Fraser Nelson, in the Daily Telegraph today, drops some truth bombs, in the form of educational attainment data, into the analysis of the mayhem in the UK this week:
Take GSCE results, due next week. Passing at least five of the tougher subjects is now called the `English baccalaureate’. Some 62 per cent of Chinese pupils took this challenge last year, as did 51 per cent of Asians and 47 per cent of blacks. White pupils finished quite a bit behind at 35 per cent. If you adjust for wealth, by looking at pupils eligible for free school meals, the picture worsens. Some 45 per cent of Asian pupils on free school meals achieve decent grades (grade 5 or higher) in English and Maths as do 40 per cent of black pupils. But just 25 per cent of white kids do so. in no other ethnic group does poverty seem to have such an impact on academic attainment. At the last count, 76 per cent of teenage girls with a Bangladeshi background went to a university, as did 71 per cent of poor black African girls. But it was just 15 per cent for poor white boys, of whom only 2 per cent ewent to a top university. (Some 42 per cent of poor Chinese girls did so.)
Nelson goes on to ponder reasons for this dispararity, a problem particularly for boys, rather than girls. This is a fact that also throws a wrench in the argument about how girls suffer from a “patriarchy” in terms of education. That seems to be long gone. The teaching profession appears to be largely dominated by women today. Richard Reeves, the British academic now working in the US, recently published an excellent book on the topic. And he’s on the liberal-left, which meant he was quite brave in pushing back at a few narratives.
Nelson:
“Lets take those who appeared in the dock of Teeside Magistrates Court after the Middlesborough riot. Each gave their address, from which you can work out neighbourhood deprivation. In the communities the accused came from, some 26 per cent were on out-of-work benefits, on average.” Further: “The British dream is working for a great many of those who came here to seek it – and we can be proud of that. But the British dream is not working out so well for working-class whites and we should be deeply disturbed by that. Now and again, politicians summon up the courage to talk about this…” Then….”nothing ever seems to be done….But as we look for the truth behind claims of British racial tension and inequality, we do see the problem of left-behind whites slowly becoming a crisis. If [Sir Keir] Starmer wants to pick an agenda from the wreckage of the last few days, he needs to look no further.”
The problem, of course, is that the Prime Minister and his colleagues are so stuck with conventional narratives that making that leap may be beyond them. But they should perhaps reflect, that having been elected to a landslide by just 35% of the electorate on a low turnout, and mainly because of anger at the Tories rather than anything for socialism, that if Labour does not make some credible moves, it is toast in a few years’ time.
Most current politicians are managers and bureaucrats and are only willing to leap from one ‘established’ narrative to another ‘pre-established’ narrative. Hopping from one tussock of grass in a swamp to another tussock, never contemplating that draining the swamp so that all may tread safely is their real task.
There was a common pattern with the riots, they emerged from areas that were generational Labour strongholds. Places which were left behind as heavy industry and coal mining faded. In all these places unemployment hovers in the 20-25% range and has done for decades.
They didn’t riot because of immigration – that was just the flash point – but because of decades of rot from learned obsequence to the state due to generational welfarism. The state is father, the state will provide, the state will lead them from the darkness. The riots were a giant cry for help, because they have long since lost the ability to help themselves.
I grew up in such places – living just over the border from County Durham, which as a collective place died around 1985 and holds onto grudges against Thatcher like some treasured family heirloom.\
In my itinerant journey through life which has taken me through London, Dubai, Singapore, Bergen, Amsterdam, and other places; I was forever running into people from the North East & Teesside. We all had a shared trait: ambition and a desire to get as far away from those crab buckets of despair as we could.
@BlindIo, thanks for sharing your story. But perhaps it would be really valuable, if you are willing, to explain what it is about you and those people you ran into abroad that allowed you to escape the “crab buckets of despair” and find success while so many of the people you grew up with did not.
Teesside, Middlesbrough.
We all had a shared trait: ambition and a desire to get as far away from those crab buckets of despair as we could.
