Boris Johnson's Tory government have opened up a new front in their nauseating culture war, by trying to blame the term "white privilege" for catastrophic failings in the educations system, that leave working class kids (white and non-white alike) at huge disadvantages in comparison to kids from wealthier backgrounds.
I'm going to give a non-exhaustive list of other factors that are infinitely more damaging to the prospects of working class kids than this term, but first I'll briefly explain what "white privilege" actually means.
The term certainly doesn't mean that all white people are wealthy and privileged, only a fool or someone who is trying to fool you would try to argue that.
It means that in a still-racist society there are advantages to being white.
White people are obviously less likely to suffer institutional racism like being harassed by the police or denied painkillers when seriously ill; we're less likely to have our CVs immediately thrown in the bin for having non-white sounding names; and we don't have to face disgusting examples of inter-personal racism like the majority of non-white people have experienced in their lifetimes.
This obviously doesn't mean that life is a bed of roses for all white people, because there are all kinds of other forms of discrimination such as classism, sexism, homophobia and other forms of anti-queer bigotry, ageism, persecution of the disabled, persecution of the neurodiverse ...
Only those with malicious intentions would even try to portray recognising that whiteness is an advantage in a racist society as some kind of attack on poor white people, which brings us to the Tory government, and their woeful efforts to hide their own catastrophic failings behind yet more culture war bollocks.
So here are eleven things that are infinitely more damaging to the prospects of working class kids than the existence of the term "white privilege".
1. Education cuts
Ever since the Lib-Dems enabled them back into power in 2010, the Tories have been inflicting brutal cuts on England's education budget, with the worst cuts of all concentrated in the poorest areas of the country. This means that working class kids have borne the brunt of this deliberate Tory strategy of under-funding the education system, and trashing the nation's future economic potential.
How dare they pretend to give a damn about the prospects of working class kids, when their own longstanding policy is to systematically underfund the schools these working class kids attend?
2. Tuition fees
When the Tories and Lib-Dems colluded to triple university tuition fees, and bring in rip-off new repayment terms (inflation +3%) they ensured that kids from poor and ordinary backgrounds would need to drive themselves tens of thousands of pounds into debt just to get their degrees, and that the vast majority of post-2012 graduates (83%) would never be able to pay these debts off despite making entire working lifetimes of repayments.
Is it even possible to think of a better way of putting working class kids off academic attainment, than telling them they'll have to suffer an entire lifetime of unpayable debt if they aspire to go to university?
3. Youth service cuts
Anyone who claims to give the slightest damn about kids in deprived working class communities should be championing youth services aimed at honing kids' talents, giving them social skills, and keeping them away from crime and drugs.
The Tory government has been relentlessly slashing youth services budgets to the bone (70% cut in less than a decade).
4. Sure Start
If you want to give kids the best possible opportunities in life, it's crucial to begin the positive impact as soon as possible, which is why, despite their many other faults, the 1997-2010 Labour government did a great job in setting up Sure Start.
Despite the overwhelming evidence that Sure Start is extremely beneficial to kids' prospects, the Tories have slashed it to pieces since 2010, resulting in 500+ closures, and once again, the worst cuts have been reserved for the most disadvantaged areas.
5. Free School meals
Anyone who claims to care about the prospects of working class kids wouldn't hesitate for a second over providing free school meals during a global pandemic, because there's mountains of evidence that well-fed kids concentrate better and get better grades, while starving hungry and malnourished kids often fail to live up to their academic potential.
But we've all seen how the Tory government repeatedly voted against providing free school meals during the coronavirus pandemic, and had to be shamed into action by the footballer Marcus Rashford, on more than one occasion.
6. Social security cuts
Since 2010 the Tory government has implemented round after round of savage social security cuts. It hardly takes a genius to understand that policies like slashing working tax credits and cutting entitlement to child tax credits and child benefit would end up having profoundly negative consequences for children in the poorest families.
But there's just something in the Tory mentality that gives them a perverse sense of pleasure at the idea of punishing the poor for their poverty, and ensuring that their kids grow up even poorer too.
