Wednesday, December 23, 2020 / 09.17AM /
OpEd By Ahmed Olayinka Sule, CFA* / Header Image Credit: Twitter
Dear Jemima,
I read with interest your article titled, "Classism is social activists'
forgotten prejudice" published in the 2 December 2020
edition of the Financial Times. You argue that to be a white working-class male
is often a marker of underprivilege. You note that while all sorts of bigotry
are shunned, "Ridiculing
someone for their lack of education, or for their social class, often appears
to remain acceptable." You also suggest that social activists
are not accepting of the plight of white working-class men as they see,
"whiteness, cisgenderness and maleness as the ultimate privileges."
Furthermore, you state that the prevalence of the cancellation culture makes it
difficult to make class issues the primary discriminatory factor relative to
racism and sexism.
Your article rests on three faulty pillars - First, it restricts the so-called working
class to a particular race and gender. Second, it affirms the humanity of the so-called white working-class man while
overlooking the humanity of so-called non-white working-class men and women. Third, it ignores the role white elites have
played racialising the working-class to maintain power. I will address these
flaws in the next couple of paragraphs.
In writing this piece, you join a long list of
thinkers and politicians from the Global North such as Owen Jones, Donald
Trump, Bernie Sanders, and Angus Deaton in whitewashing the working class as a
"Pale and Male" collective group. In his book titled Chavs- The
Demonization of the Working Class, Owen Jones mentions white working-class
sixty times while black or Asian working-class does not get a single mention.
Likewise, in your op-ed, which discusses classism, the words "white"
and "male" gets mentioned seven and four times, respectively. The
well-worn argument among white thinkers that if you are not working-class if
you are black, Asian, Roma or female needs rethinking.
It does not have to be a case of either classism or
racism/sexism, as you suggest. Why can't it be both/and? After all, these
strands of discrimination are not mutually exclusive. When we narrow our
discussion on classism to only white men, we get a whitewashed understanding of
what class discrimination is. Similarly, the focus on gender diversity to the
exclusion of racial diversity has led to a situation whereby the patriarchal
structure in corporate Britain is now morphing into a white matriarchy that excludes
women of colour. Furthermore, the focus on white working-class men would
suggest that sizeable portions of non-whites are part of the elites when this
is not the case.
Without a doubt, the so-called white working-class men
are getting the wrong side of the stick as you pointed out in your article.
However, when one takes other ethnicities out of the class analysis, the
suffering by the non-white working class goes unaddressed. The Racial Disparity Audit released by the British Government demonstrates that the non-white
working class is at the bottom of the class totem pole. According to the
report, Asian and Black households and those in the Other ethnic group were
more likely to be poor and were the most likely to be in persistent poverty. It
also states that Black, Pakistani, and Bangladeshi people are more likely to
live in areas of deprivation. Black adults were more likely than adults in
other ethnic groups to have been sectioned under the Mental Health Act. In contrast,
of those receiving psychological therapies, White adults experienced better
outcomes than those in other ethnic groups.
Despite these glaring disparities highlighted above,
it is the suffering white working-class that gets the attention of the media,
politicians, and academia partly because the humanity of white working-class
male is placed at a higher pedestal than the humanity of the non-white
working-class.
You cite a Princeton study, which reveals that "Middle-aged white working-class males'
"deaths of despair" have driven a decline in US life expectancy."
The ongoing opioid crisis devastating white communities across America has got
the attention of the political, academic and media class. In response to the
tens of thousands of Americans dying of drug overdose every year, the US
Government declared the opioid crisis a public health emergency in 2017. The
Trump Administration secured $6 billion in new funding over a two-year window to fight opioid abuse. In the following
year, the US Congress passed the single most extensive legislative package
addressing a single drug crisis in US history.
In contrast to the recent opioid crisis, the US
government declared War on Drugs during the crack epidemic of the 1980s, which
led to the demonisation and criminalisation of the black and Latino
working-class. In a paper titled, The War on Drugs That Wasn't, Julie Netherland and Helena Hansen note, "To date, we have seen no move to similarly
criminalise white suburbanites for their illegal use of prescription opioids
and heroin, even though the scope of this epidemic far exceeds that of crack in
the 1980s and 1990s." As the black working-class languish in
American and British prisons for possessing and supplying cannabis, white investors are lining their pockets via the launching of multimillion-dollar
cannabis funds.
