The Left Behind by Morrison James;

Author:Morrison, James;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pluto Press

COUNTERING WHITE WORKING-CLASS PRIVILEGE: SPEAKING UP FOR A MULTI-ETHNIC LEFT BEHIND

If it is possible to speak of a coherent counter-discourse about the left behind, beyond comments problematizing the values and attitudes ascribed to them, this could be found in the small but significant number of interventions challenging the quality with which it was most persistently associated: its whiteness. Racialization of left-behind areas and communities as a primarily white working-class grouping, or cluster of related groupings, was a recurring discursive trope throughout the three-and-a-half years of debate and reflection over the outcome of the referendum. Alternately privileged (as a group whose suffering was recognized over that of all others) or stigmatized – as a culturally backward and socially inferior ‘ugly contradiction’, both ‘abject and white’ (Haylett, 2001: 352) – the dominant left-behind imaginary was cast as a stubbornly monocultural, mono-ethnic construct.

As the post-referendum debate unfolded, however, a steady strain of counter-hegemonic argument slowly emerged, both in Parliament and sections of the national and regional press. A primary strand of counter-discourse was that the racial and cultural composition of many post-industrial communities, both in the present and (to a lesser extent) past, was significantly more multi-ethnic and multicultural than commonly supposed. A secondary argument was that, while many traditional working-class areas might indeed have been historically white, most economic challenges they faced today – from low-paid, precarious work, to benefit cuts, to depleted public services, to a lack of good-quality, affordable housing – were precisely the same as those endured by the more racially diverse urban ‘precariat’ (Standing, 2011), ‘emerging service workers’ (Savage, 2015) and/or umbrella ‘new working class’ (Ainsley, 2018) latterly identified by social scientists. Meanwhile, a third strand sought to subvert the dominant discourse more substantially – by emphasizing demographic data showing that, far from merely experiencing comparable levels of economic disadvantage to the white working class, Black and minority-ethnic households and communities were disproportionately affected by poverty and associated inequalities, with lower life expectancies and poorer health and/or education outcomes than white ones.

An early flavour of the argument that economic disadvantage was no respecter of colour or ethnicity played out in a May 2017 news story in the Bristol Post – published a few weeks ahead of that year’s snap general election. Focusing on the recommendations of a Bristol University-hosted community workshop exploring ways of uniting Remainers and Leavers following a divisive referendum, the story’s opening lines reheated the popular narrative that Leave voters, ‘fed up of being left behind’ by the city’s creeping gentrification, were ‘sticking two fingers up’ to ‘politicians and politics generally’ (Cork, 2017). In reported remarks, the PhD student leading the project acknowledged that many Leave voters were ‘older, white, working-class men’ who had been ‘“left behind” by rapid social and economic processes’ and backed Brexit ‘out of frustration with the EU and mass immigration’. However, she added, ‘the stereotype of ethnic minorities as (passive) victims of hate crime rather than active participants in the referendum’ was ‘no more helpful’ than ‘stigmatising the white, working-class Brexiteer as making the “irrational” choice to Leave based on racial prejudice’.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.