7. Adult education cuts
Since 2010 the Tories have relentlessly attacked adult education spending, even though any sane government would be investing in adult education in order to ensure that the economy has a skilled and flexible workforce, and so that workers have the means and ability to retrain should they lose their jobs.
The Tories clearly don't want a modern, flexible, highly-skilled workforce, they want to minimise retraining opportunities, and ensure working class people who lose their jobs end up languishing in exploitative low-pay gig economy jobs, working for capitalist mega-corporations, because their retraining options are so severely limited.
And to make things even worse, despite all of his cheery rhetoric about investment and upskilling, Johnson's government is pressing ahead with yet another round of cuts to adult education spending.
8. Wage repression
After the Tories came to power in 2010 they imposed the longest sustained period of wage repression since records began.
There's basically no better strategy to erode the prospects of working class kids, than to spend the best part of a decade systematically eroding the real value of their parents' wages, and ensuring that when these kids do eventually enter the workforce, they'll be earning less in real terms than those who were entering the workforce a decade previously!
9. School privatisation
Since 2010 the Tories have been overseeing an extraordinary programme of school privatisation in England, to such an extent that 75% of English secondary schools are now controlled by private profiteering pseudo-charities called "Academy Chains" (many of them owned and operated by major Tory party donors).
These profiteers aren't allowed to leech profits out of the education system in shareholder dividends because of their so-called charitable status, but there are loads of other ways of soaking cash out of our kids' education budgets into private pockets, not least vastly inflated six figure salaries for profiteering academy chain directors and their cronies, and endless tides of massive untendered supply contracts handed out to their friends and family.
If you think that the existence of the term "white privilege" has more to do with working class academic under-achievement than this widespread looting of education budgets by Tory party donors and assorted other spivs and profiteers, there's something seriously wrong with the way you're looking at the world.
10. Soaring child poverty
Several of the aforementioned issues, like social security cuts and Tory wage repression have combined to drive half a million more kids into poverty over the last five years, with a shocking 75% of all the kids in poverty, now living in a household where at least one adult works.
It's utterly obscene for the Tories to pretend that they give a damn about working class kids, when their own policies have resulted in hundreds of thousands more kids growing up in dire poverty, and literally millions of kids learning the very early life lesson that 'work doesn't pay', because they see their parents struggling in destitution, despite having jobs.
11. Classism
Britain has one of the most rigid and persistent class hierarchies in the world. The wealthy privately-educated 7% minority are vastly over-represented in politics, corporate media, the judiciary, corporate boardrooms, and the top-paying public service jobs.
Two of our last three Prime Ministers went to the exact same elitist private school, which charges vastly more than the average annual salary in yearly fees.
People still use ludicrous anachronistic terms like lord, baroness, and sir in all seriousness, and we've still got unelected hereditary peers in the House of Lords for pity's sake.
The evidence shows that people from working class backgrounds, with regional accents, are routinely paid thousands of pounds per year less than the posh, for doing exactly the same work.
And the current Prime Minister is a hateful elitist, who used incredibly derogatory language to attack working class children as "ill-raised, ignorant, aggressive, and illegitimate" in a disgusting tirade in which he also derided working class men as "drunk, criminal, aimless, feckless, and hopeless".
Is it any wonder at all that society is geared to fail working class kids, when we insist on picking sneering elitists like Johnson to run the show?
Conclusion
If you look at their actual track record in government, it's obvious that the Tories have been conducting class warfare against the working class.
They've slashed education budgets, handed control of schools to a bunch of sleazy profiteers, gutted youth services, ruined sure start, smashed the adult education system to pieces, and imposed rip-off unpayable student debts.
Beyond their outright vandalism of the social ladder, to make it so much harder for working class kids to escape poverty, they've also been actively making the poverty worse with their twin agenda of wage repression and social security cuts.
And these Tory vermin think that they can just hide this dreadful and downright malicious track record behind a smokescreen of vapid and divisive culture war bollocks about the term "white privilege".
The reason they think they can get away with pushing this absolute gibberish is that they're confident that the majority of the lower orders (as they see us) have been leaving the education system with such under-developed critical thinking skills, that we won't even notice that we're being duped into blaming "woke teachers" or whatever, rather than the powerful elitists who actually run the country, and are obviously to blame.
