Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race

by Reni Eddo-Lodge

  Because we are a nation that loves to think of itself as the underdog, it wasn’t surprising that a 2016 British Social Attitudes survey found that 60 per cent of the British public identifies as working class. The most interesting part of the survey was that 47 per cent of those who considered themselves working class were actually in managerial and professional jobs – hardly working class at all. In its analysis of the numbers, the survey called this identification the ‘working class of the mind’. And although there was no breakdown of survey respondents by racial demographics, those who identified as working class but were in middle-class jobs were more likely to have anti-immigrant politics.1 When people ask me ‘what about class?’ when I talk about race, I can’t help but wonder if they’re not really talking about money, but instead a particular mindset.

  One of the most successful and vigorous studies on class in recent years was the Great British Class Survey, commissioned by the BBC. Around 160,000 people took part. The results, published in 2013, revealed there were not just three classes, but seven. The elite are the wealthiest people in the country, scoring highest economically, socially and culturally. The established middle class are the next wealthiest. They love culture. They’re followed by the technical middle class, who have money, but are not very social. New affluent workers score middle-wise on income but high on socialising and culture. They’re coming from working-class backgrounds, and are less likely to have gone to university. The traditional working class are, on average, the oldest group. Emergent service workers lag behind them in terms of financial security. Lastly, there’s the precariat – the most deprived group.2

  Unlike many other class surveys, the BBC’s collected information on the race of its participants. You’ll find most people of colour in the emergent service workers’ group, making up 21 per cent of it. We’re also over twice as likely to be found in the emergent service workers’ group than in the traditional working-class group. And materially, we are actually poorer. I say ‘we’, because according to the calculator, I am an emergent service worker, along with 19 per cent of the population. We tend to be young, and we live in urban areas. A lot of us aren’t white. We have high cultural and social capital, but barely any economic capital. Our income averages at around £21,000. That’s higher than the traditional working class, who tend to be living in post-industrial areas of England. They are much more likely to own their own home, and have more money in savings than my group. The Great British Class Survey report concluded that emergent service workers – arts and humanities graduates doing bar work, or working in call centres – are the children of the traditional working class. My guess is that they’re also the children of immigrants.

  This information suggests that it’s not as simple or binary as choosing between race and class when thinking about structural inequalities. Not only does the three-tiered class hierarchy no longer really exist, but it looks like existing race inequalities are compounded rather than erased by class inequalities. In the wake of the 2015 summer budget, analysis from race equality think tank the Runnymede Trust found that 4 million black and minority ethnic people would be worse off as a result of it, that BME people were over-represented in areas hit by the budget, and that race inequality will worsen over time because of it. The reality is, if you are born not white in this country, you probably haven’t been born into wealth. Research from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation has shown that black and minority ethnic people are much more likely to live in income poverty than their white counterparts. At the time of their research, the foundation found that just 20 per cent of white Brits were living in income poverty, in drastic comparison to 30 per cent of black Caribbeans, 45 per cent of black Africans, 55 per cent of Pakistanis and 65 per cent of Bangladeshis. The report also found that a disturbing 50 per cent of black and minority ethnic children were living in poverty.3

  But that Joseph Rowntree report was published in 2007. Looking at census data provides a more long-term analysis of race and poverty in Britain. Published in 2014, analysis from the 2011 census focused on race and the labour market found that black men aged between 16 to 64 have the highest unemployment rates in the country, and that black women are more likely to be unemployed than white women. When it comes to the type of work that people in Britain are doing, the evidence again correlates along race lines. Pakistani, black African and Bangladeshi men are the most likely to work in low-skilled (and low-paid) jobs. According to the census, low-skilled jobs include admin, care work, sales and customer service, and operating machines. Asian people are concentrated in sectors like accommodation, food and retail, whereas BME women are concentrated in health and social work (meaning that when these public services face government cuts, black women feel it especially hard). Pakistani and Indian men can be found in the wholesale, retail and mechanics sectors.4 These are not exactly middle-class jobs.

  These are the objective figures. They suggest that many consider their class to be about their preferred culture and politics, rather than their relationship to assets and wealth. Unlike race and racism, it is generally accepted in Britain your class can either positively or negatively affect your lot in life. But race is rarely brought into the analysis. Instead, when we think about inequality, we are encouraged to think of both race and class as distinct and separate. They’re not.

  None of this is to say that white people aren’t living in poverty in Britain. Rather, it’s to point out that the working-class people in this country are not all white. In the face of an assumption around class that seems to be hung up solely on the purity of British racial exclusivity, we should ask ourselves who exactly makes up the working class.

