Entry in Societal Groups Based on Race and Privilege?

Entry in Societal Groups Based on Race and Privilege?

Ep 62

Introduction

“The social structure of Britain has been highly influenced by the concept of classes. The class system is prevalent in the society of the United Kingdom in the 21^st century too. The different classes were formed depending on various factors such as education levels, income and the type of occupation.

As per the norms of the Parliament of the United Kingdom, there were basically two social classes. One was called as the House of Lords, comprising of the hereditary upper class and another one was the House of Commons, representing everyone else in the British social hierarchy.

We will first discuss the social system of former Britain and then the social system that is prevalent today in modern Britain.

The hierarchy that was prevalent at the time of formation of Great Britain is as follows:

Royal
Peer or Nobles
Baronet
Knight
Gentry
Yeomen
Tradesmen
Cottagers

Royal: This class belonged to the royal family and was the highest rank. The members were king, queen, prince, princess and close relatives of the royal family.

Peer/Nobles: They belonged to the House of Lords and played a vital role in court. They owned a large number of assets.

Baronet: This rank was above the knights. These were also among the aristocratic people in the society who enjoyed a large number of social privileges.

Knight: The job roles of the knights were different depending upon the varying time periods of the past. During the medieval times, the knights acted as common soldiers. In the seventeenth century, the knights acted in various military roles. They organized the military forces and judicial authorities.

Gentry: The members of this class were well educated and were associated with law, politics and educational fields. These used to work in government and educational institutions.

Yeoman: This class included small farmers, who had a reasonable amount of land with them.

Tradesmen: These individuals had little land with them.

Cottagers: These were the lowest classes in the former British social hierarchy. They generally worked for others for a substantial amount of wage.

Now, coming into the 21^st century, here are the social classes that are prevalent today.

Upper class
Upper middle class
Middle middle class
Lower middle class
Working class

Upper class

The upper class consists of peerage, gentry and hereditary landowners.

Upper middle class

This particular class consists of people with higher education and income levels. In some cases, the individuals of the upper middle classes have their ancestors belonging to the upper classes. The individuals of the upper middle classes get their education at the prestigious private schools and public schools.

Middle middle class

The individuals of this class are associated with the jobs as social workers, IT workers, engineers, bankers, teachers, architects etc. They are actively engaged in the political and social works.

Lower middle class

The lower class is comprised of the white collar workers. They are employed in the less skilled services in comparison to the upper middle classes.

Working class

This is the lowest class of the British social hierarchy. They are not being able to take optimum education and are associated with unskilled professions.”

Quote from the Great British Mag:-

This article about the British class system was updated by the Great British Mag content team on 3 September, 2019

Whether you are a lord, a “toff” or just the king of your own middle class kingdom, everyone in the UK fits into the class system but explaining the British class system is a hard thing to do even for a Brit. One reason for this is that moving from one class to another is increasingly possible, but the complication is that there are some unwritten rules that mean you can be considered upper class by some people and not by others!

Before the Industrial Revolution British society was divided into groups depending on what kind of family you were born into, which then influenced their occupation, social status and political influence. However, this has changed, in part, due to more people gaining an education, especially at university level.

Having said that a large percentage of people in the UK do prescribe to the class system, which is broadly broken down into five main groups.

Five main groups in the British class system

Lower class

This is a controversial term to describe the long term unemployed, homeless etc.

Working class

Basic low level unskilled or semi-skilled workers, such as those with no university or college education. This includes occupations such as factory workers and labourers.

A popular slang to describe this group is “chav” which focus on the negative stereotype of young people from this group who are perceived to be brash and loutish that wear real or imitation designer clothes.

Middle class

The vast majority of British people fall into this category, such as shop owners, white-collar professionals (literally those who wear a white collar like businessmen and office workers), teachers, journalists, nurses and the list goes on.

A slang used sometimes for this group is “champagne socialists” because they are comfortable financially but have socialist views.

Upper class

This is where it gets juicy. A popular slang for this group is “toffs” which has both negative and positive connotations. A toff is someone that may think they are superior to others but someone from a working class background may think a toff is someone that has no clue about real life and lacks practical skills.

Someone with a good job such as being a barrister can be considered upper-class but if their parents were working class they may be considered to have “new money” by those that come from families were they have “old money” which means they have been rich for a long time.

