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So I heard about this through Lenin's Tomb:
I was intrigued when watching BBC2 the other day to see a trailer involving a white man being drawn on in a variety of languages by a variety of hands to the music of Billy Bragg's version of 'Jerusalem'. My interest turned to horror as I realised it was advertising a series of programmes entitled 'White' with the tagline: 'is the white working class becoming invisible?'
Over on Dissensus, gumdrops says:
saw the advert for it last night and i found it a bit worrying. its a white guy getting his face written on in non english languages in black marker until hes written on so much that his face turns black, at which point the tagline comes up - it was something like 'has white working class identity dissapeared'.
I have not seen these adverts, and in fact don't have access to TV at the moment. From what people are saying, though, this sounds dodgy, so I thought I'd flag it up here for you to talk about.
What's frustrating is that we certainly do need more awarenss about what, exactly, is going on when people throw around the word 'chav', and why some people in poor white areas go in for the BNP (this is not to say that people in rich white areas don't often have the same or worse politics) - but what we don't need is, essentially, some issue-based drama that basically says 'black people done it', which it looks like we're going to get.
It's telling that in answering the question 'who is doing down the (white) (working class)?', the BBC, rather than responding with 'the ruling class', appear to have rather gone with 'black people' - ironic, if the issue at hand is our current discourse's silence on class.
Let's also remember that, if class has been brushed under the carpet, it's not as if we've all become any less racist. |
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