
I realise I’m in an ever dwindling group, but this idea that white people in this country are somehow oppressed is a load of old crap. It’s pure perception created by the right-wing media and vote-grabbing politicians. And BBC 2’s White season looks like shaping up to do the same.
If you ask me, a venture that advertises itself using tasteful, epic photos of Enoch Powell and promotes wife-beating drunk George Best as a ‘working class hero’ is automatically suspect. Even the name ‘White’ is gratuitously provocative, gratuitously divisive.
Going by the website, the season reduces working class people to exhibits in a zoo, to reality television show freaks, to anthropological curiosities in National Geographic. Here’s some knobbly-faced salts of the earth in a Bradford working men’s club. Here’s every little-brained, little Englanders’ worst nightmare, a white girl in a hijab.
Here come the Poles to steal our jobs, women and dignity. Let’s take a trip to putative BNP launchpad, Barking. If the programmes don’t feature some wildlife footage of scantily-clad honkys puking in a gutter outside a nightclub, I’ll run round the town with my trousers round my ankles.
Not only that, what’s the appeal to working class viewers? Where are the stories of working class boys and girls done good? Where’s the message of ‘you can do it too, if you pick up a book or go to a night school class or join the Open University or whatever’. Where’s the tales of ‘if you don’t like it, do something about it’.
Where’s the aspiration? Not the woolly, fuzzy, meaningless kind as espoused by Gordon Brown or David Cameron but the proper, concrete ways for working-class people to escape their so-called oppression.
I don’t want to play the prolier-than-thou card but I was the first person in my family to go to university from generations of steelworkers, coal miners and farmers. It’s doable. Forget the academic side of it. The independence, the social skills, the new outlooks and ways of thinking you get are beyond price. And that’s before we mention making friends who teach you how to hold your drink. Why further and higher education isn’t sold like that is a mystery to me.
Whatever happened to ‘God helps those who help themselves’ or ‘I’m a lucky person and the harder I work, the luckier I get’? The notion of the dignity of the poor is repugnant, but this wallowing in a perceived victimhood is equally difficult to watch and the BBC should be ashamed for fuelling it.
There are escapes, if you feel you need to escape, even small ones like the public library or BBC4 or having Wikipedia’s daily article emailed to you (thanks, Chris). Night classes are cheap, and cheaper if you’re on some kind of benefit. We need broader horizons not narrower views.
(Christ, that last line was terrible but I hope you get the gist.)