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Tory Brextremist Jacob Rees-Mogg has provoked outrage by insinuating that the victims of the Grenfell Tower fire deserved to die because they lacked "common sense".
Rees-Mogg made these outrageously callous comments in an interview with LBC's Nick Ferrari, in which he tried to desperately spin the findings of the first report into the Grenfell fire to the advantage of the Tory party.
For some unfathomable reason the inquiry into Grenfell fire has been split into two segments, one critiquing the response of the fire service, and completely ignoring the decision to cover the building in highly flammable cladding because it was fractionally cheaper than the fire proof stuff, followed by another report into the actual causal factors to be released after the general election.
The first report criticised the fire brigade for advising people to stay in their flats, rather than advising them to attempt to escape down the smoke-clogged stairwell, but no attention was paid to the fact that this kind of cladding fire was unprecedented in Britain, nor the Tory government's failure to inform the fire brigade that they had allowed hundreds of buildings up and down the country to be turned into similar fire traps, so that they could consider actually altering their protocols.
Rees-Mogg seized on the "stay indoors" advice to claim that he would have been clever enough to fully appreciate the scale of the fire from within his flat, ignore the advice, and flee down the smoke filled stairs.
Rees-Mogg's callously insinuated that the victims died because they were too stupid to ignore official advice, rather than because the local Tory council turned their building into a deadly fire trap to save an absurdly small amount of money.
This insinuation betrays the elitist mentality that's all-too-common in the Tory circles that the likes of Rees-Mogg move in: The idea that the rich are rich because they're morally, genetically, and intellectually superior to the poor.
The idea that rich Tory elitists in a burning building wouldn't panic, but calmly assess the scale of the fire for themselves, with such impeccable intuition that they automatically understand the situation far better than fire service professionals with decades of experience outside.
According to this warped worldview the poor people died not because they were treated with contempt by an elitist Tory council who couldn't give a damn about the desperate and dangerous living conditions of the "the lower orders", but because of their inherent inferiority to the Tory elitist class.
If only they'd been morally, genetically, and intellectually superior like Rees-Mogg and his Tory mates, then they would all have survived the fire by virtue of their inherent excellence.
And besides, they would never have been living in a decrepit death trap of a building anyway, because they would have had the good sense and intuition to have been born into good genetic stock, a luxuriant country estate, an Eton education that costs more than the average salary in annual fees, and an automatic place at the top table of society like plucky quick-witted Jacob, wouldn't they?
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The majority of our political class live in bubbles of wealth, power, and privilege that most of us could only imagine, swanning around from one lavish and oh-so-important event to another barely ever having to interact with ordinary people (or the lower orders as they tend to think of us).
Last night the Tory establishment class gathered for a speech by Tory Chancellor Philip Hammond at Mansion House, but this time some of the lower orders managed to get in and start making a fuss about climate change (you know, unrestrained capitalism is wrecking the planet, we've got to do something about it before it's too late ... that kind of entirely justifiable point).
The Tory establishment class are used to having things their own way, as they've been for centuries, so they don't take kindly to interruptions, especially when they're busy giving important self-congratulatory speeches about how wonderfully they've been doing overseeing the slowest economic recovery in centuries, the worst period of collapsing workers' wages on record, soaring rates of poverty, collapsing public services, and wanton vandalism of the social safety net.
The impertinence of these Tory safe space-invading protesters was all too much for the Tory MP Mark Field, who furiously leapt from his seat grabbed one of the protesters, violently shoved her against a pillar, and then dragged her away by the back of the neck.
The footage is shocking, and it certainly puts a lot of the right-wing faux outrage over political violence and free speech into clear contrast:
Lobbing milkshake on Nigel Farage generated torrents of 'this terrorism is the death of democracy' outrage.
A crap joke by a comedian was dressed up as 'incitement to political violence'.
And every time a right-wing hate preacher gets themselves kicked off a social media platform for breaking the community standards it's hailed as another example of 'the death of free speech'.
