These are just a few of the experiences that those from a visible ethnic minority have to deal with regulalry – you may have even failed to notice – until now – that you don’t’ have to deal with the same barriers. It is important to be aware that being born with a certain skin tone affords people certain advantage in life that people of another skin colour are not afforded. By creating greater awareness and understanding we help to build a fairer and more equitable society for future generations.
Apparently it doesn’t include spelling or grammar.
Because of the intersectional nature of society, this means that it’s incredibly likely you have experienced some form of oppression – the gender pay gap is still 18.4%.
Or statistical numeracy. Or even logic – as we all know some to all of that gap is because of voluntary differences in male and female behaviour.
For example, while white British women are paid on average £11.21 per hour, Pakistani women make £10.10.
That’s casuistry – black British women get paid more than white. Sure, largely a London effect but still.
BAME* young carers and their families identified language barriers as one of the key reasons they’re unable to access support.
And isn’t that just a surprise. Not speaking the language of the country you’re in makes things difficult.
Do:
Be open to start the conversation with others who are interested and willing to learn, even if they don’t understand.
Share fact-checked resources, examples, information and statistics with others.
Look after your mental health, and take breaks where needed.
Keep cool – stick to the facts and show some patience.
Pause the conversation with someone refusing to listen – suggest they continue their research.
And when do these ghastly little shits start to do any of that themselves?
“For example, while white British women are paid on average £11.21 per hour, Pakistani women make £10.10.”
I wonder what ‘cultural practices’ could possibly stop Pakistani women from making lucrative careers outside the home?
Pause the conversation with someone refusing to listen – suggest they continue their research.
Did Captain Potato write this stuff?
I know I could have. Although I’d be more likely to deploy STFU than “pause the conversation”. It’s by far the best defense against people like this.
On the basis that, in Birmingham anyway, there are third-generation UK-born Pakistani women who are unable to speak english, one would consider it to be a slight handicap to achieving decently-paid gainful employment.
remember when Barnardo’s was about getting abandoned urchins off the streets, giving them a home and 3 square meals?
@BonM4: mission creep. It’s good news, actually, it means there are no more abandoned urchins on the streets.
How did white people, never more than 10% of the global population, acquire this privilege? To the ignorant, uninformed observer, it almost appears as if they are superior to other races. Clearly, this cannot be the case, so there must be some other explanation in which white people, despite being numerically disadvantaged, nefariously obtained this privilege from gentle, peaceful, trusting non-white people.
Ethnic minorities fare badly in all societies at times, ask the Tutsi in Rwanda for example and White farmers in Zimbabwe.
A white guy walks into a bar in Mogadishu. They kill him.
I like the Dan Hannan thought experiment – you’re an alien parked invisibly in earth orbit in 1420. Your colleague invites you to a bet – which territory will have the most profound effect on this planet in the next 600 years when we return. You would surely have bet Ottoman or Ming.
Funny how one’s views change. When I was a kid, at one time we lived not far from the Barnado’s Home at Barkingside. Used to see into it over the fence from the top deck of the bus. Those days I was incredibly envious of the inmates. A Childrens’ Village where you lie with other kids rather than having to suffer parents. But I never remember actually seeing any of them outside of the place, although I’d presume some must have attended local schools. Maybe I was looking for the wrong thing. For some reason I associated Barnado’s with those plaster statues of a little girl holding a box for charity donations was stood outside high street shops. And had the idea that to live in this paradise you had to wear leg-irons. Not sure if it’s still there. The fences came down sometime in the late ’70s. Maybe it’s now a Woken SS training camp. Wiki mentions a Barnardo’s Barkingside regeneration programme & them employing 450 people on the site. But nothing whatsoever about children.
” Childrens’ Village where you lie with other kids rather ”
Freudian slip.
Live. Of course.
And another point. Part of the site was redeveloped as the rather modernistic Barkingside Magistrates Court. Widely regarded as the Centre For Outdoor Relief For The Criminal Classes.
Another in a rapidly expanding list of once worthy organisations I now feel no shame in not supporting by donation – eg RSPCA, National Trust, Tax Research LLP*
*not this last was never worthy
*note this last was never worthy
Sadly you can add the RNLI to that list following their their “burkinis for Madagascar” initiative.
