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meatcleaver -> RE: Are WE racists? (7/16/2006 3:34:58 AM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: NorthernGent
meatcleaver,
Even though the proportion of black Britons in prison is obscene it is not just law that is a problem. There is also crime, housing, pverty, education, workplace discrimination. All of these issues are covered in the three links I posted and they include Pakistanis and Bangladeshis who have had to set up their own businesses due to discrimination in the workplace and live in some of the worst housing in Britain in places like Oldham, Burnley and Bradford - resulting in riots. This is set against a backdrop of general inequality and racism.
The most disturbing finding is possibly the quote saying black British graduates are seven times less likely to find employment than white equivalents - in other words, same educational success, completely different opportunities. If you don't provide an incentive for people to succeed then the result will quite probably be crime, relative poverty and a feeling of alienation fostering resentment. Why bother abiding by socities norms if there is no incentive to do so?
It is easy for us to play it down because we don't suffer the discrimination day in, day out but if I was standing in ths shoes of a British muslim or a black Briton I would be pretty pissed off with the situation.
Having worked in a Black inner city area for ten years, there are a lot of complaints from the Black population about the amounts of police harrassment and the amount of black people in prison. At the same time the communities complain that the police don't do enough to stop drug and gun crime which is largely black on black. The police are damned if they do and damned if they don't and I'm no friend of the police but I can see they are put in a dilemma by the politicians and the community itself. They make arrests, then they are guilty of racial harrassment, they don't make arrests they are guilty of allowing 'no go' areas.
As for the worst housing subjected on the Asian population in Burnley, Oldham and Bradford. You will find that white working class are subject to the same housing. Bad housing is not a matter of racism but successive governments refusing to invest in public housing because middleclass Britain doesn't want an increase in tax and neither does it want any of its benefits diverted into investment in inner city areas.
There has been a report commisioned by the government and carried out by the LSE that states that while councils have been fullfilling their obligations to immigrants in regard to allocating money in benefits and housing, money has been reduced to the local white workingclass areas and so feeding resentment and racial tension. One of the reasons for the riots in the towns you mentioned.
If you look at the stats, most graduates are looking for work in the main metropolises and mainly London. Having been a graduate myself and looking for work in private companies at one time, the competition is very high. I did see a documentry on BBC about Black graduates facing a harder time getting work than white but one significant factor that didn't need to be highlighted was that white graduates, rather ironically, were far more willing to uproot and move to the otherside of the country than Black graduates but I don't deny there is probably something racially happening here but it doesn't tell the whole story.
The problem with looking at the headlines is that they don't tell the whole story and handwringing white middleclass do not acknowledge their indirect impact on the reasons for the statistics being as they are. Even Old and New labour have largely blamed white workingclass for racism while being unwilling to look beneath the surface and seeing it is their policies that magnify the obvious problems that there are.
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