From the Trans-Atlantic Slavery era up to the 21st
century, white elites have used the white working class as pawns to maintain
their power and white supremacy. White and non-white working-class have both
got the short end of the stick in the Global North economic order. However, the
power elites result to the old divide and rule to keep the two classes separate
to eliminate the existential threat the working-class combination could pose to
their hegemony.
During the time of slavery, the wealthy plantation
owners utilised the services of white working-class overseers to keep the slave
plantation running. The overseer directed the work of the slaves and meted out
punishment on the black slaves. The Western labour union has a long history of discriminating against
ethnic minorities. In Britain, following the immigration
of the Caribbean's in the late 1940s, the white working-class organised labour
union joined hands with employers in restricting job opportunities to black
workers. As Lee Jasper puts it, the white working-class has "Also been the Labour aristocracy of the
world for years at the expense of other nations. White privilege means they
expect, and will be treated differently, to their Black and Asian neighbours."
Today, the diversionary tactics used to divide the
working class along colour lines takes a different form. Politicians and
western pundits often use classism and the invocation of the white
working-class man as a red herring to silence the non-whites quest for racial
justice. When black working-class boys cry out for being criminally profiled,
all we hear is, "It's time
to give white, working-class boys a fair shot in life.
White elites sometimes suggest that ethnic minorities
cause the woes faced by white working-class. They present a zero-sum argument
by linking "white pain" with "black gain". For long, the
white elites deceived the white working-class into believing that their
whiteness meant they had more in common with the white elites than the non-white
working-class. Isabel Wilkerson in her book Caste notes, "If the lower-caste person manages actually
to rise above an upper-caste person, the natural human response from someone
weaned on their caste's inherent superiority is to perceive a threat to their
existence, a heightened sense of unease, of displacement, of fear for their
very survival... The malaise is spiritual, psychological, emotional. Who are
you if there is no one to be better than?"
It is somewhat confusing when western politicians and
thinkers push the narrative that it was the white non-college-educated people
who voted for Donald Trump. They argue that his message resonated with the
poor, non-college-educated white working-class men as if there is no non-white
working-class. Paradoxically, the exit polls of the 2020 US election reveal 72% of white protestant, 56% of white
Catholics, 61% of white men, 55% of white women, 53% of white youths, 58% of
white, middle-aged, 51% of white men college graduates and 45% of white women
college graduates voted for Trump - yet media pundits spend their energy asking
why the white working-class flocked to Trump. As Ta-Nehisi Coates notes, "The focus on one
subsector of Trump voters-the white working class-is puzzling, given the
breadth of his white coalition. Indeed, there is a kind of theater at work in
which Trump's presidency is pawned off as a product of the white working-class
as opposed to a product of an entire whiteness that includes the very authors
doing the pawning."
Rather than framing classism in competition with
racism and sexism and setting the white working-class against the non-white
working class perhaps it is time for white pundits and politicians to focus on
revamping neo-liberal policies such as austerity, offshoring, predatory
lending, deregulation, labour flexibility, financialisation and tax cuts for
the wealthy which have contributed to the hierarchy of classes.
Selah.
About the Author
Ahmed Olayinka Sule is a CFA
Charterholder, photojournalist and social critic. He is an Alumnus of the
University of Arts, London; where he obtained a Certificate in Photojournalism.
He has worked on various photojournalism projects including Obama: The
Impact, Jesus Christ: The Impact, The Williams Sisters etc. He can be
contacted via e-mail at suleaos@gmail.com and
via Twitter @Alatenumo
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#EndSars
Protest Movement A Watershed Moment in the Quest for Genuine Change in Nigeria - Oct 15, 2020
2.
The Neoliberal
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3.
BAME Cabinet
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4. Why the Global
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5.
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8. The Betrayal of The 21st Century Nigerian Intelligentsia - Jan 14, 2019
9. Time for A Revolution says FT Editor; Publishes Ahmed Sule's... - Oct
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10. It's Time for
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11. Re: Commonwealth
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12. The Big Read:
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13. #SharapovaGate:
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14. Are Nigerian Banks Committing Crimes Against Humanity? - Oct 01, 2012
15. Why Poverty
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