Tag Archives: Discrimination

Coronavirus diary day 33 – Discrimination and the virus

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Lockdown has dealt a serious blow to the epidemic, French health boss Jérôme Salomon said yesterday, as he announced three successive days of decline in the number of people in hospital with Covid-19 and the ninth daily fall in the number in intensive care.

Yesterday’s death toll was 761, however, slightly up on the previous day. So the message is no let-up yet.

When it comes to phasing out lockdown, Macron says he “does not want any discrimination” against older or more vulnerable people.

He was reacting to the words of an expert, Professor Jean-François Delfraissy, who told a Senate hearing that lockdown should continue for the vulnerable and “people of a certain age – 65 or 70 years old”.

Everything here is confusing. Does the professor mean people over 65 or those over 70? Can’t he make his mind up and, if so, why not?

And what does Macron mean by “discrimination”?

When announcing plans for “déconfinement”, he said himself it would be phased and seemed to imply that restrictions would remain in place for vulnerable people. Speaking as someone at the lower end of the professor’s age category, that seems advisable to me. I shall continue to be careful until I’m sure the damn virus has gone away.

We seem to have forgotten the meaning of the word “discrimination”. It doesn’t have to be bad. A discriminating museum director will assemble a good collection, a discriminating doctor will choose the right treatment for patients. Racism, sexism and other discriminations based on prejudice are unjust. Rules that target those at risk for their own protection are not.

Mayors can’t introduce additional anti-virus rules on top of those put in place by the government, the country’s top court has ruled, although it made an exception for “pressing reasons arising from local circumstances”.

The French Human Rights League had appealed to the Conseil d’état against an order by the mayor of Sceaux, a town just outside Paris, obliging all residents to wear masks.

Several mayors have declared night-time curfews, with Christian Estrosi, the hard-right mayor of Nice, tightening conditions in some deprived areas after fighting broke out one weekend. I don’t know if these decisions were ever challenged.

The curfew in Nice was later extended to the whole region by the préfet, who is a representative of the national government and so not covered by the Conseil d’état’s ruling.

The famous Dr Fauci, the US’s Jérôme Salamon, said a few days ago we should never go back to shaking hands, a practice he claims leads to the spread of flu and other infections.

This led to a heated exchange on one American Facebook account I follow, some people declaring they have always hated the whole idea.

Twenty-six years ago I moved from the UK, where casual physical contact is, or at least used to be, practically regarded as an act of terrorism, to France, where the concept of personal space is radically different, as anyone walking down a Paris street soon discovers.

Here people shake hands and even kiss as a casual greeting – yes, even the men! Arriving at work can become a 10-minute ceremony. And knowing how many times to faire la bise is a real challenge. It can change according to region and, as far as I can tell, age and racial/cultural origin.

It all seemed very exotic at first but I have come to feel that the physical contact breaks a psychological barrier and establishes a certain mutual confidence, whether justified or not. I believe that shaking hands originally started as a way to prove you weren’t carrying a sword or dagger, which is always nice to know, especially in the workplace.

France’s Covid-19 death toll now officially stands at 18,681. 31,190 people are in hospital due to the virus, a fall of 115 in 24 hours, while 6,027 are in intensive care, down 221. 34,420 people have been discharged from hospital, 1,608 yesterday.

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The white working class – does it exist and should you despise it?

FacebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmailIn the US, the Republican right have taken to sneering at the “white working class”. But they’re not alone. Middle-class liberals same and the media feel free to caricature “white trash” or “chavs”. Class hatred lives on … when it’s top-down.

It’s so difficult to hate in peace these days. Overt racism is generally frowned upon – even by racists (“I’m not racist but …”).  Islamophobia is having a moment, it’s true. And then there’s class hatred, as long as it’s de haut en bas, especially if you target the “white working class”, the subject of sneers from the American right recently but also portrayed by media and liberals as the repository of all bigotry, backwardness and bad taste.

