school, who are continually being told they are privileged while receiving no additional support themselves, I fear that despondency and resentment could very easily set in from an early age. We urgently need to consider how we implement these initiatives, and do it thoughtfully rather than clumsily, to avoid unintentionally alienating other groups.
Unlike many of my more mobile middle class peers, who have arrived from all corners of the U.K., I live in the same London suburb where I grew up. When I was born in the ‘80s it was around 85% white; now the white British population makes up less than a third overall, and the proportion of white children in local schools is 17% and falling rapidly (at primary level it’s more like 1 in 10). That’s a phenomenal rate of change, which has tested community cohesion to the limit and pushed already creaking local infrastructure to near collapse. The situation is hugely localised and complicated, and anyone who claims it isn’t is in denial IMO.