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White working class? Is that investigative journalism?

Paula Sharratt | 06.03.2008 21:41 | Analysis | Anti-racism | Globalisation | Sheffield

Most local and national journalism defaults to notions of an underclass of 'losers' without any analysis of how these 'losers' have been structurally excluded. The recent discovery of 'working class' and 'white' as a disadvantaged group is for purely cynical and sensationalist reasons.

White working class? There’s a constructed debate going around the local and national media, smoothed by the professional caresses of a professional media class who don’t have accurate information, (don’t want accurate information).

Who really don’t give a fig.

And would much rather base their stories and practice on the fictional glamour of the grubby people they continue to exclude on a day to day basis (because there’s a real living to be made in taking the mickey, humiliating one group or another).

They’re not really talking about the ‘working class’ then, but the empty of anything ‘underclass’ that they’ve been instrumental in constructing, concentrating on the negatives rather than any positives, crushing the life out of anything not like themselves...

-and now the category has been around for twenty years or so it’s so easy to abuse and manipulate, to wrong foot and catch out, to surveil and make guilty anyone who has that tag.

But now the ‘discovery’ of the (white) working class that, in their usual day to day lives, in their own race to have ‘that career’ they usually call the underclass or the losers. Their knowledge of other working class experiences from other cultures is nil.

In my opinion, Underclass is really a group of people who have been permanently excluded from the economy in order to remove all traces of the benefits of the welfare state and cooperation between people and provide benefit fodder in the buy to let economy and very cheap and unsustaining labour.

Underclass is a group of people who are structurally always in the wrong and therefore, cannot move without making a mistake in the way they live, work, bring up their children, socialise. People who believe they are part of society but have been brutalised by their experience of exclusion.

But there are working class stories now, except the working class of now, from all cultures, often doesn’t work for long periods of time

-and you can bet your bottom dollar that the stories these working class, people, be they white or Irish or Chinese, Bengali, Jewish, Jamaican, or whichever ever gloriously invisible cultural lineage has been hammered out of them are interesting and the inextricable roots of everything our culture takes for granted as ‘our civilisation’.


But these stories don’t get written or even rehearsed by our media.

The stories of the working class are a little bit too real and normal and just like their own feelings and aspirations to fit the ‘glamour in nihilism’ market and so

-they should really know better before setting one group against another. But it’s all good, ignorant and prejudiced fun, like it always used to be before political correctness, say the tabloid harpies.


The constructed debate about the white working class and the suddenly found group of grubby white people who are being done down by housing allocation, education and work opportunity givers is really a story about intra-organisational competition over funding.

The reality of how all of the working class (in an underclass environment) are really struggling to survive the ignorance of the sensationalist media and how their stories aren’t being told is another very important matter.

Paula Sharratt
- e-mail: poly.sharratt@btinternet.com

Comments

Display the following 3 comments

  1. Sort of agree — Boyd
  2. Sorry for being cynical but..... — My proles bigger than your prole
  3. at least she is interested — weneedanotherOrwell
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