Sunny Hundal | ukwatch.net

Brown and Class-less

Ellie Keen — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 19:05:26 +0000

I was recently invited to give a speech at the annual general meeting of the NUJ Black Members Council, which I duly did on Saturday morning. I generally try and avoid preaching to the converted so I began, on the subject of how ethnic minority journalists can break the glass ceiling, by illustrating how race intersects with class.

I started with this:

“Over two weeks, BBC 2 films will give voice to the prejudices, alienation, fears and confusion of white working class Britain – a constituency that rarely finds its voice on the BBC, at a time of sweeping social change. ... ‘What we wanted to do was look at these issues in a rounded, non-political way and I think we’ve done that,’ says season commissioner Richard Klein.”

That from the BBC’s in-house magazine, Ariel. Two points should immediately be noted, I said. Why does the white working class rarely get heard on the BBC, by its own admission? Second, how can you make a series featuring immigration, Muslims, the BNP and Enoch Powell in a non-political way?

Anyway, there was an issue here being overlooked by everyone. The experience of minority groups in the UK is sometimes more affected by class and yet we keep viewing issues through the prism of race or religion. This applies to educational achievement as much as it does to media.

Race relation “experts” such as Lee Jasper (good riddance) were prime candidates reponsible for using this scattergun approach and branding the entire education system as racist without asking why Indian and Chinese kids consistently outperform white kids of either gender.

The same applies to employment. Most ethnic minorities who work in the press are of middle class backgrounds from Oxbridge and may be under-represented simply because most Pakistanis, Bangladeshis and African-Caribbean households are working class.

The media industry and politics throw up further complications. Because these industries depend much more on personal relationships and the understanding you’re going to fit into the culture, class differences are exacerbated by race. So if you’re not going to socialise or network with white colleagues, it affects your promotion prospects. Furthermore, media employers sometimes cannot get over the person’s race or religion and over-politicise it. That can mean minority journalists are either condemned to “specialist stories” or not allowed to go near them. That makes it harder for them to break the glass ceiling.

The big problem here is that many white commentators apply this class blindness to ethnic minorities (and sometimes women) too.

The BBC’s “provocative” White season is a prime example of this silliness. Last week a researcher from Radio 4 called after reading an earlier article when I asked who had failed the white working class.

The corporation is simply the latest to fall into this trap. The problem faced by white working classes isn’t that of race but their class, as Chris Bertram and Chris Dillow point out. Does anyone really believe there aren’t Asian working class families who resent Polish workers moving into the area?

When the BBC’s Richard Klein told an audience of programme makers, according to Ariel, that the corporation was “ignoring, at its peril, a great swathe of white, working class audience”, then its symptomatic of a wider problem: that media gatekeepers reflect only their own experiences in programming and journalism rather than that of wider Britain.

The White season is a tokenistic effort after which the middle class commissioners, pleased that they’ve done their bit for the proles, will go back to their usual habits, as they do with ethnic minorities. Except, there the lives of working class minorities are ignored while shiny happy middle class Asians making music or becoming successful entrepreneurs are lapped up.

But even worse is the patronising attitude that underlies it all. Here, I can’t really do better than quote Justin McKeating: “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.” It’s spot on.

Any discussion of the white working class cannot go without a mention of Enoch Powell or the BNP can it? Because middle-class people aren’t racist you see, only white working class males can be remember.

To ensure the White season gets complete overkill across the corporation Newsnight invites Nick Griffin on to debate the series. From there it can only go downhill. Kirsty Wark pointed out that the BNP doesn’t get much electoral traction and that their own polls illustrated many working class people didn’t cite immigration as a top concern (so why invite the BNP leader then?), while drugs and drinking culture were. Griffin still managed to blame that on Pakistanis and Islam, to which Wark limply replied: “I think there is a number of people who would dispute that.” I can only shake my head in despair at this travesty of journalism.

(Though, she would be competing quite strongly with Andrew Anthony of I’m-not-sure-what-liberal-values-are fame, since he was recently found complaining that the series gave Muslims an easy ride.)

I tried to sum this all up for the Radio 4 researcher and my audience at the NUJ. Ethnic minorities in Britain are basically treated similarly to white working classes: as problematic and stereotyped guinea pigs who are sometimes seen through tokenistic efforts but usually ignored until an issue comes up. Then the middle-class media land likes to get all “provocative”. What the industry needs is to re-examine how they employ people and how that affects output, not just the odd season of programming. And that minorities are sometimes affected by class more than race. The researcher never called back.

Seen But Not Heard

Ellie Keen — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 23:11:06 +0000

On Tuesday evening, around a 100 women and men were heard protesting noisily outside Ealing town hall at the council decision to cut funding for Southall Black Sisters. Among the oldest women’s organisations aimed at helping ethnic minority women, SBS has been caught in the crossfire of two political trends that started since the July 7 bombings in 2005.

The first has been for the government, in an effort to give the impression that it is trying to deal with terrorism, to shift funding to Muslim groups at the expense of other minority groups. In October last year, Hazel Blears announced £70m to combat extremism. Here too there has been a shift, initially from funding top-down “community leaders” to grassroots groups to a bigger focus on empowering women.

Either way, the government is chucking money at the problem and hoping it works. That agenda has inevitably sucked funds out of other priorities. That in itself is likely to breed resentment due to its politically motivated nature.

The second trend has been for commentators of every stripe to decry multiculturalism as the source of all evil and the collapse of our society, without specifying how they define the term and what exactly they object to.

In accordance with the political weather, the commission on integration and cohesion last year declared that funding groups based around ethnicity fuelled separatism. Curiously it said very little on specifically funding religious groups, probably because one of its commissioners, Ramesh Kallidai, is the one-man-band otherwise known as the Hindu Forum of Britain.