  Never has the conversation about class and inequality felt more urgent than in the recent discussion about London’s housing crisis – on the lack of available social housing, on the barely regulated private rental sector, and the increasingly futile pursuit of home ownership. In the capital, the invasion of luxury flats built for people on extraordinarily high incomes appeared to start in the east and quickly began to spread north. Construction was alarmingly swift. I spent half of my childhood in Tottenham, north-east London. When I go back to visit friends and family, I see the area changing. Walking down one Tottenham street on an autumn evening, I noticed that what was once an area of demolition had sprung up into skeletal scaffolding. The grounds were surrounded with boarding, and the boarding was plastered with aspirational images. The words on the boarding were in equal parts sinister as they were inviting.

  The reading really depended on who caught a glimpse of it at the time. ‘Enjoy a more urban side to living in the heart of north London,’ the lettering read. This was an invitation that was not aimed towards people already living in Tottenham, but to newcomers – perhaps first-time buyers desperate to get on the property ladder with help from the bank of Mum and Dad, or maybe buy-to-let landlords whose sole aim was to make money out of London’s housing crisis. The word ‘urban’ here was coded, a term that implied inner cities, poverty and dilapidation. Urban here, as it is so often used (in music particularly), was code language for ‘black people live here’. The 2011 census saw 65 per cent of Haringey residents report that they were not white British. I was suspicious of the sudden increase of Tottenham new-builds, worried that they might begin to usher in an era of gentrification – with huge implications for the class and racial make-up of the area.

  My suspicions weren’t unfounded. In 2013, The Economist reported that in the neighbouring London borough of Hackney between the years 2001 and 2011, Stoke Newington’s white British population jumped by 15 per cent and Dalston’s by 26 per cent.5 Fuelled by gentrification, the change wasn’t just about race, but about wealth, affluence and mobility. It was also about class.

  After noticing the first ‘urban living’ invitation, I saw similar new-build construction sites popping up all over Tottenham. In 2015, barriers around the freshly built Rivers Apartments on the Spurs end of Tottenham High Road promised passers-by a ‘major sport-led develop
ment for Tottenham’ – new homes, a new school and new jobs. Fascinated by the race and class implications of London’s housing boom, I decided to look into it – and began rifling through the council’s publicly available documents.

  The same year, Haringey Council planned to build 1,900 homes in Tottenham by 2018. This was promised to be part of a £131 million regeneration programme, with funding secured from the city’s most senior administrative body, the Greater London Authority. On the face of it, this seemed like a positive contribution to meeting the high level of demand for housing in the borough of Haringey. In mid-2015, its housing waiting list had over 4,500 people looking for somewhere to live. The council decided that half the homes built would be affordable, two-thirds of which would be affordable rent, and one-third would be shared ownership. As a response to the housing crisis, it couldn’t have been more timely.

  But when I looked deeper into the borough’s regeneration plans, I found a different picture. An intriguing coalition of people had aligned to question exactly who the new housing in Tottenham would benefit, and they made convincing claims about race, class, wealth and access. One activist told me: ‘We’re not opposed to regeneration. This is a community and an area that needs regeneration and investment for the existing residents.’ His view was echoed by another housing activist, who said: ‘People would like to see improvements. But what kind of improvements, and who for?’

  The question was whether low-income local residents in most need – who were mostly black – would benefit from the new housing at all. The crux of criticism against Haringey’s housing plans surrounded the council’s decision to ‘place a high priority on affordable home ownership’. The council’s own equality impact assessment (EQIA) of its housing strategy read: ‘There is a possibility that, over time, black residents in Haringey may not benefit from the plans to build more homes in the borough through promoting affordable home ownership in east Haringey. White households may benefit more easily.’ The 250 homes available at affordable social rent that Haringey planned to build by the year 2018 accounted for just 5 per cent of the number of people waiting to be homed, the EQIA concluded. It was damning. But at the time, Haringey Council argued that they needed to sell some homes privately because the funding available from central government wasn’t enough for the whole project.

  To truly understand what happened here, you need to think about these housing plans in the context of Tottenham’s history of race and class. In 2015 the average Haringey resident earned around £24,000 a year. That figure is above the national average of £22,044, but below the inner-London average salary of £34,473. However, Haringey’s average earnings were skewed by the vast income inequalities in the borough.

  The council calls this the ‘east–west divide’. In east Haringey’s Tottenham Hale, where the new housing was proposed, the highest amount of residents work in jobs like sales and services, cleaning, delivering goods, collecting the bins. That’s in comparison to 23.9 per cent of Haringey’s overall residents working in professional occupations. This is a clear class divide. Home ownership is high in the affluent west of the borough – areas like Muswell Hill, Crouch End and Highgate – while residents in the east of the borough – areas like Seven Sisters, White Hart Lane and Tottenham Hale – live mostly in social housing. Similarly, high salaries can be found in west Haringey, while low pay is found in east Haringey. These fault lines are compounded by race, with white people disproportionately represented in the west of the borough, and black people disproportionately represented in the east. In the west Haringey wards of Muswell Hill, Crouch End and Highgate, more than 80 per cent of residents are white, in comparison to around 40 per cent of residents in the east Haringey wards of Northumberland Park and Tottenham Hale.