But when a powerful Tory MP and government minister literally attacks a woman and drags her out of the room for daring to interrupt when her Tory 'lords and masters' were speaking, and suddenly it's 'he did the right thing' and 'she was asking for it'!
The outrage only ever goes one way, until the violence and repression of dissent comes from their side, they're suddenly making excuses for it!
But the worst thing of all isn't Mark Field's display of elitist violence against political dissent, nor is it the naked hypocrisy of right-wing faux outrage about violence and free speech, it's the fact that nobody else in the entire room full of Tory toffs sought to intervene, or to even tell him to stop.
As far as the room was concerned this violent and repressive response to political dissent wasn't even vaguely shocking.
It's bad enough seeing ugly bile-spewing right-wing Twitter trolls banging on about how the protester got what she deserved, but the absolute non-reaction of the rest of the Tory toffs in the room as one of their own behaved in this atrocious manner tells you that they have the same mindset as the Tory Twitter trolls.
Of course they're far too refined to overtly blabber it out on Twitter in the hope of winding up social liberals and lefties, but their silence and non-reaction speaks louder than words.
These people weren't outraged because they simply saw nothing to be outraged about.
And these arrogant elitist toffs are the people we've let rule over us for the last nine years.
No wonder the country is in such an absolute mess.
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As the rest of us were celebrating the New Year, the Tories decided to quietly sneak out an announcement that they'd appointed the vile hard-right polemicist Toby Young to their new (and supposedly impartial) universities watchdog.
Within a matter of hours it became clear that the Tories had failed to do even the slightest due diligence on the guy they were handing a job to. Not only did Toby Young have a disgusting back catalogue of misogynistic, homophobic, and downright disgusting Tweets, he'd also been attending secretive pro-eugenics conferences full of white supremacists and paedophilia apologists, and writing articles attempting to rehabilitate the concept of eugenics.
Eventually, after a nine day shit-storm over his repulsive comments and views, Toby Young resigned, and any sensible and/or vaguely competent political party would have looked into how they managed to appoint someone with such an appalling track record, but not the Tories.
On the very same day that Toby Young resigned over his back catalogue of despicable articles and Tweets, Theresa May appointed the recently elected Tory MP Ben Bradley as Vice Chair for Youth.
Apparently his job would be to get more young people to engage with the Conservative party.
Had they bothered to check Bradley's Internet history before appointing him, they would have come across a truly disgusting blog post calling for the sterilisation of unemployed people, as if unemployment is some kind of genetic disease, rather than a necessary condition in capitalist economies.
I mean just think about it, how else are the exploitative capitalist class going to extract as much profit from the labour force as possible if there isn't a permanent pool of unemployed workers ready to replace any worker who agitates too loudly for pay raises or better working conditions?
One of the most shocking things about his elitist views on unemployment is that Bradley is the first ever Tory MP in the former mining town of Mansfield.
If anyone should know that unemployment can be thrust upon people, families, and even entire communities through no fault of their own, then surely it's people in a former mining town that was socially and economically decimated by the closure of the mines (as well as the textiles industry and the Mansfield brewery)?
But no, they've actually gone and elected this elitist Tory prig as their MP.
How someone with such vile elitist views about the sterilisation of the poor ever made it through the selection process to become a Tory parliamentary candidate is bizarre enough, but his appointment to Theresa May's government as a kind of youth engagement officer, well it just defies belief doesn't it?
Bradley and his right-wing backers have attempted to defend his comments by making out they happened ages ago, but 2012 wasn't that long ago, and his comments were made in defence of Iain Duncan Smith's welfare cuts, as if sterilisation of the unemployed is somehow a natural extension of Tory party welfare policy.
We all know that if Labour (or any other political party) had appointed someone with such vile views to an official position, the Tories, the right-wing dominated print media, and the Guido Fawkes smear-mongering operation would be in all out attack mode over it. But because this guy is a Tory, they're churning out excuses, and pretending that the Tory mask hasn't slipped.
Theresa May has decided that someone who has so recently expressed such vile elitist views is an appropriate person to try to engage young people with right-wing politics.
