Page 48-Living With Being White-"In day-to-day-life as a white person, most people do not think about their race or its privilege. Many protest that they are not racist and do not benefit by being white, if anyone suggests that they are but they may not be taking into account the factors mentioned above which are just part of ordinary everyday life. It helps if you understand that racism isn't just a personal matter. There is:
1)-Personal racism, which is about racist attitude and actions in the present day
2)-Institutional racism, which describes the way that organisations have entrenched racist assumptions within their systems
3)-Cultural racism, which is embedded in the general culture and arises from deeply held assumptions that are rooted in the past
Page 96-Class-"So, what is class and how does it intersect with race? The meaning of the term "working class" has changed over the years. When Karl Marx used it to describe the "proletariat", it meant those who did not "own the means of" "production" (Marx, 2013)- The means of production were owned by the "capitalist class" or the "upper classes". The upper class also contained aristocracy, who owned wealth through inheriting it. There were therefore three classes: upper, middle and working class. In this book, Social Class in the 21st Century savage (2015) shows how class differences have changed over the last decade so that the stratification into "upper, middle and working class" no longer describes the most complex situation we find on the ground. His seven (rather than three) classifications grew out of research he helped to carry out for the BBC called "The Great British Class Survey." The seven groupings are
1)Elite
2)Established Middle Class Elite
3)Technical Middle Class
4)New Affluent
5)Traditional Working CLass
6)Emerging Service Workers
7)Precariat
Page 97-Savages shows how ethnic minorities show up in complex way within this classification. He says:
"Ethnic minorities are relatively under-represented among the elite, but are well represented in the established middle class beneath them. We also see that ethnic minorities are very well represented among the "emerging service workers", the group of well educated young people who have no yet procured large amounts of economic capital. So there appear to be some telling indications here as to how ethnicity is bound up with these new class categories, in that ethnic minorities have considerable amounts of cultural capital but have not been able to translate this into economic capital in the same way that white Britons have. This complex patterning of ethnic minorities into these different new classes is a further indication of the way that ethnic groups cannot but positioned within the older middle/working class divide."
Page 100-A triad of privileges
Page 174-And Now Towards The Needs Of The Future-8 ways in which white people maintain their privilege. Maybe the reader can think of more
Page 175
1)In recent centuries, white people have been globally dominant and therefore, without thinking about it, feel a historical certainty that they are the dominant race
2)Their certainty about this has led them in recent decades to assume that, within a racial context, they are racially neutral. Other's "have a race". As Dyer says. "There is nothing so powerful than being "just human".
3)Not having to think about race leaves energy for thinking about other things
4)Artefacts and evidence for your forebears activities are all around us-we take this built environment for granted, leaving its origins unquestioned. We feel rooted in our environment. This is even true for white people visiting other countries that have been colonised by white people where white architecture and other artefacts like street furniture are in evidence, but are populated, at-least in apart by non-white people who's ancestors did not build these things, South Africa, Canada, Australia, America and India are examples of colonial cultural take-over
5)Living in a country of ex-colonisers such as the UK and some European countries, or in a place which used slave labour, like the USA then we must acknowledge that the wealth created in the past has been built on exploitation of non white people for centuries, right up to the present day. It still makes ex-colonising countries much wealthier than they would have been without the history and practice of exploitation.
6)Within European countries, the cultural habits, behaviours and practices have been developed by white people over centuries. This gives a sense of deep rooted cultural placing, membership and belonging-a world we take for granted, which gives us security.
7)If your ancestors were slaves, than your families according to ancestral custom. This is not true of white people, who ancestors passed their name to the following generations. This gives a sense of being founded and rooted in a known and secure history, not one in which there was extreme suffering, alienation and cultural deprivation.
8)Much of the art, literature, music and so on that is mainstream in the culture is white. Although non-white people's cultural richness is becoming more mainstream, it is still on the fringes, which gives the individual a sense of being on the margins of society.
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