White privilege comes in many forms. You have the privilege of your mother leaving
your father for another man and then being convicted of killing this new lover.
You have the privilege of your new step mother having four children with three
different men, but she doesn’t care for any of them and least of all does she
care for you. You have the privilege of being forced to stand for hours on end,
while everyone else eats ice cream. Finally, you have the privilege of being
forced to eat salt until it kills you.
Last year as social workers up and down the country went on white privilege courses where they were taught how to identify the privileges they had because of their white skin, they found themselves less and less able to identify the signs of abuse and neglect that were all around them and which would in one instance lead to a little boy being tortured and then murdered.
Parliament is outraged. Something must be done. But we
have been through all this so often. There is a long list of vaguely remembered
names that we were all once outraged about. But nothing changed. Next year or
the year after there will be another name, another death that might have been
prevented, but wasn’t because of yet another woke course that causes social
workers to close their eyes to the real problem.
It isn’t accidental that social workers miss abuse. We
will go through a ritual of a public inquiry. It will recommend new training
courses, new safeguards, better this and better that. But nothing will change
until you eradicate an ideology that views everything through identity politics
and thinks that there is a hierarchy of victims.
There was a time when the local district nurse would
visit the homes of children and be judgemental about the parents and the home
environment. Was the house clean and tidy? What sort of food was in the
cupboard? Did the father have a steady job? Were there signs of immorality? If
it was obvious that the child was from a good family, there was no need to
check back very often. If the parents had bad habits and a history of petty
crime, they had to be watched closely. But now we mustn’t be judgemental.
The Scottish Government tells us that we mustn’t call
drug users addicts, because that would be judgemental. Instead, we are supposed
to say that drug users are unwell. When social workers go into a drug user’s house,
they are not going to be judgemental if it is filthy with drug paraphernalia lying
about and a child in unclean nappies annoying its mother with its crying. Above
all don’t call the mother an addict, what matters is the feelings of the drug
user and the hurtful words we use.
The route through college or university is now a woke
obstacle course. You are not going to pass your social work course if you
question identity politics too closely. There are victims and villains. At the
peak of villainy are rich white men who vote Tory. Various characteristics give
you a degree of victimhood. White people can be victims if they are poor single
mothers with multiple children from different fathers, even if they also
obviously have an inherent white privilege which they can no more change than a
leopard can change its spots.
It means that the authorities will treat the case of a
poor white girl complaining of being raped differently according to who she is
accusing. She might even be called
racist if she accuses a gang of men from the wrong ethnicity. But just as identity
politics caused the crimes of such men to be ignored, so too it causes other
forms of child abuse to be ignored and for the same reason.
It isn’t merely that social workers waste their time
going on woke courses rather than courses that would teach them to identify
child abuse. No one really needs a course to tell that a child has bruises or
is distressed or undernourished. The problem is that the basic common sense
that we grow up with that would immediately identify abuse is distorted by the woke
courses. Instead of judging impartially and objectively we see through a prism
of identity that sees more harm if it comes from a nice middle-class family
with good jobs, than if it comes from the home of the underprivileged.
If Arthur Labinjo-Hughes had a father working in the
city and a step mother working as an engineer then a mere fraction of the signs
of abuse that were present would have been enough for the case to have been
investigated thoroughly. It was his misfortune to be living in a family somewhere
near the bottom of the heap. It was for this reason that social workers felt
they couldn’t be just too judgemental about his parents. If he had been a
little black boy his “black privilege” would have made it still more likely
that the social workers would cut his parents some slack. After all we mustn’t
judge the parenting skills of the poor and downtrodden. And if the little boy
died, we could still feel warm about the fact that his black life mattered.
Woke politics must be taken out of social work, or
else nothing will change. It’s not merely that the obsession with identity politics
is a waste of time. Worse it teaches students to lose their common sense. If
you can believe that a father can give birth, you can also believe that a
battered child is loved by his parents. Worse still you are conditioned to
excuse the inexcusable because the parent is poor, or black or drug addict,
while condemning the rest of us for the white privilege of owning the slaves
which our ancestors fought to abolish.