Aristocrats

The royal family and those with titles, such as lords or barons, fall into this group. They are often referred to as “blue blooded,” a phrase that originated in France. The term originally referred to people who were so rich that they didn’t have to work and rarely went out into the sun. This kept their skin very pale – so pale, in fact, that their veins (which appeared blue) were visible under their skin.

Of course no one really has blue blood, but the term has stuck around.

How do people fit into each category?

This sounds all very confusing but comes down to three main factors: wealth, class and occupation.

Wealth, and this is inclusive of land ownership, can push a person into the upper class. Then title and birth comes into the picture with some old English families still holding a high social status because of their origins, not because they are still wealthy.

And class is not always a boundary. Not exactly a classic rags to riches story, but Kate Middleton’s seemingly middle class life was quickly boosted into upper class-princess-superstar status when she married Prince William.

The class system in everyday life

The class system is alive and kicking in the UK but in today’s society it doesn’t have the same status as it once did. Working class people can become middle and upper class by gaining a good education and going into a profession. However, the class system’s residue is here to stay. As George Orwell said, Britain is “the most class-ridden society under the sun.”

Natives – Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire

As many of the listeners to this channel know, I love to buy books, and have a growing group of favourites that I call upon in my writing these articles to outline and better explain the topic being discussed. One of my favourite authors and orators is Akala – a rap music artist, a scholar and a wonderful orator among his many talents. I have included a few of his videos into some of the podcast last year. This book and the few extracts from it, is very applicable to this podcast, and as before, I highly recommend the book, and if nothing else, watch as many videos on You Tube of Akala discussing Race and Privilege and Empire and the Uk and its link with many nations around the world over many centuries and the role it has now, and would like in the future.

I am going to quote extracts from the book, and then link all of the information so far, into the rules of mobility into various social groups, and the unwritten rules that also apparently exist. I hope you will see, and can hopefully imagine what Princes Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex experienced in Royal circles since 2016, even though since 2020 the Sussexes are now resident in the USA and have purchased a home there. We all know the main reason why the family live outside of the UK, and the ongoing stalking and harassment and attempts at Coercive Control of a USA citizen who no longer resides in the UK, but yet the UK media and the Royal Family seem to not know when to let go. Imagine if someone with wealth enters those spaces, and has suffered in the way no other person entering the BRF, just imagine the ordinary member of the public, who does not have those resources at their disposal, and who is also a person of colour and how they would be treated by members of the societal groups I mentioned at the beginning. Think of the Commonwealth and the interactions between the people of the commonwealth nations, particularly a recent round of visits by members of the BRF inviting themselves to these places, with the excuse to celebrate the then forthcoming Queens Jubilee. It has since been reported that the UK still made a loss during the elaborate and self indulgent 4 days of ‘celebrations’ and like many vanity projects since 2016, there appears to be no added value for the UK, but is more to do with stroking fragile egos of members of the BRF.

Lets have a look at a few extracts from one of many Akala best sellers, this one on the subject of Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire.

“I think he would be very proud of the continuing legacy of Britain in those places around the world, and particularly I think he would be amazed at India, the worlds largest d emocracy – a stark contrast, of course, with other less fortunate countries that haven’t had the benefit of British rule. If I can say that on record, why not? It’s true, it’s true..” This quote was made by Boris Johnson the Prime Minister of the UK, about Winston Churchill, on whom Boris Johnson had just completed a book at the time, on Churchill.

“I am strongly in favour of using poison gas against uncivilised tribes. It would spread a lively terror. I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.” By Winston Churchill

Another extract from Akala’s book by Akala:-

I speak about the British Empire so much not just because I live here and have been shaped by it – not that any historical interest needs explaining – but because its legacies are so clear and visible and because unlike the Spanish, Portuguese, German or Japanese Empires it still sort of exists, albeit in attenuated forms as second fiddle to the American Empire, despite what our free press likes to pretend. Our ruling class and much of the citizenry seem to believe that it is still ‘our’ divine right to police the world, and to hell with what the rest of the planet thinks. What is more fascinating about British intellectual discourse is that we can see brutality ever so clearly when it wears Japanese or German or Islamic clothes, but when it comes to looking to the mirror at the empire on which the sun never set – the eighteenth century’s premier slave trader, the mother country of the Commonwealth and one of the pioneer countries in developing and then putting into practice the Enlightenment philosophy of white supremacy – so many suddenly become blind, deaf and dumb, unable to see murder as murder.”