But the truth is obvious for everyone to see. Not only did the Tory party welcome Bradley with open arms and promote him to an official position within the party, and either they did no due diligence on his background at any state, or they did do due diligence and concluded that sterilise the poor blog posts are well aligned with the Tory party ethos.
The Tory mask has well and truly slipped, and Theresa May's decision to let Bradley keep his job could well backfire. Perhaps he has more extreme pro-eugenics views lurking around in his past, and even if not, any youth Bradley tries to get hooked on right-wing politics can be easily warded off with warnings "don't listen to him, he's the sterilise the poor guy".
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The BBC's Nick Robinson (a former chair of the Oxford University Conservative Association) has desperately tried to discredit independent media by saying that criticism of the BBC is so persistent that it's negatively affecting public perceptions of mainstream media, and also accused independent media of living in a "social media bubble".
I'll tell you what really negatively affects people's perceptions of the BBC. It's stuff like the BBC politics editor Robbie Gibb moving directly from the supposedly impartial BBC directly to Theresa May's propaganda team at 10 Downing Street, BBC journalists like Laura Kuenssberg fabricating fake news stories to attack Jeremy Corbyn and being allowed to get away with it without punishment, and the shockingly biased BBC coverage of stuff like the Scottish Independence referendum (massive anti-Independence bias that was obvious to all but the most rabid of Unionists) and the General Election debates (Jeremy Corbyn getting relentlessly grilled on his sticky subjects while Theresa May was tossed one ridiculous softball question after another).
As for living in bubbles, it's not the diverse range of independent media journalists who are living in a deluded political bubble, it's clearly the mainstream media journalists who operate in the cosy Westminster clique alongside the politicians they're supposed to be holding to account.
How else is it possible to explain that the political class and Westminster bubble journos were both so ridiculously out of touch with the public mood that their only debate about Theresa May's vanity election was whether she'd end up with a super-majority of 100+ or a mega-majority of 150+?
Mainstream media journalists have become so absorbed in the Westminster political bubble that they've ended up uncritically repeating the tropes that are circulating amongst the privileged political class (many of whom went to the exact same elitist private schools as they did) instead of actually trying to hold the political class to account for their actions.
All too often mainstream journos just regurgitate these delusional tropes from Westminster bubble as if they're news, whilst basically ignoring the serious real life issues faced by ordinary people (the lower orders) like the unprecedented ongoing Tory wage slump since 2010, the systematic abuse of disabled people, the housing crisis, and the critical state of the NHS, the education system, local government services, and the rail network.
Their total immersion in the insular Westminster bubble perspective is the reason so many mainstream media journos were flabbergasted and completely incapable of understanding how Theresa May lost her majority on election night.
The gradual realisation that independent media had a significant role to play in the result that took the mainstream journos by such surprise has got them fired up and angry.
They're furious because they see themselves as the true and only legitimate gatekeepers of public opinion, and they can't stand the idea that uppity plebs from ordinary backgrounds are now using social media to influence public opinion away from the predetermined news agenda favoured by the elitist establishment class of Westminster politicians, mainstream media hacks, and corporate fat cats.
People like Nick Robinson are outraged because they tried every propaganda trick in the book to guide the public into handing Theresa May a huge parliamentary majority, but we didn't do as we were told, shopping around for news that better matches our own perception of reality than the ludicrous tropes that emanate from the Westminster bubble and get magnified by the BBC and the rest of the mainstream media.
Just hours after Robinson fearfully aimed both barrels at independent media the Tories shot a massive great hole in his already sinking argument by parachuting the former chair of the BBC Trust Rona Fairhead into the unelected House of Lords to take up a ministerial position in Theresa May's government!
How on earth is anyone expected to believe that the BBC are actually an impartial public service broadcaster when these days they're obviously more of a fertile recruiting ground for new members of the Tory government than an institution committed to holding the Tory government to account?
But Robinson and his ilk would have you believe that any critical coverage of the revolving door between the BBC and the Tory party, or the desperately deteriorating standard of BBC political coverage, is some kind of nasty conspiracy spread by sinister forces who are intent on upsetting the natural order of things.
