“This ideology was created, not by poor people – this is important and has relevance today – as often poor people are painted as the most, or even the only racists, which is classist nonsense.”[1] Akala
My family and I used to live in a nice road in Catford in Southeast London. We were, like a third of the residents of Catford, a white family. Our immediate neighbours were Julia, a retired white primary school SENCO and Sharon and Lemar, who are black. Sharon works in the city and has a posh car, and her sister is a successful television producer.
We once had a Daily Telegraph journalist live up the road, but his wife was a nightmare and they moved away quickly. Aside from our immediate neighbours, our favourite people were the profoundly gentle widowed white historian directly opposite, and our very favourite person was Barbara a black community activist across the way. We were aware that we lived in one of the nicer roads in Catford, a road in which even up to the early 2000s someone on a decent teacher’s salary could drum up the debt to afford a nice house, and that such a pad would be impossible for a newly qualified teacher to even dream of now. But the point is that we all rubbed along quite nicely. As a teacher, I’m of the more ‘educated’ end of the white working-class, and I know that education is important in combatting the profound ignorance of racism. But there are other more obviously working-class white people down our street and there’s never the remotest sign of any trouble. We all felt privileged to live in such a community.
The Daily Telegraph journalist’s wife was continually moaning about the area to my ex-wife who was swiftly tired of her negativity. This interested me as the Daily Telegraph would have been one of the chief organs that would paint the working-class white people who live in the road as racist. But somewhat weirdly if you read what ‘legitimate’ newspapers think of us, they do not seem to be. In fact, in the near twenty years that we lived in this multi-ethnic community in which whites are a minority I have never seen a single example of white on black racism and only one, relatively recently, of a version of the reverse, should such a thing exist, when my son was described as “a white devil” by a nutter on a bus.
As Hanif Kureshi, who was educated at a neighbouring school to the one I attended, and who witnessed and was subject to daily casual racism, writes “the proletariat of the suburbs did have strong class feeling. It was virulent and hate-filled and directed entirely at people beneath them.”[2] One of the key issues with white working-class engagement with education is that the families are not angry, or not angry enough, or not angry enough about the right things, or are directing their anger towards entirely the wrong people - sideways rather than up.
However, it’s almost as if it wasn’t a thing in Catford. I’m sure that in the past there may have been issues, and I witnessed elements of racism in my extended family forty years back; I’m also sure that there are communities in which there are very few black and Asian people where there is vastly more of the racism to come from complete and utter ignorance that is caused by the fear that comes from a lack of experience, but it’s pretty well absent in multi-cultural communities and multi-cultural schools. In over twenty-five years of working in classrooms in such schools, I can't recall witnessing a single racist incident (I’m not saying they didn’t happen) but once at parents’ evening for one of my sons, he pointed out a haunted looking white boy and described him as “the school racist”.
“What’s his life like?”
“Utter misery.”
It feels slightly weird for the white working-class to be portrayed as racist by enclaved journalists who feel under threat in Catford or Brixton or Peckham when they are the class that live intimately with, specifically in London, the black communities - and elsewhere with Asian communities, and one gets the feeling that it's almost as if the white working-class are being used as a depository for another caste’s guilt at their own feelings. An allegedly more liberal middle class who might be argued to be quite comfortable with classist gestures use this classism to superimpose racism onto the people that adapted to live alongside the immigrant communities. This thought is shared by former journalist, Johan Hari, who has said that “one of the ways people have made their snobbery socially acceptable [is by] acting as if they are defending immigrants from the ‘ignorant’ white working-class.”[3]
Working class protectionism, which is mainly a reaction to the impact of economic status, and, as much as it is about neighbourly love, can, and historically definitely has, come with a dark side on the reverse: the fear of the other and of being invaded. I use this euphemistic language deliberately because to state, as some do, that the white working-class are all racist is, itself, an example of what Pierre Bourdieu termed ‘class racism’, and it is vilely untrue. This accusation generally comes from the comfort of ignorance inhabited by scribes on right wing newspapers who may live in metaphorically gated, all-white communities and who care not to notice the irony that they, who will generally work in all-white offices in which the only black people work in the kitchen, are casting aspersions of racism on a community of people who live shoulder to shoulder with the immigrant communities, who know them as schoolmates, friends and neighbours when the writers themselves have no experience at all of such levels of intimacy. Such integration was at times a painful progress for everyone concerned, but it is a level of integration, acceptance and respect that seems so far to have been resolutely beyond other classes.