A really nicely put point. And you emigrated to places in pursuit of commercial success and adventure – and all power to your elbow.
One of my great-grandparents, long since gone now, left home from his rural background before WW1 at the age of 14 to work in the South Nottinghamshire coalfields, doing double shifts. He also was a bookie for horseracing (which was illegal) and ran a grocer’s store on the side, and also earned money boxing (also illegal). He was an extraordinary person, and by his early 20s, had earned enough money – paid in gold guineas (real money) to buy a small Suffolk farm. There he worked for the rest of his life, before enjoying a long retirement.
He came from the rural part of the country in which the same despair that you observe could be seen. Over the centuries, a key number of people have said, “fuck this, I am off to find my way”, and they have worked on ships, gone to towns, run sheep farms in New Zealand, grown rubber in Malaysia, dug for diamonds in South Africa, or joined the Royal Navy in pursuit of prize money. There is a rich, colourful and occasionally harrowing history of the things that Brits have done to get out of that crab bucket.
What was different then was that welfare was thin. In my great grandpa’s time, you had workhouses. Even very poor people would be expected to work, and put a few pennies into a friendly society. To receive charity was a mark of shame. Nearly everyone would go to a church on Sundays and be harangued about the merit of work and taking responsibility. To be sure, the great manufacturing, shipyard and mining towns of the UK were often crammed with pubs and noisy music halls, and people drank in industrial amounts. And there was plenty of despair and ugliness. But there was, for those who had the fortitude to go for it, a sense of possibility and excitement. (Some of that was smashed by WW1.)
So what has changed? We have got social media, the internet, streaming TV, cheap jet travel, endless documentaries, and the rest of it. And yet one in five UK working age adults are sitting on the sofa, and for some, they are out causing trouble on the streets.
The rot is, in large part, one of weak incentives, and a demoralisation, in terms of the absence of shame and scorn for idleness, that that term “demoralisation” means. The Protestant work ethic isn’t what it was. You are more likely to find a version of it today in places such as South Korea, Taiwan, etc.
Anyway, rant over.
Primary education, higher education, and most entertainment with morals preach that the “friendly society” was so racist/sexist/homophobic/cisnormative that the best thing you could do was dismantle it. Even if you realize they’re nothing but hot air, the prudent plan is to prepare to spend most of your time defending yourself against condemnation and penalties for contributing to friendly society. Those preparations leave very little time for contributing to friendly society.
I was born in Newcastle in 1973. I grew-up in Gateshead. I get where BlindIo is coming from. I think on of the major issues for the NE is the sheer number of jobs in public-sector admin which are thoroughly demoralising. I know. I temped there for quite some time. Note: as a temp you have limited control over where you work. The nadir was The Rural Payments Agency. I was fired for being able to touch-type. It embarrassed the staffers. That’s when I thought “fuck it” and moved. I would have done it earlier but I was broke.
I was not surprised when I read this. The offices are on the site of one of William Armstrong’s great works back in the day when the Tyne Valley was “Steampunk Silicon Valley”.
It isn’t just benefits the government undermining morale in the NE but the shite non-jobs the government provides.
Johnathan Pearce (London)
To receive charity was a mark of shame…So what has changed?
One thing has changed is that people don’t receive “charity” any more. They have “entitlements”. That is what they are called here in the USA anyway. That word tells you a huge amount about why we are in the shit we are in.
White working class men know that they are despised by the metropolitan, metrosexual Labour Party. The feeling is mutual.
Just don’t expect them to fight for this country. The Russians can have it.
“So what has changed?”
Could the deliberate infantilisation of large sections of the population be a factor? A while ago the subject of free, as in paid for by somebody else, breakfasts for schoolkids was in the news. Kiddults who don’t see it as their own responsibility to feed their own kids. I’m sure that there are plenty more similar examples of this kind of lack of personal responsibility.
@Fraser Orr Upbringing. We had parents who hammered home that working and making something of yourself was something of a moral imperative. Succeeding if not academically then at a trade was considered a minimum expectation. The other shared trait I noticed was a certain bravery, for want of a better term, a willingness to take risks and move away from friends and family to pursue your own objectives.
