If working class whites speak out about the plight of the white working class then they are called racists, as only middle class non-whites are authorised to acknowledge the existence and plight of the white working class.
The only voices allowed the white working class are people like Bonnie Greer, Harriet Harman and other middle class 'professionals'.
Whilst Muslims and blacks and Jews and others are ;
a) Allowed to organise as a community in the multi-cultural system
b) Receive council, government and lottery funding for such activities
c) Running charities for their own benefit as a group and community
d) Running their own community centres and legal and lobby groups
e) Running their own media wings via the BBC eg The Indian Channel
Not one of the above exists for British whites, let alone be run by British whites.
We are the most discriminated against community in Britain.
The article below reflects a real perception of the white working class by the white liberal middle class, fear, hatred and loathing.
They really see white working class children as 'devils'.
Only non-whites can raise the issue of white working class suffering, as the white liberal middle class hate to be reminded of the white working class as they are too busy weeping over kids in Haiti and organising raffles, plays and jumble sales to help them, whilst seeing their own people as 'devils' and dehumanised.
Rigged offers sympathy for the little white devils
White working-class boys have been demonised as shiftless and violent, but Ashmeed Sohoye’s play gets under their skin to tell a different story
John Lewis
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Paul Clerkin as Gary and Kyle Summercorn as Nathan in Rigged
Not a week goes by, it seems, without some new report outlining how white working-class boys are underachieving at school. According to Ofsted, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and the Institute of Education, white males from low-income groups get fewer GCSEs than any other ethnic group — fewer even than the poorest children from homes where English is a second language.
Rigged, a drama that has been touring British schools and which now starts a nationwide theatre tour, is a rare attempt to explore this situation. The irony is that it has been written by a British Asian, Ashmeed Sohoye.
Sohoye knows this subject well. As well as writing plays (he previously worked as a literary manager at the Theatre Royal Stratford East and at the Soho Theatre), he works as a learning mentor in a North London comprehensive.
“My job is to remove the barriers to learning,” he says in a small office filled with dozens of case reports. “If students are being disruptive, or turning up late, or doing badly in lessons, the head of year will refer them to a learning mentor such as myself. We talk to them, one to one, and find out what the problems are, before liaising with their home.”
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The children that Sohoye works with every day are the archetypes demonised in news reports — usually male, often disruptive, often from problematic homes. “For me, they’re not archetypes, they’re real people, with real lives.” The lead character of Rigged is Nathan, a violent 16-year-old on the verge of exclusion from school. His girlfriend is a bright student who finds herself pregnant, his mum is illiterate, and his stepfather is a drunk and a gambler. Somehow, Rigged brings these abstract, sociological ciphers to life.
“These are people we are supposed to despise,” says the play’s director, Natalie Wilson, “but Ashmeed’s script makes us care about them. The four characters are inarticulate people. They don’t have the language to reflect their emotions. What Ashmeed does is allow the story to emerge through subtext, through what they don’t say. A lot of writers don’t trust their audiences enough to do that.”
Theatre Centre, the veteran touring company that commissioned the work, has a reputation for using multiracial casts. Here they made a conscious decision to make Rigged an all-white production.
“Some people might find that odd,” Sohoye says. “I’m from an Asian-Caribbean background. My parents were Muslims from Guyana. I grew up in Tottenham and went to a school that was predominantly African-Caribbean. So you might wonder why I should be so interested in white working-class youth. But why wouldn’t I be interested? These are stories I see every day.”
How helpful is it constantly to view these things through the prism of race?
“From my experience, there really isn’t much racial tension in multicultural schools like this one,” he says. “What I was more interested in was how different ethnic groups tend to have different expectations of education and different relationships with authority institutions.
“A cousin of mine used to work in an employment agency and he talked about the ‘lads with dads’ — white kids could come out of school with no qualifications but within a few weeks they’d be starting an apprenticeship with their dad or one of their dad’s friends. That informal system has broken down, and that has affected the white working classes more than anyone else.”
Sohoye suggests that the increased atomisation of society over the past 30 years has affected the white working classes more than other ethnic groups.
“Traditionally the middle classes had a sense of responsibility towards the working classes. After Thatcher, and the belief that there was no such thing as society, I think that moral leadership broke down. It’s been replaced by a kind of contempt and fear for the white working classes. Policies such as selling off the stock of council housing has impacted on poorer white families more than other people.
“I’m also interested in how different working-class ethnic groups interface with middle-class institutions — the State, the trade unions, the police, the Church, the Army. Black and Asian people have never expected those institutions to help them. But in established white working-class communities, there remains an expectation, together with a lower expectation of social mobility.”
Is Rigged agit-prop theatre? “I prefer to see it as a state-of-the-nation piece,” Sohoye says. “But where state-of-the-nation dramas tend to be about big institutions or politics, this is a very human tale from a working-class perspective. When I was younger I used to insist that I was writing about class and race and cultural identity. Actually, I think I’m writing about compassion.”
It’s sometimes hard to feel much compassion for the lead character in Rigged, a violent bully with an ASBO. “Nathan is easy to hate,” Sohoye says. “Myself and the director agreed that, when casting him, we had to believe that this guy could randomly beat up a kid in the playground without any compunction.
“The thing is, I meet boys like Nathan all the time. One to one, they are shy, frightened children. You quickly realise that there are always underlying reasons for their behaviour. Often there’s a harrowing story of how violence has been bred into them through bad parenting. They might need stability, they might need male role models, or they might need an adult to talk to. These are all things we can change. The first thing you have to do is make sure that their stories are being told.”
Rigged opens at the Unicorn Theatre, SE1 (020-7645 0560), tomorrow and Thur, before touring nationwide (www.theatre-centre.co.uk)
More psychological humiliation, ethnics 'caring' for poor Brits.
ReplyDeleteAll very carefully orchestrated isn't it, how much of this humiliation are the British going to accept.
I shouldn't be so critical, they have no idea what is being done to them and most will see this as an act of friendship, compassion rather than a carefully orchestrated act of Humiliation.
Like being photographed naked now by scanners in airports.