Having created a monster, the Republican establishment is desperately trying to shift the blame for flipping the switch that brought Donald Trump to political life. Two writers in the New Republic have found the perfect suspect – “the white working class”.

“The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles”, writes Kevin Williamson, going on to decry “the whelping of human children with all the respect and wisdom of a stray dog”.

Cheering him on, David French claims Williamson has debunked “the idea that the white working-class (the heart of Trump’s support) is a victim class”. His church tried to help these people, he reports, but found its efforts wasted because they prefer welfare to work, drop out of education on a whim, shag the neighbour at the first sign of marital discord and neck prescription drugs with the same gusto that respectable people sip Chardonnay.

Reassuringly, French “hate[s] the mockery that poor and working-class people of all races endure” and doesn’t think that the drug-addicted fornicators are solely responsible for their fate. The government, the “cultural elite”, “progressive culture”, “progressive policies”, the “progressive welfare state” and the “elitist sexual revolutionaries” are not blameless, he adds … to no-one’s surprise.

For the New Republic, while both the causes and the guilt seem to be collective, the solutions must be individual – don’t claim disability, be faithful, stop snorting OxyContin move to get a job – and the way to achieve this is to give “white working class” – collectively – a good telling-off.

It isn’t just the right that lumps white working-class people into a homogeneous, contemptible mass.

“[S]ince Donald Trump’s charade of a candidacy caught fire, I have heard many fellow liberals freely toss around the terms ‘white trash’ and ‘trailer trash’,” writes US journalist Connie Schultz. “These are people who would never dream of telling a racist joke, but they think nothing of ridiculing those of lesser economic means.”

Jack Metzgar in In These Times points out that the statistics don’t bear out the assertion that Trump’s support comes disproportionately from non-college-educated whites, the definition of working-class adopted by a Brookings article that says it does, while Charles Davis of TeleSur claims that among white voters who make less than US$25,000 a year, it is Bernie Sanders who is in the lead by a margin of 15 per cent.

But Trump isn’t really the point.

“Every group has its ‘other’,” Schultz observes. “For too many white intellectuals, it’s the working class.”

When Hillary Clinton was fighting Barak Obama for the Democratic nomination, she was accused of playing to racist sentiment to appeal to the white working class. In France the white working class is often blamed for the rise of the Front National’s support, as it is for Ukip’s successes in the UK, where “chav” is now a term of abuse and the poor are the given the reality-TV treatment. These are standard liberal media analyses, repeated again and again in various forms, but generally identifying a hazily defined racial-cum-socio-economic category with whatever prejudice is to be decried at any given moment.

My own experience is that there are selfish shits and bigots in all social classes, although upbringing and level of education may influence the degree of subtlety with which these characteristics are manifested. Generosity and open-mindedness can be found everywhere, too, although I’ve found solidarity, in the sense of standing together in the face of common oppression, is somewhat lacking in the middle and upper classes.

But, however you define it, the working class is not ethnically homogeneous.

So what is that adjective doing in front of that noun?

We don’t talk about the black female gender, so why would a socio-economic category have an additional racial characterisation?

I understand one can reasonably talk about a white bourgeoisie in some Latin American countries, we could certainly talk about a white slave-owning class in the southern United States and the Caribbean in the past but, despite racist employment practices, membership of the working class is not such a privilege that it is restricted to any one race.

When factories close workers of all ethnic groups are thrown out of work. When incomes are squeezed, the banks foreclose with a lack of discrimination that would be praiseworthy in another context.

Some working-class people may react to the loss of relative security with racism or other prejudices – as may middle-class business owners or professionals who feel the pinch – but, when they do so, they are identifying as white, not working-class. When you express contempt for someone who is less privileged than yourself, whether in education, income or status, you’re defining them by class. And that’s a form of bigotry, too.Facebooktwitterlinkedinrssyoutube
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