Giving money to groups on the basis of ethnicity rather than need can fuel resentment and separatism, especially if that group in question deliberately sets out to exclude others. Plus, I have my own criticisms of multiculturalism.

But SBS’s case is rather different. It provides specialist services to ethnic minority women who may not feel comfortable at mainstream/bigger refuges. As I uncovered in my radio documentary last year, there are plenty of brides who come to this country every year without having learned any English and face domestic violence at home. For them, such services are vital, if we focus purely on need rather than political pointscoring.

Asian women have thus become political footballs. Everyone is falling over themselves to protect them by banning sharia and railing against forced marriages. In a speech on Tuesday the Tory leader David Cameron again mentioned forced marriages, citing the campaigner Jasvinder Sanghera. And yet her refuge group, Karma Nirvana, set up for women in similar situations who had run away from home, would face funding cuts under Cameron’s regime. Ealing council is Tory controlled.

This isn’t to say that Labour is any better. Despite all its rhetoric in favour of equality and women’s rights, the party is largely perceived to be under the thrall of “community leaders” who have little interest in the well being of Asian women.

Last month the tragic story of 19-year-old Sabia Rani’s murder by her husband came to light. And yet, even if she had escaped him and run away, current legislation forbids such brides from recourse to public funds. In other words refuge groups would get no funding to shelter her and her choice would be to stay at home or be destitute. Who cares about those Asian women now?

Southall Black Sisters, it must be remembered, also campaigned hard to get justice for Kiranjit Alhuwalia, who had faced domestic abuse for years, before retaliating one night by setting her partner on fire. It made legal history because the legal interpretation of what constitutes as “provocation” (for murder) was changed for domestic violence cases as a result. It was later even made into a film.

This is the same group that spearheaded Women Against Fundamentalism, which bravely challenged and picketed Muslim activists in 1989 when they were calling for Salman Rushdie’s head. They were fighting the fight against extremism and trying to empower Asian women way before these agendas were even on the political radar. Now, typically, our brave politicians are full of empowering language with little in the way of action to back it up.

This 'Commemoration' Farce

Alex Doherty — Wed, 28 Mar 2007 12:20:04 +0000

At the slavery abolition bicentenary yesterday, Toyin Agbetu from Ligali disrupted the proceedings by striding into the middle of the event and shouting for the Queen to apologise properly. The Guardian has an account here.

The Archbishop had just delivered his main address and the service had moved on to “confession and absolution”. But the reading was stopped in its tracks by Mr Agbetu’s outburst: “You should be ashamed. We should not be here. This is an insult to us. I want all the Christians who are Africans to walk out of here with me!”

... After what seemed an eternity, Mr Agbetu was shuffled towards the quire, in the direction of the exit. But he pointed at the Queen and yelled: “You, the Queen, should be ashamed!” The monarch did her national duty by remaining icy calm. Mr Agbetu was now directly beneath the prime minister.

He turned to face him and Mr Blair glared back. The thousands of guests watched in hushed anticipation, wondering what would come next, wondering if Mr Agbetu might even leap on him. Instead the protester screamed: “You should say sorry!”

I’ve had my run-ins with Ligali before, when I accused them of stoking up tension over the Lozells riots by asking for a boycott of Asian businesses. So I’m not necessarily a fan, shall we say.

But in this case I think his sentiments and actions were justified. This so-called commemoration of 200 years since the abolition of slavery has been a farce for two reasons.

Firstly, over the word “sorry”. It is completely right to point out that while the current generation of Britons had nothing to do with slavery. But the monarchy, as an institution, did so directly. The parliament did so too directly, until someone could not face their conscience and decided to ban it despite lots of opposition.

Pointing out that “lots of others did it too”, as Simon Jenkins and Melanie Phillips have done over the past week, is a playground argument. The fact that some Arabs and Africans were also involved does not negate the facts: that it was overwhelmingly practised by whites in America and western Europe; and that it was driven by deep-seated racism that saw Africans as sub-human primates that could be used and abused at will.

Instead, we get people trying to take the moral high ground by pointing fingers at others in an effort to undermine British complicity. It’s pathetically tragic. I expect that from Melanie Phillips but not Simon Jenkins, whom I hold in high regard.

The “commemorations” are also a farce because they seem to be more about canonising William Wilberforce than actually remembering the horrors of what happened.

Frankly, I couldn’t give a rat’s arse about Wilberforce. The real heroes of ridding the world of slavery were the slaves who rebelled and fought back and tried to bring some dignity to their people. You know, the people who actually died trying to change the course of history … remember them?

Lester Holloway has written a spot-on sarcastic editorial asking why a film about slavery, Amazing Grace, can only stomach one black man in the cast.

It is like making a film about the German Holocaust and only showing good Germans, while excluding any images of the Nazis, or of Jews suffering in concentration camps. The story of Anne Frank told a story from the personal viewpoint of a Jewish victim, and Steven Spielberg’s Schindlers’ List did not flinch from exposing the frightening realities of the Nazi campaign of genocide.

The poster for Amazing Grace reads: “One Voice Changed the Lives of Millions.” Perhaps one day we will get a flick told from the point of slaves themselves, called Amazing Resistance. We won’t hold our breath.

I’m not surprised many British African-Caribbeans are annoyed. Yeah, I get it, white people don’t want to watch a film where whites are the baddies.

But this absurd obsession with Wilberforce only points to one thing: the establishment is still having trouble dealing with the horrors of slavery. This whole state of affairs has been a complete farce and I, for one, am glad Ligali showed it for what it was.