Teaching working-class young men that they benefit from ‘white privilege’ is having a detrimental effect on a generation of boys, leading to feelings of negativity and worthlessness, and driving them into the hands of dangerous influencers such as Andrew Tate.
This is the claim made by Sam Fender, the best-selling, 30-year-old musician from North Shields. As the singer told the Sunday Times yesterday, this teaching has resulted in boys from poor white backgrounds being ‘made to feel like they’re a problem’, with those from ‘nowhere towns’ being ‘shamed’ and told they weren’t underprivileged because of their skin colour. Consequently, this constant disparagement is leading many to seek consolation in misogynist online narratives, where people like Tate – whom Fender calls a ‘demagogue psycho’ – reassure them that are ‘worth something’.
Fender articulates what critics of the doctrine of ‘white privilege’ have been saying for years: that it is untrue, corrosive and counter-productive. This common-place narrative in education establishments, invariably accompanied by a hyper-liberal philosophy that boyish behaviour is intrinsically problematic, has had woeful consequences in schools, where working class white boys now sit bottom of the class.
The conceit of ‘white privilege’ epitomises one obsession among woke hyper-liberals, that of race. Their other, that of sex and gender, finds expression in another fashionable phrase: ‘toxic masculinity’. Yet there exists no comparable phrase today pertaining to class difference. This is because the matter has always been a blind spot among the hyper-liberal clerisy who produce these slogans. As Fender puts it pithily. ‘We are very good at talking about privileges – white, male or straight privilege. We rarely talk about class.’
It’s hardly surprising that an understanding or language of class barely exists among progressives today. Hyper-liberalism has always been a quintessentially middle-class affair. It has its origins in the universities in the 1990s, where the impressionable undergraduates of yesterday and the academics, policy makers and politicians of today, were taught about oppressive and invisible power relations that permeate society. These concepts find common expression today, with nebulous ideas about ‘systemic’, ‘unwitting’ and ‘institutional’ discrimination, and in laws based on subjective opinion and ‘perceived’ racism. This outlook proved particularly attractive for women and those of colour also from the middle-class. The working class has seldom been much bothered by ‘inappropriate’ language, or rarely still been fixated with pronouns or one’s ‘gendered soul’.
Hyper-liberalism embodies a worldview that is detached both cerebrally and physically from the real world. Those who were sealed away on campus among other well-to-do folk, or were ensconced in their wealthy New York and London citadels, among others who live and thought the same way them, were never willingly likely to venture to America’s rust belt or England’s Red Wall, to behold white under-privilege in all its visceral awfulness.
Reform’s standing in the opinion polls is what happens when a governing class is seduced by the otherworldly and simplistic fantasies of academia
Emily Thornberry was once, famously, aghast to see the proliferation of St George flags in Rochester, Kent. And her comments in 2014 came to be seen as symptomatic of a detachment among metropolitan progressives in this country, for whom poor white areas of England were another country. She could have seen white under-privilege elsewhere in Kent, in Dover or Gillingham, and many in the Labour higher echelons could have likewise decided to visit areas in the East Midlands and the North East. Except they didn’t. They ignored them, and for too long. Reform’s standing in the opinion polls today is what happens when a governing class is seduced by the otherworldly and simplistic fantasies of academia.
Class difference has always existed. It both shapes society and forms people’s views of each other. Just as class has been ever-present in British society, so has class awareness and the snobbery that results from it. And the culprits have not always been privileged males. As one female academic reminded us at the weekend, the suffragettes had a ‘pretty horrific’ attitude towards the working class.
Speaking out against the ‘girl bossification’ of history, Sarah Richardson, a professor of Modern History at the University of Glasgow, claimed that feminists have tried to hide the ‘nastier side’ of the women’s suffrage movement, which disdained the working class and, in tandem, enthusiastically embraced eugenics. Richardson said that history shows us that ‘in order to make an impact and get their message across, people have often trodden on lots of marginalised groups’.
So much for the theory of ‘intersectionality’, another hyper-liberal shibboleth, one which holds that all underprivileged people have always had – and still necessarily have – a shared common cause in the struggle against straight, white, male hegemony.
‘White privilege’ is a lie. Children can see the proof right in front of them. As Fender explains: ‘People preach to some kid in a pit town in Durham who’s got fuck all and tell him he’s privileged? Then Tate tells him he’s worth something? It’s seductive.’
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