The first was enough to get you to University, but to actually go out and do something needed the latter. As an example a friend from University went all the way through to a PhD in Chemistry because it was easier to stay in education then find a job, then when he actually needed to find a job rather than take a risk and move to another city stayed where he was on welfare before ending up working in a call center. The easy option was available, so it was taken. There was no external imperative to force him to take the risk and move.
This is what you see generationally in a lot of the North East. There is no external imperative, and because they lack an internal one the path of least resistance is chosen.
Some of these guys are employed – but not officially. They’re black economy and/or county lines and they’re doing much better than the saps working dead end jobs albeit at the risk of imprisonment. The fact is that no one in authority gives a damn about young men and especially not about young poor white men. Disparaging these men has been a full-time occupation for the left for 40 years now and it shows – funny how this is the very cohort they need to fill the ranks of both the Police and the Army and both are struggling with recruiting.
On the subject of moving out of the area that you grew up in. When I left school in the mid 1970s, kids from my background didn’t go to university, we got jobs or apprenticeships. My daughter and various nephews and nieces all went to university and are now dispersed all over the country. Moving to get a good job maybe isn’t such a big deal if you moved to study to start with.
I’m American so I can’t comment on the white working class in England, but one thing I notice in this type of discussiion on both sides of the Atlantic is, college is used as a marker for upward mobility. It’s not true anymore. Young women who go to college won’t necessarily get a better job than young men who learn a skill such as plumbing. In the USA, plumbers are well off and have more work than they can handle. Many are white working class men with poor grammar and backward baseball caps, but they have more money than a lot of people, men and women, with useless degrees in the humanities. So when college is still used as a marker as a ticket to the good life, it’s misleading.
Also: the same type of journalism keeps referring to “working class” as if people even knew what that is. What is working class, people who work in fast food or clean hotel rooms, or plumbers, electricians and carpenters? People who spend their whole life on welfare, people who are always either in prison or out of prison? Are they all working class? Maybe people who write for a living could think about these matters before confusing everyone with obsolete descriptions. Fancy grammar doesn’t pay the rent nowadays.
I’d be curious to know if anyone is looking into the actual trend I see. What happens to these supposedly privileged young women who are fortunate enough to go to college, while their male counterparts don’t? 10 years after graduation, who is making more money on average?
I can tell you from personal experience, a non-technical degree is a handicap nowadays, unless one is a member of a group that only has to get a degree, any degree, to be swooped up by the government or an NGO. But if one is white and not connected socially, a degree in the humanities can be useless. I’ve done clerical work alongside women with PhDs. One of my most gifted teaching assistants never got a job as a professor and ended up doing something completely different. A lot of educated young women start their own small business as dog walkers, beauty consultants, etc.
This business of comparing rates of women in college, as if that’s the only thing that’s going on, is just lazy. We all know about smart, educated underachievers, and in my personal experience, women have a harder time with this trend, because a man can always learn to build houses, but most women aren’t strong enough, so what do we actually do if the art history degree doesn’t lead to anything?
What percentage of men study STEM subjects, compared to women? That’s the real question. Otherwise, college is just finishing school, as in you’re finished.
One awkward question that i’d like to ask is why Black pupils do almost as well as “Asian” pupils (presumably South Asians). That is certainly not the case in the US.
Could this be due to Black Britons being a self-selected group?
Even more awkward: Are there studies on the IQ of Black Britons?
If modern doctrine was consistent it would look at the facts and conclude that white males were being “discriminated against” indeed “marginalised and oppressed” at school and-so-on.
However, modern doctrine has no logical consistency, indeed has a fanatical hatred of reason.
Sadly modern doctrine has a stranglehold over almost every institution – government and corporate.
As the Labour Party got far fewer votes in 2024 than it got under Jeremy Corbyn in 2019 and now openly shows its hatred of the “white working class”, Labour is “toast in a few years time”.