There is no “white privilege” in this country. A privilege is something – a benefit, or an exemption from something onerous – available to all members of a particular group, simply by virtue of them being members. MPs have privileges. So do clergy. So do frequent flyers, and holders of Waitrose cards. Members of the aristocracy had privileges in the Middle Ages, and white people had privileges under apartheid. But there is currently no white privilege in the UK, because there is nothing that all white people, and only white people, can do, simply by virtue of their colour.
There are of course advantages that different groups have, and white people do seem to have a few. But not all that many. It’s certainly worth having a conversation about them, along with the advantages that other groups might get. But calling such things “privileges” merely serves to perpetuate the view that we are somehow “institutionally racist” and rotten to the core.
Sam Vara
Nope.
You’ve not understood how it works.
Naively, you think “privilege” is a word that means what it’s meant since at least the 1950s
It doesn’t
“White privilege” is a phrase used by a large number of people to mean essentially the same thing as “institutional racism”
That’s what they mean by it, and so that’s what it means.
Sad to see increasing chunks of the language get commandeered by woke f@clwits, but there y’go…
One of my ancestors – a prosperous businessman – was locally celebrated for the energy and money he devoted to Barnardo’s in its early days. Can I have the money back, please?
The claim, Sam, is that white accomplishment is achieved by privilege. You were given what you have*; you didn’t earn it. Since you didn’t earn it, it is not immoral to take it from you.
White privilege = kill the rich, take their stuff.
*It is never explained where what you have come from. If whites never produced anything, then where did all of it come from? “You didn’t make that!” – Barack Hussein Obama
@ Gamecock
Goebbels-type “repeat a big enough lie often enough”.
Occasionally people comment that I was privileged to receive my education, to which I reply that’s because I won a scholarship … I don’t add “so why didn’t you?”
john77
I shouldn’t wish to detract from the merit of your winning a scholarship but surely what of those of your contemporaries whose parents paid school fees, or other pupils who went to grammar schools or, yet again, other children today who go to the best state schools because their parents have bought expensive homes in the appropriate catchment areas: none of them need to apologise for usurping a place that would otherwise have been taken up by another.
One might as well apologise for being born as to feel like an interloper in someone else’s good fortune.
“I won a scholarship”
Gambling? Late night game show? Lottery? How did you “win” it?
Once had an interesting conversation with someone about growing up in an institution, the fact that he was referring to the Canadian Indian Residential Schools and I the English Care Homes system was secondary to our experiences.
Similarly I have many a good night out with rugby fans from all over the world
“I won a scholarship”
Gambling? Late night game show? Lottery? How did you “win” it?
Open competition. Same as me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_grant_grammar_school
The biggest problem with the concept of ‘white privilege’ is that it pathologises stuff we actually want. It’s not ‘white privilege’ that I can walk down the street without being hassled by the police; we want the police to stop being scumbags. It’s not ‘white privilege’ that I have a family that loves me; we want everyone to have a loving family.
Incidentally, a white security guard at the Manchester Arena didn’t accost the bomber, even though he had a bad feeling about him, because he was afraid he would be branded a racist. But we never talk about ‘brown privilege’.
White privilege doesn’t seem to extend to immunity from prosecution for drug dealing and street crime, carrying knives in public, not paying tax, multiple benefit fraud
It does seem to include a free pass for profanity in recorded music, heroic levels of misogyny, parental support to ones progeny by various partners, inability to articulate a sentence in the Queen’s English or intimidating ones way through life while simultaneously playing a ‘victim card’
does *also* seem
Ahem
Thanks Chris.
@ Gamecock I am old (or old-fashioned) enough to use “win” as succeeding in a competition as distinct from “being the recipient of unearned good fortune” – the latter (?American) use of the word would not make sense in my response to the envious/snide comment.
@ TMB
The point I was making that I was not awarded a place through the “old boy network” or whatever “privileged” mechanism that they wish to pretend exists but because I was deemed by my school and my college as being exceptionally fitted to benefit from the education they provided – an opportunity equally available to a boy from any country, class or creed (regardless of his parents’ wealth or lack thereof, which does affect the quality of education provided to those attending Comprehensive Schools, introduced to the UK by Tony Crosland after their failure to educate in the poor in the USA had been observed).
Statistics keep telling us that women live longer that man! When will governments legislate against this gender discrimination?