As far as they're concerned the intimate relationship between the BBC and the Tory government is all above board and nothing to worry about.
And it's this complacency and complicity that is the main reason that their influence is being gradually eroded by independent media journalists who cover politics from outside the confines of the insidious Westminster bubble.
Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.
I wouldn't normally react to a political rant written by a model I'd never even heard of because there are more important things going on in the world, but the way Munroe Bergdorf has been turned into some kind of heroic martyr after getting sacked by L'Oreal for her all white people are racist rant, I think it's important to criticised the misplaced hero worship and adoration she's receiving.
Firstly I'll begin by quoting what she actually said to get herself fired (with important bits in bold).
"Honestly I don't have energy to talk about the racial violence of white people any more. Yes ALL white people.
Because most of ya'll don't even realise or refuse to acknowledge that your existence, privilege and success as a race is built on the backs, blood and death of people of colour. Your entire existence is drenched in racism. From micro-aggressions to terrorism, you guys built the blueprint for this s***.
Come see me when you realise that racism isn't learned, it's inherited and consciously or unconsciously passed down through privilege.
Once white people begin to admit that their race is the most violent and oppressive force of nature on Earth… then we can talk. Until then stay acting shocked about how the world continues to stay f***** at the hands of your ancestors and your heads that remain buried in the sand with hands over your ears."
ALL white people
Monroe Bergdorf clearly accused all white people of being guilty of racial violence. There is no ambiguity here. She even used all caps to emphasise the point that she was making her accusations against ALL white people.
The dictionary definition of racism (Merriam Webster) is that it is "a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race".
Accusing all white-skinned people of being guilty of racial violence, and claiming that white people are the most violent and oppressive force of nature on earth is brazen and obvious racism because it's defining people by the colour of their skin, not by the content of their character.
White supremacy
Several people have presented that the fact that she got sacked for this blatantly racist rant as some kind of proof of white supremacy.
One excruciating Independent article (that failed to even disclose what the model said so that the reader could make up their own minds about whether she was just "speaking out against racist rhetoric" as the article claimed, or spewing racist rhetoric herself) even painted her as a "trailblazer to lose out on opportunities for calling out the insidious ways that racism functions"!
In reality the fact that she got sacked is proof of nothing except the fact that L'oreal is a corporation that considers anti-white racist views incompatible with their brand identity.
As someone who is considered by many to be a radical leftist I don't often find myself defending massive corporations, but the decision to fire a brand ambassador who decided to attack a huge swathe of their own customer base as being guilty of racial violence simply because of the colour of their skin, doesn't actually seem that outrageous at all.
Of course white supremacy exists, there's no debate about that. We just need to recall the events at Charlottesville, or any number of other violent extreme-right rallies, or the hateful bile spread in online hate chambers like Britain First to see that this sickening white supremacist ideology persists, but a model getting sacked for spewing anti-white racism isn't proof of anything except the fact that overt racism of all forms is unacceptable.
Only whites can be racist?
Not only does Bergdorf accuse all white people of being guilty of racial violence, she also seems to suggest that white-skinned people are the only ones who are capable of being racist because racism is supposedly learned and passed down through white privilege.
Of course this theory of racism is narrow-minded rubbish that ignores all of the countless examples of non-white racism like the ethnic genocide in Rwanda and the oppression of the Kurds in the middle east, through to the huge increase in white-on-white racism that has happened in the UK since the Brexit vote.
But what really rubs it in is that this ridiculous theory that racism is propagated only by white privilege is being expressed in the very same statement as a load of blatantly racist anti-white rhetoric.
Collective responsibility
Bergdorf accuses white people of having their heads buried in the sand over the crimes of our ancestors and ignoring the fact that empires of privilege were built through the exploitation of people of colour.
As an anti-imperialist I'm well aware of the way the British empire was built on exploitation and I don't need some racist rant from some model I'd never even heard of to accuse me (and all other white-skinned people) of racial violence and wilful ignorance to accept the fact.
Aside from understanding the depravity of the imperialist exploitation and genocide that built the wealth of Britain, the United States and numerous other western countries, I'm also well aware that the victims were not always people of colour.