I take a different view – I think the United Kingdom may well fall apart over the next five years, so we are all “toast”.
President Trump and J.D. Vance face an incredibly difficult task in saving the United States from January 20th 2025 – if they manage to overcome media bias and election fraud, but at least there is some hope for the United States.
What hope is there for us in the United Kingdom?
What will be left of our country in five years time?
Possibly THE funniest comment in this thread.
What the phuck would the Russians want with this shit hole ? A massive welfare liability ? And a huge budget deficit. Why would they want that?
Even the rats are deserting the place.
I’d hate to grow up as a young woman/girl in today’s West. You don’t know who you’re supposed to be.
Generally – knowing that there are always outliers – there are biological differences in the sexes that bear upon what a person can do for pay. But society now determinedly denies this, and insists on, not so much equality, as identicality.
Sure, either sex can be a doctor, or a lawyer, or a teacher. But there are vast numbers and kinds of jobs that are more easily done with strength and mass. And so the melded income levels of men are going to reflect that. There are a lot of plumbers and ditch-diggers and mechanics out there making money, and women have not been ideally placed in those areas. And not every woman can be a doctor.
So, needing to live up to this mythical identicality of ability and income, many women grabbed onto the cargo-cultish idea that college would be the great equalizer. They take the courses for trendy degrees and get those degrees and then . . . wait. They wait for the income these degrees supposedly bring.
They wait for the cargo planes to come back.
But the planes don’t come back. They’ve confused cause and effect. One doesn’t make money as a reward for attaining a degree anymore. There are too many degreed people out there for that to work. And the kinds of degrees that have been instituted to provide space for all of these people mostly just provide “a degree”, not any skill or quality that causes other people to pay them for their expertise.
Far easier these days to be a guy. You can do the doctor thing, or you can lay pipe, or yank transmissions, or push cows around, or load trucks, or . . . With all of the opportunities for both mind and bigger body, a guy can usually find good-paying work. Not so for many women.
Re bobby b,
Mostly good points, but you shouldn’t be suggesting that people mug livestock. They have powerful lobbyists…
Some of that might be true but it’s also worth asking why the educational attainment of this cohort is poor.
One explanation is that boys need more chance to play and do outdoors activities than girls do. Their brains are wired differently. They tend on average to be more rebellious and competitive in sports, etc. unfortunately, our education system favours obedience and “fitting in”. Girls tend to do better at this.
Even so, this isn’t the only issue. Family culture plays a part. Thomas Sowell, the Chicago economist, has pointed this out for years. There’s something about white bits in less affluent backgrounds where ambition in certain forms isn’t where it should be.
I’m not sure this can be blamed on things like simple poverty etc. I think most of this is about culture and in particular, ambitiousness. Look at Chinese and Indian immigrants.
Over the years, cows have broken three of my ribs, my arm, and several bones in my foot. I no longer talk about mugging livestock unless I know they’re not listening.
(Come to think of it, all my injuries were done by female cows . . . )
Regarding the North east and Durham in particular …
I worked for a company in Consett in the late 90’s (1996 to 1998 to be precise).
I was absolutely astounded that as Christmas approached, the people were discussing what grade of Christmas hamper they had ordered. For those of the less 1930’s mindset, they paid a small amount each week into a “Club Scheme” and at Christmas, selected from a list of “Hampers” with tinned ham, a tin box of biscuits, Christmas pudding and other festive fare included. Pick the Deluxe one and swank it over your neighbours …
I pointed out that you could save the money in an account that paid interest and then buy stuff you wanted, rather than a “one size fits all” pre selected bundle but I might as well have been speaking in English and they were listening in Swahili. It was good enough for their Grand parents and therefore was good enough for them too. Against that mindset, what can you do?
As for the American “You have to have a Degree at a minimum to get a job” approach, as far as I am aware, the grievance industry won a court case that employers carrying out aptitude tests on candidates discriminated against the less skilled or unskilled. As a way of eliminating the unsuitable candidates, they insisted on a college degree as a proxy for the test, presumably assuming that anyone with the dedication and intelligence to get a degree had what it took. Unfortunately, the degradation in educational standards moved the bar upwards to PhD/Doctorate level.
