[This was first posted on comment is free this morning.]

I was recently invited to give a speech at the annual general meeting of the NUJ Black Members Council, which I duly did on Saturday morning. I generally try and avoid preaching to the converted so I began, on the subject of how ethnic minority journalists can break the glass ceiling, by illustrating how race intersects with class.

I started with this:

“Over two weeks, BBC 2 films will give voice to the prejudices, alienation, fears and confusion of white working class Britain – a constituency that rarely finds its voice on the BBC, at a time of sweeping social change. … ‘What we wanted to do was look at these issues in a rounded, non-political way and I think we’ve done that,’ says season commissioner Richard Klein.”

That from the BBC’s in-house magazine, Ariel. Two points should immediately be noted, I said. Why does the white working class rarely get heard on the BBC, by its own admission? Second, how can you make a series featuring immigration, Muslims, the BNP and Enoch Powell in a non-political way?

Anyway, there was an issue here being overlooked by everyone. The experience of minority groups in the UK is sometimes more affected by class and yet we keep viewing issues through the prism of race or religion. This applies to educational achievement as much as it does to media.

Race relation “experts” such as Lee Jasper (good riddance) were prime candidates reponsible for using this scattergun approach and branding the entire education system as racist without asking why Indian and Chinese kids consistently outperform white kids of either gender.

The same applies to employment. Most ethnic minorities who work in the press are of middle class backgrounds from Oxbridge and may be under-represented simply because most Pakistanis, Bangladeshis and African-Caribbean households are working class.

The media industry and politics throw up further complications. Because these industries depend much more on personal relationships and the understanding you’re going to fit into the culture, class differences are exacerbated by race. So if you’re not going to socialise or network with white colleagues, it affects your promotion prospects. Furthermore, media employers sometimes cannot get over the person’s race or religion and over-politicise it. That can mean minority journalists are either condemned to “specialist stories” or not allowed to go near them. That makes it harder for them to break the glass ceiling.

The big problem here is that many white commentators apply this class blindness to ethnic minorities (and sometimes women) too.

The BBC’s “provocative” White season is a prime example of this silliness. Last week a researcher from Radio 4 called after reading an earlier article when I asked who had failed the white working class.

The corporation is simply the latest to fall into this trap. The problem faced by white working classes isn’t that of race but their class, as Chris Bertram and Chris Dillow point out. Does anyone really believe there aren’t Asian working class families who resent Polish workers moving into the area?

When the BBC’s Richard Klein told an audience of programme makers, according to Ariel, that the corporation was “ignoring, at its peril, a great swathe of white, working class audience”, then its symptomatic of a wider problem: that media gatekeepers reflect only their own experiences in programming and journalism rather than that of wider Britain.

The White season is a tokenistic effort after which the middle class commissioners, pleased that they’ve done their bit for the proles, will go back to their usual habits, as they do with ethnic minorities. Except, there the lives of working class minorities are ignored while shiny happy middle class Asians making music or becoming successful entrepreneurs are lapped up.

But even worse is the patronising attitude that underlies it all. Here, I can’t really do better than quote Justin McKeating: “Going by the website, the season reduces working class people to exhibits in a zoo, to reality television show freaks, to anthropological curiosities in National Geographic. Here’s some knobbly-faced salts of the earth in a Bradford working men’s club. Here’s every little-brained, little Englanders’ worst nightmare, a white girl in a hijab.” It’s spot on.

Any discussion of the white working class cannot go without a mention of Enoch Powell or the BNP can it? Because middle-class people aren’t racist you see, only white working class males can be remember.

To ensure the White season gets complete overkill across the corporation Newsnight invites Nick Griffin on to debate the series. From there it can only go downhill. Kirsty Wark pointed out that the BNP doesn’t get much electoral traction and that their own polls illustrated many working class people didn’t cite immigration as a top concern (so why invite the BNP leader then?), while drugs and drinking culture were. Griffin still managed to blame that on Pakistanis and Islam, to which Wark limply replied: “I think there is a number of people who would dispute that.” I can only shake my head in despair at this travesty of journalism.

(Though, she would be competing quite strongly with Andrew Anthony of I’m-not-sure-what-liberal-values-are fame, since he was recently found complaining that the series gave Muslims an easy ride.)

I tried to sum this all up for the Radio 4 researcher and my audience at the NUJ. Ethnic minorities in Britain are basically treated similarly to white working classes: as problematic and stereotyped guinea pigs who are sometimes seen through tokenistic efforts but usually ignored until an issue comes up. Then the middle-class media land likes to get all “provocative”. What the industry needs is to re-examine how they employ people and how that affects output, not just the odd season of programming. And that minorities are sometimes affected by class more than race. The researcher never called back.

About the author
Sunny Hundal is editor of LC. Also: on Twitter, at Pickled Politics and Guardian CIF.
· Other posts by Sunny Hundal

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