I'm from a working class background and I have some Irish heritage, so I know perfectly well that while the establishment class were building up the vast fortunes they maintain today.
Not only did the British ruling establishment build their fortunes on the backs of people of colour across the empire, they ruthlessly exploited the white working class in Britain too in their mines, in their sweatshops, and on their battlefields.
When it comes to imperialism, the occupation of Ireland was absolute proof that when it came to exploitation, genocide and famine, the British ruling class drew little distinction between white Irish people and people of colour elsewhere in the empire.
So why, just because of the colour of my skin, should I bear collective responsibility for the crimes of exploitation the British ruling establishment committed against my white working class ancestors to build their fortunes, and their savage repression of my Irish ancestors?
Tarring all white-skinned people as being collectively guilty for the crimes committed by some white people in the past isn't just ill-considered as a tactic for getting white people to consider the history of oppression that others have suffered, it's downright racist.
Imagine if someone tried to argue that all black people are collectively responsible for the crimes of Idi Amin, or Mobutu Sese Seko, or that all Asians are collectively responsible for the crimes of Japan during WWII or the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.
There would rightly be an absolute uproar about it, but when it comes to tarring people with white skin with the imperialist genocide and exploitation of the past, there are many who actually laud this kind of racism as if it's the wonderfully progressive anti-racism of a heroic trailblazer for freedom!
Privilege
Of course white privilege exists. Countless studies have proven stuff like white sounding names on identical CVs achieve far more success than non-white sounding names, however white privilege isn't the only form of privilege.
In the United Kingdom it's been proven that people from non-elitist backgrounds get paid thousands of pounds per year less than people from establishment backgrounds for doing exactly the same job.
Talk to anyone with a physical disability or a mental health condition about the way they are discriminated against.
Anyone who sees the world in terms of ALL white people being privileged and ALL people of colour being oppressed is thinking in a childishly two dimensional manner.
As a transgender person Bergdorf should know that privilege is a multifaceted issue that involves race, sex, class, creed, age, sexual orientation, physical and cognitive abilities and countless other things, but she decided to paint it in absolute terms as a skin colour issue in her rant.
In the 21st Century UK an able bodied, wealthy person of colour who has been educated at an elitist private school obviously has far more privilege than a white person from an ordinary working class background, a regional accent and a physical or mental disability.
How to alienate people
Issues like the legacies of imperialism and exploitation, continuing race discrimination, privilege and widespread indifference/denial are incredibly important, but to frame such important issues in the context of a racist anti-white tirade is massively counter-productive.
You don't engage people into thinking about these issues by furiously deriding them as massively ignorant and violent racists who are automatically defined as guilty simply because of the colour of their skin.
Such a confrontational and openly racist approach to these issues is clearly likely to be severely counter-productive, because tying these issues up with displays of brazen anti-white racism is more likely to turn people away from giving them proper consideration than it is to suddenly wake them up.
Publicity
Bergdorf may have got herself sacked as a brand ambassador for L'oreal, but she's certainly whipped up a mass of free publicity with her racist rant.
Instead of being just some obscure model few people had ever heard of, she's now being championed as some kind of heroic anti-racism campaigner by people too thick to see that ranting about "ALL white people" is the polar opposite of anti-racism.
It seems that social media platforms, and especially Twitter, have created an appalling online environment where calm and considered analyses usually get ignored, and the people who spread the most extreme views get the bulk of the publicity.
If you want to get a following of millions for your views on immigration and Islam, call refugees "cockroaches" and propose a "final solution" for the Muslim problem. Even if you get sacked from your radio show, it'll be worth it for the storm of free publicity.
And if you want to be lauded as a hero by right-on liberals, don't talk about issues like imperialism and privilege in rational evidence based terms, furiously generalise that all white people are violent and wilfully ignorant racists. Even if you get sacked as a brand ambassador for L'oreal, it'll be worth it for the storm of free publicity.
Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.
On Wednesday 30th August 2017 the right-wing blogger Guido Fawkes landed a massive scoop. He was sent screenshots of an outrageous WhatsApp chat between a load of elitist young Tory activists fantasising about the Nazi policies they would like to impose on "Chavs".