Throughout history, the culture of lower-class whites has always kept in mind that they might be lowly, but they were higher on the social totem pole than the other races. They always had someone to look down upon.
That’s changing, rapidly. That’s a huge cultural ego-blow, and the lower-class white culture isn’t handling it well.
They could redouble efforts to rise – to get schooled, to move to where the work is, to just work harder.
But it’s easier to bemoan the loss, and blame it on external factors. Why put out the effort to do well in school if the new system is simply going to give everything to “them?”
The current governments aren’t helping this situation. If anything, they’re amplifying the sentiment. It’s no longer a conspiracy theory if it’s actually happening – if you are not just suddenly equal with people who used to be lower than you, but now you are lower yourself.
Tribal egos are dangerous stuff.
Bobby, well said. That’s the issue in a nutshell..
Come on! What planet is this. Do you also ape the Monty Python “I’m poorer than you skit”.
Have you seen the schools they have to attend? They’re falling apart and the teachers are less interested than they are? Move to where the work is? How?! With what money and what qualifications? Even middle class kids with wealthy parents struggle to live in London/SE England.
Who are you; Tebbit. Do you think they should get on their bikes and cycle to a job? Laughable. Get with the real world.
Spence, I’m trying to figure out if you’re just trolling or trying v hard to be sarcastic.
This is 2024: opportunities for those who want to work are everywhere. There are unfilled vacancies. A hiring crunch. Ask any employer.
I’m so bored by the endless victimhood, the politics of grievance. Knock it off.
Yeah, basically. You can be an actor in your own life, or you can be a victim of it.
I’ll put plenty of blame on government. For eons, society (here and in the UK) has been (racially and economically) two-tiered. Gov’s new “solution” to that wasn’t to wipe out tiers – it was to switch the tiers top for bottom. That’s dumb, and is guaranteed to ultimately provoke a violent response.
For starters, I’d stop welcoming more low-econ migrants until those already there in that economic group have some security. “Poor” is now over-represented, and there will never be enough jobs for all when borders are gone. We will ultimately all be making the same basic wage of a Pakistani bricklayer in Pakistan.
But, in the end, if the territory has been taken, you can either stay and suffer and feel aggrieved, or you can up stakes and find a better territory.
Otherwise, you’re just a bunch of dumb Gazans screaming about Israel. It might feel good, but life will still suck.
But, to be sure, I do sympathize with the outlook. For a long long time, people had their own neighborhoods, their own “homes.” Here’s the park granny used to take me to, here’s where Dad bought me a bike, here’s where me and my friends used to hang out. Life was comfortable, you had a home base.
Then, when the floodgates opened at the borders, those comfortable home territories disappeared. Now, there’s a tension whenever you venture outside. Your park is full of tents and beggars and gangs. Your bike shop now sells strange foods. Your store clerk isn’t quite into speaking English.
Your boundaries and your buffers are gone. What you thought would exist forever is now something else, something worse. (Unless, of course, you’re well-off enough to be in a spot in which the buffers and boundaries still exist.)
That shouldn’t have happened, and it’s only going to get worse. But what I’m saying is, you can roll over and die – you can slowly go broke and hate where you are – or you can do something about it.
It’s hard to change. But life is going to be harder if you don’t. We’re not going back from this.
P.S. What’s a Tebbit?
When I walked out of my engineering degree – 42 years ago – I was one of a very few. Top ten UK university, my class was 120 strong. So that’s 1200 really strong graduate engineers turned out in the UK every year. Let’s add the folk from the next tier and we get a few thousand. Many of them very much better engineers than I have ever managed to be.
And I was (we all were) as helpless as a new-born kitten. I was a cost. A thing that still had to be trained to be useful. And in the first couple or three years, folk without my start and my advantages helped me, taught me, pointed me. Toolkmakers. Foremen. Ex-apprentices who could actually do things. And after those years, I no longer needed that. If I don’t know something now or cant’t do something now, I know how to find it, who to ask. Whether to learn it or get help. That’s what engineering is btw.