But, acknowledging the existence of an unholy hand that pits race and class against each other, it would be wrong of this text to not acknowledge that white on black racism has a history. As someone with an eye on my seventh and possibly/probably last decade on the planet, I recall the response to the relative novelty of immigrant cultures in the seventies. There was, of course, the racism that comes from complete and utter ignorance, but often the relationships were informed by genuine interest in the other culture. My closest friend at school, Reginald Winston Bascombe, and his brother Selwyn are Bajian by descent and were both respected at the school to the point of being semi-idolised. They were classy guys: gentlemanly, both highly erudite for the attendees of what was felt to be, though we didn’t know this at the time. a sink school and both were gifted with a certain silkiness of touch with a football; it was a wonderful experience and a privilege to be invited into Reggie’s house to, in later years, smoke one of his dad, Rupert’s, unfiltered Senior Service cigarettes and to hear scandalous tales of the errant Uncle Percy.
I wondered during the early stages of writing this book this as to whether Reg, who now lives in Darlington but who somehow, given where he lives, works as a Director of Resources for Carlisle Council, might be able to give me an insight into how far this current state of relative harmony is a change from the 1970’s and early 80’s when we were at school and perhaps from his Dad’s experiences as part of the original Windrush generation. Surely Reg would be able to give me insights into the bad old days when he was one of the relatively few people from an ethnic minority background in what was very much a white area at the time; surely Reg experienced the brutish racism of the white working-class in those throwback days when footballers were allowed not to wear shin pads and when the mark of a flair player was often found in the luxurious nature of their sideburns.
It turns out that his experience of racism in the 1970s attending predominantly white working-class school that had a few middle-class boys in the top sets was, erm, basically, there wasn’t very much of it, if any. It may be that Reg’s Dad experienced it, and he tells me there was a time when either a brick or a can was thrown through a window, but the family lived on the corner of a major road, and this could have been just an accident of position. But it wasn’t something his dad ever spoke of and, as a very fine cricket player who had once bowled out Sir Garfield Sobers, and who had set up the Croydon West Indian cricketing team, Reg tells me that his dad’s experience was of playing sport with and being accepted by white people.
Reg recalls a primary teacher saying that he was black and replying that, actually, he was brown, and his hair was black, but he detected no malice in her comment. “She was probably just trying to make a point about difference. She was a very nice woman.” He said there was never any other even borderline racial comments from teachers and that he was always welcomed and felt a part of things. The worst he experienced was being called some derivation of “black bastard” generally after he had scored for our Sunday League team (which he did rather distressingly often for the liking of this low scoring midfielder) but, despite what we might reasonably assume to be the utter ugliness of this comment, he felt it was sometimes fondly intended[4] and that there was always mutual respect after the match.