Members of the WhatsApp group behind the shambolic fake-grassroots pro-Tory "Activate" campaign joked about setting up a concentration camp, gassing them, using them to conduct medical experiments on, and forced sterilisation.
We all know that if it had been a bunch of pro-Corbyn Labour members who were caught joking and fantasising about Nazi style genocide against poor people (or anyone else), the story would have been rolling headline news for days, with countless outrage pieces in all the right-wing tabloids, and mainstream media journalists haranguing Jeremy Corbyn to apologise in person for the behaviour of his supporters.
In reality critical mainstream media stories about the Nazi-Tories were only run by The Independent and The Daily Mirror, and nobody has confronted Theresa May in order to demand that she apologise in person for this outrageous behaviour from her supporters.
The Daily Mail even ran an extraordinary cover-up piece in which they made their own excuses, allowed several Tories to make excuses and fake apologies, and didn't include a single critical quote from opposition parties, anti-Nazi activists.
The right-wing tabloid hacks who usually trawl Guido Fawkes looking for stories, and who would spew reams of outrage had the comments been made by Labour or SNP youngsters, have steadfastly ignored and downplayed the Nazi-Tory story in the hope that it will just go away.
The reason of course is that this Guido Fawkes story fails to confirm to the overarching mainstream media narrative that Jeremy Corbyn's brand of centre-left democratic socialism is dangerous and extreme, while Theresa May's neoliberal fanaticism (austerity dogma, privatisation mania, rundown of the NHS, lavish tax cuts for corporations and the mega-rich, brutal social security cuts for the disabled and the working poor ...) is sensible and moderate.
A useful comparison is the way the mainstream media swooped on another Guido Fawkes story about Jeremy Corbyn breaking his so-called promise to eradicate all student debt. It didn't matter a jot to mainstream media hacks that Corbyn never actually made the promise he was accused of breaking, because their primary objective isn't actually to report the news, it's to attack perceived threats to the neoliberal status quo.
The mainstream media stretched out a fake Guido Fawkes story about Corbyn's so-called promise to eradicate student debt into a week worth of rolling anti-Corbyn news, and their complete bypassing of this real story about the shocking attitudes of a bunch of young Tories. this contrast is extraordinary, but totally predictable.
The way the Nazi-Tory story has been ignored and downplayed is yet another demonstration that significant swathes of the mainstream media are part of the establishment machine, and share exactly the same wealthy and privileged backgrounds as the young Nazis in the Tory party.
These mercenary hacks see their job as the moral guardians of this system of wealth and privilege, so they'll gladly spew faux outrage about a fake anti-Corbyn story for days on end, but when it comes to fellow members of the privileged elite gleefully fantasising about imposing genocidal policies on the "lower orders" they have either ignored it completely, or if they have mentioned it, they've tried to downplay it in terms of being youthful high jinks that got out of hand, or by crudely deflecting onto issues in other political parties (whataboutery).
The fact that the mainstream press have systematically ignored/downplayed the story because it doesn't conform to the overarching narrative that they're trying to push is indicative of a much bigger story:
The corporate mainstream media are even more biased than the heavily right-wing biased Guido Fawkes blog that actually broke the story!
There's no way they'd ever try to frame the story as being an indication of the endemic elitism within the Tory party, or of the extreme-right views that have persisted within the Tory party ever since the anti-Semitic Right Club and the pro-Nazi Anglo-German Link group in the 1930s.
They would never frame it in that way because their job is to make Tory elitism and hard-right economic dogma look palatable, and to attack anything that questions the elitist hard-right orthodoxy as terrifyingly dangerous extremism.
Thus the widespread use of intensely biased ignore/downplay tactics by the mainstream media. The fact that the story is being downplayed and ignored so systematically is actually a much bigger story than the leaked Nazi fantasies of these horrible little Tory elitists ever actually was because it's a crystal clear demonstration that elitist mainstream media hacks will deliberately ignore or downplay incredibly juicy stories if they don't conform to the overarching narratives they're trying to brainwash the lower orders with.
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