And then the resection of the 80s bit to the next level, and Blair expanded tertiary education, and a forest of young people was sold a dummy and were unleashed upon the world and… there was nobody to help that many, to teach that many, to point that many. And it failed. And it still fails. Not only that but the few that there had been had gone to the scrap heap. And this is STEM! (BTW I once employed an Alfred Herbert toolmaker to shovel aggregate as we laid a tarmac car park. I don’t know who was the more ashamed. Although he had no reason to be, I surely did.)
I have survived and spend my time now with young things who have M.Engs and PhDs. They are just the same as we were. I bet the numbers aren’t very different. And my lad, bless, who is more diligent than I ever was, is one of those. But his cohort from university who didn’t get higher degrees? They work in bars and coffee shops and call centres. They thought that they were going to build bridges and design ships and the wings of aircraft but they aren’t because some of that stuff has differential calculus in it, in three dimensions, with imaginary numbers and that crap makes me ill. And there is a distinct bit of the curve you have to be past to be able to cope with that malarkey.
Imagine how many thousands of souls have stalked up the lane to Creative Writing at UEA convinced by the Blair blather that they were the next Ian McEwan. It is heartbreaking and horrible. It has all been quite wicked. And now I need a few non-standard windows replacing in wood and there is a two year wait. That’s about 4,000 quid for a week’s work – maybe ten days if they build them by hand. Turnover of 200kpa for a superior chippy.
With jobs resetting passwords and replacing toner cartridges demanding a “Computer Science Degree”, degrees are just today’s School Leaving Certificate.
I’ve seen adverts for *MINIMUM WAGE* IT jobs demanding a “2:1 or higher from a Russell Group university”. Not a software development job, not a job with a “decent” wage, a *minimum wage* *IT* job.
Tebbit.
Norman Tebbit’s advice to the English ‘rust belt’: get on your bike and look for work elsewhere.
Valid in his own time, but that was forty years ago
(Secretary of State for Employment, then for Trade and Industry, 1981-1987)
Bobby:
For most of European history, there were no other races in Europe to look down upon.
In any case, i doubt that the current riots are motivated by a “cultural ego blow”: more likely they are due to the British police turning into an instrument of political repression, doing little or nothing to protect vulnerable people.
As for improving themselves by studying harder: British schools seem to be part of the problem, rather than part of the solution.
Snorri – correct.
Although history is now being rewritten – black and brown people were incredibly rare in Europe till well after World War II. For example, my father claimed to have seen a black man in London when he was a boy – but the other boys did not believe him, black men were not “looked down upon” seeing one was thought to bring good luck, and the other boys thought my father was boasting when he claimed to have seen a black man.
Even in the United States cities were overwhelmingly white till the 1960s – although there was some black migration to the cities after the terrible floods of 1927 which destroyed a lot of the black family farms along the Mississippi.
The idea that poor whites, in Europe or the north of the United States, accepted poverty because they had other races to look down on is FALSE – the theory is just not true.
I work in a grammar school, we have a a large number of black pupils. As far as I can tell they are mainly the kids of more recent arrivals from Nigeria and Western Africa than descendants of the Windrush generation. It is likely (IMO) that they are more motivated and push their kids to succeed academically.They also seem more religious (lots of Evangelical names like Emmanuel) so that might be a factor too.
The authentic voice of the clueless middle class. Sure! Of course! They did it to themselves didn’t they. If only they’d pull themselves up by their own bootlaces like Jonathan did when Jonathan were a lad. They’d be living in mansions and drinking champagne if they were only as good as you are Jonathan.
So, are these people simply trolling? The UK is probably the most unequal developed world country, there are large sections of England outside of the leafy areas where you live that have average incomes on a par with Puerto Rico. Large parts of the UK are very poor – that is not sarcasm, it’s facts. And boomers telling increasingly poor young men to suck it up and “just get a job” is laughable.