  A report from the Runnymede Trust and Manchester University declared Haringey one of the most unequal places in England and Wales.6 And according to the council’s equalities impact assessment on its own housing strategy, it is single mothers in the borough who are most likely to be homeless. The numbers of single mothers registering as homeless in 2015 was increasing. It was fair to conclude that it was women – almost certainly the majority black, almost certainly mothers – who were being pushed into precarious living situations. Their council responded by ignoring their needs in its housing plans.

  In March of 2015, dissent at the council’s regeneration plans had spilled over into local government. The general committee of Tottenham Constituency Labour Party, an organisation of local party members, unanimously passed an emergency resolution noting its concern that the council’s housing plans had ‘placed the onus on black residents to increase their income to be able to afford the new homes on offer, and not required or considered what the council should be doing to enable equality of opportunity and eliminate discrimination’. The resolution wasn’t the policy of Tottenham CLP’s councillors, but it did an effective job of displaying the general feeling of discontent.

  When I pressed Haringey Council for an explanation on the racially exclusive nature of the housing plans, Alan Strickland, Haringey Council’s cabinet member for housing and regeneration, told me: ‘Where people are struggling to access different types of homes because of their incomes, clearly what has to be done is address their incomes. That must come through skills and jobs and training and employment. Through our economic development and jobs work, we want to make absolutely sure that we’re improving life chances so that everybody can access these new homes.’ It seemed like an unrealistically ambitious cop-out answer in the context of systematic racial economic disadvantage. If we were yet to solve the problem nationally, how on earth was one council going to achieve it? But they’ve pressed on with their plans. In mid-2016, a source close to Haringey Council told me that they had no intention to make a U-turn, despite the solid evidence that the plans could lead to black racial displacement.

  This is just one borough in one city. But it’s a clear example of how, in Britain, race and class are intertwined. In this case, building housing out of reach for working-class people meant that it was out of reach for black people.

  We should be rethinking the image we conjure up when we think of a working-class person. Instead of a white man in a flat cap, it’s a black woman pushing a pram. It’s worth questioning exactly who wins from the suggestion that the only working-class people worth our compassion are white, or that it’s black and ethnic minority people who are hoarding scant resources at the expense of white working-class people who are losing out.

  A seemingly innocuous phrase has become naturalised in British politics over the last decade. The phrase ‘white working class’ is supposed to describe a group of disadvantaged and under-represented people in Britain. When she threw her hat in the ring for the 2015 Labour Party leadership contest, Leicester West’s MP Liz Kendall explicitly let it be known that she was interested in supporting white working-class children. Setting out her stall for the leadership bid in a meeting with journalists, she said she wanted Labour to ‘be doing the best for kids, particularly in white, working-class communities’.7 It wasn’t just class discrimination that was holding these kids back, she seemed to suggest. It was their whiteness.

  And when the BBC announced plans to increase the representation of people of colour in their ranks in an attempt to tackle the over-representation of whiteness on- and off-screen, Conservative politician Philip Davies took great umbrage with the decision. Mr Davies was so outraged that he opted to take on Tony Hall, the BBC’s Director-General. Confronting Mr Hall in a House of Commons culture, media and sport select committee session, Davies said, ‘If I have a white, working-class constituent who wants that opportunity . . . why should they be deprived because you’ve set these politically correct targets?’8 Again, the implication was that race and class are two separate disadvantages that are in direct competition with each other. The phrase white working class plays into the rhetoric of the far right. Affixing the word ‘white’ to the phrase ‘working class’ suggests that thes
e people face structural disadvantage because they are white, rather than because they are working class. These are newly regurgitated old fears of white victimhood, fears that suggest that the real recipients of racism are white people, and that this reverse racism happens because of the unfair ‘special treatment’ that black people receive. When Philip Davies MP intervened against positive action at the BBC, he seemed to interpret the work as an attack on his white and working-class constituents rather than a challenge to the BBC’s white and middle-class managers and executives.

  And so we find ourselves focusing on imaginary reverse racism, rather than legitimate class prejudice. It is extraordinary to see how Nick Griffin’s rhetoric about an embattled white working class has been subsumed into the mainstream less than a decade since his political peak. The class privilege of middle- and upper-class people in Britain is not challenged when we focus on the plight of the white working classes. Instead, it shifts the focus of the problem on to black and brown people. The immigrants. There is a scarcity mentality. ‘There are many people who feel that the pace of change in their communities has been too fast, and that the government has not properly resourced those particular areas to respond to that change,’ said Baroness Sayeeda Warsi in a 2009 episode of BBC Question Time. At the time, she was the Conservatives’ shadow minister for community cohesion and social action. ‘This is not a race debate,’ she continued. ‘This is a debate about resources.’