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A Touch of Class, Ethnicity, and Religion: Difference between revisions
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Many academics have attempted to write a definition of the various classes, and most have failed to pin it down exactly, but it has a lot to do with what you do for a living. No, actually, it has a lot to do with what your ''parents'' do/did for a living, though you can transcend your class. Also note that class is not directly related to how much money you or your family earn, though it can be heavily related to what school and what if any university you went to. Alas, [[Tall Poppy Syndrome]] runs rampant; social climbing is not generally the done thing.
* ''Underclass'' - Do not work and subsist on State benefits and/or crime.
* ''Working Class'' - Blue-collar workers at the lowest pay grades. Historically the largest group in any country, this includes farm labourers in the countryside as well as factory workers in the cities. A good rule of thumb is "if you work standing up, you're working class".
* ''Middle Class'' - divided into three:
** ''Lower Middle Class'' is one step up from Working Class. Perhaps a factory foreman or a skilled tradesman (builder, plumber, roofer). Alternatively someone in a working class job, but self employed. Someone a cut above the Workers in terms of seniority, income and skills, but not quite at the level of:
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A person's accent is a good clue as to their social class, with upper class people sounding more formal.
Some people have a thing for posh young ladies. Conversely, posh young ladies are traditionally expected to favour 'a bit of rough'. [[Australia (2008 film)||That applies down under too]].
'''Ethnicity'''
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An important note to begin with. When Britons use the term "Asian", they are referring to someone from the Indian sub-continent, not the Far East, usually. For many years ethnicity monitoring questions on goverment forms actually gave "Asian" and "Chinese" as different options! Partly this is simply because most ethnically Asian people in Britain are of Indian/Pakistani/Bangladeshi/Sri Lankan origin, but it's also because people from the other three countries in that region get upset for good reason if they're described as "Indian". Also, there's some sensitivity about referring to people as "Pakistani" because of the common British use of the abbreviation "Paki" as a racist insult as extreme and explosive as "the n-word" in the USA.
Britain has been colonised by many ethnic groups over the ages (including failed colonisations between Ice Ages), with identifiable Late Stone- and Bronze Age individuals found to be from France, Germany, Switzerland,and further East such as Hungary and Poland. Much evidence was lost when the North Sea Plain flooded in more recent ages. Cheddar Man (found in the nineteenth century in a cave in Cheddar Gorge) was Old Stone Age.
Britain is still a mostly white country, with 85.7% of the population being White British, 1.2% White Irish and 5.3% White (Other). Although this varies greatly around the country with Northern Ireland having less than a percent of it's population being non-white. The Irish have migrated in large numbers to Britain for centuries, though this has tailed off since the 60s.
The non-white ethnic minorities (7.9%) of the UK are mostly found in [[Britain Is Only London|London]]. Significant minority populations (in percentage of the local population terms) also exist in [[The Midlands|Leicester]], [[Sweet Home Midlands|Birmingham]], [[Home Counties|Slough]] and [[Crapsack World|Luton]] as well this ghettos with large South Asian muslim populations exist in [[Wars of the Roses|Lancashire and Yorkshire]]. Minorities are more common in cities and it is rarer (although they are still prevalent) to come across them in rural areas.
The main ethnic minority groups are:
* Afro-Caribbean (2% in 2001): Split fairly evenly (10:8) between Caribbean (from the British West Indies) and African (from the African nations of the former [[British Empire]])respectively. Most of these first arrived in the 1950s and are entering third generation status.
* South Asian (4% in 2001): Those from the former British India. Split between Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis and those who fled from Idi Amin's Uganda and stayed. These largely arrived in the 1970s. The second and third are mostly Muslim. This has led to some tensions in British society- with home-grown terrorism, most notably 7/7, carried out by British-born Muslims.
** Britain does have the [[Asian Store Owner]] stereotype, in that you are likely to see South Asians running newsagents in fiction.
* Central and Eastern Europeans: Not actually that new- a large number of Jews arrived in Britain around 1900 from the [[Russian Empire]] while there was considerable Polish, Greek and Italian immigration after the Second World War. However, since the admission of several new states into the [[European Union]] in 2004, quite a lot have arrived, taking mostly factory, building and service jobs. The credit crunch has seen many head back home.
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However, "blacking up" lasted about 20 years longer on UK TV than in the United States.
There is still a fair amount of racism in the UK. The Far Right have a worrying level of support, although it's actually lot less than in most other European nations. The British National Party only just, as of 2009, won their first major seats in the European Parliament, and they actually received less votes than in the last election—they had the good fortune that the election occurred in the midst of a scandal over MP expenses, depressing voter turnout among supporters of the three major parties and thus increasing their share of the vote. And contrary to popular belief, the far right will probably do worse under proportional representation since a) the most likely forms involve ranked voting and they are a lot of people's absolute last choice and b) electoral reformers claim proportional representation will greatly increase turnout, swamping the committed nutters with less committed moderates.
Or, to put it more simply: racism, particularly casual racism, is arguably less prevalent in the UK than on the Continent, but is arguably more prevalent than in the US. For example, where a Brit might see a funny caricature or romantic painting, an American (particularly one born since 1975 or 1980) might well cringe at the racial undertones. On the other hand, if the American pointed out to the Brit, "that's actually kinda racist," he/she is more likely to say, "I see... you seem to have a point" than, say, a Frenchman or a Pole (unless, of course, the thing is racist towards Frenchmen or Poles, in which case the insult was probably intended).
Arguably though, and certainly in the opinion of the UK and Europe, there are some places where America is still more racist than the UK. There are still high tensions in many places between different races, which can also be seen through class barriers. For example, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina there were accusations of racism due to the majority of people not being able to leave New Orleans being black and working class. President [[Barack Obama]] has had to deal with accusations of "being too black", "not being black enough", being foreign and being a Muslim, all of which he has taken with very good humour. It could be pointed out, that despite America having increasingly equal amounts of White Americans to other ethnicities, if you look at their media you'll notice its predominantly white. As several sociologists have pointed out, out of A list actors, only two are black, none are Asiain, Hispanic etc, and both of those actors (Morgan Freeman and Will Smith respectively) are straight and male. As mentioned there is also a high amount of suspicion of muslim people ever since 9/11, though this to a lesser extent is in Europe and the UK too.
One could say that due to America and Europe having different histories of racism, different issues worry them and different things they interpret as racist. For example, slavery is a sore subject for America but in places like Scandinavia where countries had both white and black slavery, this isn't seen as much of an issue.
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[[Category:Useful Notes/Britain]]
[[Category:A Touch of Class, Ethnicity, and Religion]]
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