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Notes -
Haringey is approximately 32% White British. My estimate is that among school-aged children, it’s more like 20%. Most of the white British will be wealthy Londoners who live in the affluent neighborhoods of Highgate and Muswell Hill, who will almost certainly send their children to private schools. (Quite a few of the rest will be Ultra-Orthodox Jews, who have their own schools too). The rest of the borough is “among the most deprived local authorities in England” according to Wikipedia.
My guess is that there are very, very few white english children at the schools sending students to these programs. So while white working class English boys are indeed one of the lowest performing demographics in UK schools (as many conservative opinion columnists have noted in response to this program) there are very, very few of those left in Haringey. (And many if not most of the working class white children in the borough will be the children of slavic immigrants, who seem to perform fine).
For what it’s worth, I think this stuff is pretty smart and pretty good. Whatever becomes of the immigration debate, encouraging a culture of achievement, responsibility, respect for education and conscientiousness in young black men (which this program seems to want to do) is surely a good thing. It would be a bad thing if the government shut it down.
Goes to show how important numerical superiority is. Once the share of the population of ones ethnic group decreases sufficiently, persecution of it becomes of lesser concern. Usually it is the other way a round, with minorities being discriminated against being viewed as less justifiable due to lacking democratic means to defend themselves.
I don’t think it’s of no concern, I just think that the intersection of the venn diagram of:
Native
Poor/working class
Bad literacy
Lives in this part of Haringey and attends one of the schools that is part of this program
..will be almost nonexistent. How many white working class Dutch-American boys go to public schools in the Bronx?
If there are a negligible number of them, then what do you gain by locking them out?
"Sorry Bobby, we want a racially-pure program, so we won't help you" doesn't fly with me even if it's only targeting one student.
I'm not a liberal. I don't believe in universality. If it turns out for a variety of reasons that we discuss here regularly that black kids in this part of London need this extra support with literacy then I don't have a problem with the (largely black, as I understand it) Saturday school teachers doing their best to fix the issue. This is exactly the kind of stuff that, if it works, is actually worth my tax money, as opposed to so much of government spending.
Forgive my ignorance, but that still doesn't answer the question: What do you gain? Are apartheid systems better than universal ones in some way?
I'll admit that most of my opposition is based on liberalism, but even something as bland as "literacy is good" points towards more inclusive programs instead.
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I mean it won’t work- it’s probably more likely to backfire- but that’s par for the course. If extra support for literacy is needed then there’s no reason to expect that discrimination against whites is an important part thereof- if it is, that has to be explicitly argued, which it hasn’t been.
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