MP Kim Johnson sat on the Education Select Committee, which issued it's report this week.
First Report: The forgotten: how White working-class pupils have been let down, and how to change it
https://committees.parliament.uk/committee/203/education-committee/publications/
"In the name of championing the white working class, the Tory-led Education Select Committee report released this week picks up the mantle of the government’s highly discredited Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities.
The report calls for public bodies – including schools and charities – to ‘seriously consider their responsibilities’ when promoting the term ‘White Privilege’.
This was watered down from the preferred recommendation from some committee members, which called for financial penalties for public bodies doing this work. It was taken off the table after legal advice that it would contravene human rights legislation by having a chilling effect on freedom of speech.
It’s a shameful attempt to limit the freedoms of ethnic minorities to articulate their experiences of racism, and to stoke the culture war by scapegoating them for the poverty endemic in ‘left behind’ communities.
The report also pushes a free schools agenda, despite plenty of evidence to suggest that academies do not reduce the attainment gap for disadvantaged children in comparison to local authority-run schools.
Since 2010 there have been 92 Education Committee reports and only two of these reports have explicitly focused on a named ethnic group – both on white pupils.
Instead of focusing on the multitude of evidence that shows that cuts, lack of investment and stark poverty has on the opportunities of so many communities, the Tories once again take the cowards way out by pointing the finger at the red herring of ethnic minority communities.
The use of data and language is highly selective in the report, allowing it to make misleading assertions that the white working class as a whole is achieving less than disadvantaged ethnic minority students."
https://leftfootforward.org/2021/06/kim-johnson-mp-i-sit-on-the-committee-behind-the-white-working-class-education-report-its-a-disgrace/
In short, the English Government are trying to assert that efforts to address Racism and Misogyny are the root cause of the difficulties of poor white schoolchildren living in areas where unemployment, low wages and cuts to funding for social programs are contributing to poverty. The English Government are using skin tone and gender as weapons to sow social discord and prevent grass roots solidarity emerging.
They are broadcasting this via vexatious abuse of their majority in parliament and it's select committees, and they are quite deliberately targeting the alt-right amidst those impoverished by 12 years of Austerity who are on low incomes or are dependent on benefits, the poorer sector of the English population, 14 million strong and growing due to callous Conservative policy. They are saying to those people that the difficulties their children face are being caused by too much concern about Racism and Misogyny and not enough concern about them and their condition.
They omit that Austerity has harmed children of every ethnicity in England.
The recent Sewell Report which asserted that there was no such thing as Institutional Racism in England is part of this campaign. Denial and then the allegation that those who seek to address the 'non existent Institutional Racism' are creating a distraction that is harming poor white children.
This is using Race as a weapon. Which is how Racism was invented in the 1600s, by the British Colonial plantation owners and ruling class, as a device to thwart emergent worker solidarity, which they perceived as a mortal threat to their power, privilege and status. The legalisation and Institutionalisation of Racial discrimination was a grooming operation that took 4 decades to engineer, and the ill effects are with us still 400 years later.
I have written a song to articulate this.
Race is a Weapon in The Class War - a brief historical outline
Race is a weapon, in the class war.
This is the story of the co-opting of Biblical myth, and the re-invention of Race and skin colour as a tool of discrimination and then the crafting of legalised Racism, in the British Colonies, in the 1600s.
Prior to this period, discrimination was largely religious or cultural, and rooted in war fare, with slavery as part of the 'booty' of war.
The conquered of the colonies would be enslaved by the conquerors, although it often turned out that native peoples were unsuited to enslavement and they mostly died out rapidly, burned out by the trauma of conquest. They did not have much to live for.
This was why the Spanish Empire started to import slaves from Africa to the Caribbean and to South America. They basically genocided the local populations through over working them as slaves.
This was a time in the British Colonies when African and European indentured workers worked side by side on plantations, and were routinely freed at the end of their indenture, and given land and tools to develop their own futures as equals. They formed villages, towns and communities, inter marriage was common enough.
It was not multicultural in as much as it was not an issue because they were all part of the same culture, a new culture growing in the colonies. Pioneers. Breaking new land together. There were various languages spoken, there were enclaves of various European ethnicities. Irish people, Dutch, Germans would live close to each other.
Life was incredibly harsh. Many, many people died during their indenture, and from time to time, the indentured 'rebelled' and took out their frustration and pain on their 'employers'.
It was this that frighted the Plantation owners - that the working class - indentured and free - might unite, and together in solidarity, undo them, take them down from their positions of absolute power as a reaction to the owners cruelty and oppression. The owners needed a plan to protect their long term prospects, a plan for many generations.
Thus the concepts of Race and then Racism were developed over time slowly, bit by bit, to divide the working class of the colonies. A political grooming operation over a 40 year period, starting from the Pulpit, concocting themes to marginalise, dehumanise and then legalise the oppression of freed black folk, culminating in the legalisation of Slavery of African people, with conversion to Christianity offered as a 'mercy' to those who were enslaved, for life.
A mercy denied the Native peoples, who were ethnically cleansed, in a multi-century genocide.
Race and Racism, Xenophobia and Religious bigotry continues to split the working class across the Earth, and all of these protects the Oligarchy, the owner class, even still, and will continue until the working class as a whole figure this out - honest history is crucial to effective political organisation and action.
Racism is a weapon in the class war.
https://dwylcorneilius.blogspot.com/2021/05/racism-is-not-xenophobia-both-are.html
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Corneilius
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