But Reggie and Selwyn were decidedly both top set boys from a strict family with the magical role model of a father whose bearing was of a masterful dignity and whose eyes were on occasions possessed a wicked glint. They had been very well brought up indeed and were treated accordingly. The reception of some of the other few black boys in the school was not so positive. Reg and I spoke of these boys and his memory of them is different to mine. While I was slightly fearful of A*** and P*** and L****, he remembered them as decent guys but acknowledged they were “strong characters who would let you know what they thought and who you wouldn’t want to take liberties with”. It may be that this strength, which I recall might sometimes have been displayed overly forcefully was a response to previous injury, and you only have to look at the autobiographies of certain footballers to realise that racism was very much in existence during that period.[5]
We cannot deny that the BNP exist or that Tommy Robinson has a following. There are merely facts. Their distorted worldview clearly comes from feeling, or having felt, embattled and invaded. The perception that you are being invaded and overpowered and are powerless to do anything to stop it, leads people to reach for absurd, violent gestures. How far is the racialization of their response to their worsening conditions a manifestation of lack of education, and how far is it a ‘rational’ response to the ‘evidence’ of their eyes? It is deeply unpleasant stuff this, but you have some white working-class people, perhaps not the brightest amongst us, who are continually told that what they ‘see’, that many of them regard as having damaged their communities is a delusion. The then reach in the direction of the arrant nonsense of the great replacement theory which is promoted by Eton ‘intellectuals’ such as Douglas Murray who is somehow thought to be a valid voice of truth by some people.
It is made worse by the fact that this racialization of their problems suits power just fine. The Conservatives, who seem to have an unstated wish to bring working class conditions back to those that were inhabited pre-war, have a long history of stirring this up. They blow on the dog whistle of populism whenever it suits them. In order to drum up the support of the working class, they call upon their nationalism by othering the foreigner, the immigrant, the Asian neighbour and the socialist. They make the working class stand to attention, salute the flag and get ready to march for King and country into a war with people who are more like them than are the people laughing at them as they line up.
The prejudice, some working-class people in Britain feel towards Black and people, isn’t hugely different to the prejudices that upper class people have towards those working class people acting out on what has been fermented in them: a misguided belief in their own natural superiority. This former ‘hierarchy’ has all but disappeared but some lament this, some don’t understand that some of the immigrant cultures work harder and take more interest in opportunities for self-advancement that the British state provides through schooling. Some see things in economic terms rather than cultural. The state wants us to see things in cultural terms and, because we generally don’t do well at school, and a key piece of learning in school is the difference between fact and fiction, we believe what they want us to believe.
The ghetto is not limited to the local. Attachment to place also manifests in adherence to that key tool of a dictatorial establishment: the collective narcissism of patriotism. It is, to Orwell, “a connecting thread”[6] that runs through all classes, but it manifests in different ways: “the famous ‘insularity’ and ‘xenophobia’ of the English is far stronger in the working class than in the bourgeoisie. In all countries, the poor are more national than the rich, but the English working class are outstanding in their abhorrence of foreign habits.”[7] Patriotism is a universal delusion, keenly felt in all classes, but the patriotism of the ruling class is an act of misrecognition. Were they at all conscious of the morality of their actions, they would not claim it; but they have to abide by the first commandment: “they had to feel themselves patriots, even while they plundered their countrymen.”[8]
[1] Akala – The Battle of Britishness in the Age of Brexit
[2] Hanif Kureshi – The Buddha of Suburbia, Faber & Faber 1990, p149
[3] Owen Jones, Chavs: The Demonisation of the Working Class (London: Verso, 2011) p.116
[4] It’s pretty ugly all the same whatever the intention behind it.
[5] (The most interesting of these is the wrong attribution of the first black player to play for England. Popular imagination and public record has it that it was Viv Anderson who was the first black England international, but this may not be true. In 1968 the Leeds fullback of the time, Paul Reaney, came on as a sub against Bulgaria. While Reaney himself did not regard himself as a black player, his heritage would probably now be regarded as dual. The pressures that might make such a disavowal of heritage were clearly in place at that time and certainly the brilliant West Bromwich and Coventry centre forward, Cyrille Regis, was subject to vile unbelievably abuse).
[6] George Orwell, The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius (London: Penguin Modern Classics, 2018) p.16
[7] George Orwell, The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius (London: Penguin Modern Classics, 2018) p.16
[8] George Orwell, The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius (London: Penguin Modern Classics, 2018) p.23