Snorri,
Surly you jest. You think Brits never looked down on frogs, wops, gyppos and dagos? Wogs start at Calais etc.
The riots are caused by the blatant attitude displayed by Starmer when he promised to defend Muslims (killed almost a hundred Brits) from his own people (zero Muslims killed) just because a few of their ghastly children were stabbed. A speech I believe will go down in infamy.
Roué:
🙂
Bobby used the word “race” and i decided to take advantage of that loophole — although frogs, wops, etc might have been considered alien races when they started showing up on British shores.
This is a crucial difference wrt the times of immigration from Europe to the US, and later from Southern to Northern Europe. In those times, the political class did not affect more concern about the immigrants than about the natives. Or to use Sowell’s terminology, the anointed had not adopted immigrants as their mascots.
Incidentally, the Italian 1974 comedy Pane e Cioccolata (Bread and Chocolate) is, in my opinion, very much worth watching. What i mean is, the psychology feels right.
A point to note is that, however sorry you might feel for the main character (an Italian immigrant in Switzerland), you must admit that the Swiss were fair to him; though, but fair. The only exception (iirc) is when he is in a bar, watching an international soccer/football match, and brags that Italy is going to win. Like waving a red flag at a bull.
Andy: Thank you for your reply. It seems to me that your experience is anecdotal support for my hypothesis that Black pupils in the UK do well because their parents are a self-selected elite of high achievers.
(I am somewhat simplifying my hypothesis here, but i cannot be bothered to articulate it clearly.)
Paul, depends what cities you mean. Atlanta, Charlotte, New Orleans and Charleston were not totally white before the Second World War.
Spence, the example I gave above of an ancestor should have given you pause. He rose from humble origins. He didn’t do self-pity. Or look for excuses.
I stand by what I said. Sure I’m middle class. Some of my relations are so posh it’s unbelievable. Others are very different. It’s a tapestry of experience and circumstances.
Put in the work. Cut the grievance mindset.
If you’ve come to this blog to have your angst validated, you’re mistaken.
@Snorri- no worries. Note that there are wildly different outcomes between Caribbean and African students.
Not sure what you mean here. Except for a few, US cities remain “overwhelmingly white” today. But there were substantial black neighborhoods in Chicago, NYC, and several other places in the late 1800’s. Minneapolis was slower – the first of the bigger black neighborhoods were there by the late 1920’s.
And, perhaps “race” was the wrong word. Those of us of Norwegian heritage consider Finns to be another race. I should have just used “Others.”
Jonathan Dude!!? lol Your views are from Dad’s Army. Take your tired, sad, uninformed opinions back to the 20th century where they belong.
You clearly don’t travel much & if you do, you never move very far from the hotel. Even in Europe, say Czech Republic, a nice first world developed place, the differences between Prague and the hinterland is far more extreme 😀
Spence: you seem to be projecting your own views on to other people. It is a common habit, common among mediocre minds and those who demonstrate a certain chip on the shoulder.
Like I said, you are blind to the achievements of others who rose in far, far more dire circumstances than exist today. And you fail to learn the appropriate lessons. That is your choice and mistake.
What Perry said.
bobby b – you are mistaken, unless you count Hispanics as white (which they were counted as before 1970), American cities are not majority white – let alone overwhelmingly white. The “Anglos”, for want of a better term, are on their way out – one can welcome that, as the left do (for they associate “capitalist” society with these “Anglos” and hope that if the “Anglos” become the minority in the United States “capitalist” society will be destroyed), or one can be upset about it, but welcome it or be upset about it – the United States of America that people have known, language-culture-institutions, is on its way out of existence – unless something dramatically changes. But perhaps something good will take its place- after all, Hispanics are NOT genetically left wing (beliefs are NOT a matter of “race” – they are a matter of knowledge and free will, which, contrary to Mr Hume, does exist – human beings, regardless of “race” are BEINGS – free will persons).
Jonathan Pearce – even many southern cities used to be mainly white. Even after the terrible floods of 1927 destroyed many black family farms on the great river.