“ I need to address the fact that discussions about race in the UK, are rather fascinating and often coloured by what I am going to call ‘A Very British Brand of Racism’; polite denial, quiet amusement or outright outrage that one could dare to suggest that the mother of liberty is not a total meritocracy after all, that we too, like so many ‘less civilised’ nations around the world, have a caste system. People who can see so clearly the very injustices in other nation states, or even perceive how positive aspects of British history have shaped the country’s current reality, somehow become unable to think when the lens of examination is turned inwards. If you have ever attempted to discuss a social ill with a person who is intensely invested in the order of things as they are, you will have no doubt been met by some rather odd and profoundly anti-intellectual responses. The phenomenon of self-induced stupidity seems particularly pronounced and almost laughingly predictable when we attempt to discuss Britain’s racist history.”

Movement (or not) Between Social Classes

“Unlike in the United States, where the legacy of slavery is part of the mainstream conversation, the hangover from the British Empire is far less discussed on this side of the Atlantic. The United Kingdom prefers to shape its identity around World Wars I and II, rather than the colonialism and slavery that fuelled its rise as a dominant world power.

While some Western historians argue the colonists brought benefits, many people — especially those who felt its boot heel — see the empire as defined by centuries of violence, looting and vampiric capitalism. To them, it was a project driven by white supremacy that strengthened mainland Britain at the expense of its subjects across Africa, India and beyond.”

NBC News Network article the full article in the reference sources

“”If you see a representation of yourself in something, you’re more likely to be interested in it,” Rachael Oloyede, 15, said. “I can still remember how multicultural the wedding was and how it reached out to everyone,” Jannelle Afram, also 15, added.

Now that fairy tale is over, and the message couldn’t be clearer for these high-schoolers.

“Even if you’re rich and of a certain status, you’re still black,” Ogbuani said. “You’re black first and foremost before you’re rich.”

And yet British citizens are more likely than not to say their country should be proud of its former empire. Around a third say that today, racism here isn’t a problem or doesn’t exist at all.”

This is a particularly British brand of bigotry, according to those who experience it. It usually does not express itself via police shootings, of which there are few here. But rather it’s a type of covert discrimination, sometimes unconscious, related to a pernicious lack of diversity.

Black and ethnic minority people are sorely underrepresented in government and senior management jobs, but overrepresented in prison cells. In supposedly progressive London, the wage gap between white and ethnic minority workers is 21.7 percent, government figures show.

“I’m not saying that the people who are making those decisions are intentionally racist,” Ladapo, at the London School of Economics, explained. “But you can see their white privilege in that they don’t feel the need to even consider it.”

“To young black people in Britain, racism is palpable and has direct consequences.

Kessley Janvier, 16, is a high school student in Bromley, south London. She’s politically active and has plans to become a lawyer. Yet, she feels the daily pull of racism when her classmates, perhaps unwittingly, compare her unfavorably to another smart young peer who happens to be white.

“When people say that she is passionate about something, they say I’m angry,” said Janvier, who is originally from Florida before her family moved to London five years ago. “So this angry black woman trope is immediately pushed on me. It’s the stereotype of black people as being sort of barbaric.

For example, she says, because most of the people covering the royal family are white, that may translate into unconscious biases coming through in reporting.

“If there were more women of color in the room, they would say, ‘Guys, this is not a good idea,'” she said.”

Sitting on the BBC’s on-set couch during its royal wedding coverage, Chawawa, the broadcaster and satirist, described it as “a massive thumbs-up from the top” that the country was going in the right direction.

Now, sitting in his agent’s office on a gray day in east London, he told NBC News the situation today feels like “touching down back to reality.”

“To see how Meghan has been treated by some major news outlets, it shows that these undertones of xenophobia or racism, which many people of color always have an inkling about, seemed unfortunately to be proven true,” he said, furrowing his brow, placing his hands together and choosing his words carefully.

“I’m afraid, for a lot of us, it feels like any smiling done on the day might have been smiling through gritted teeth.”

The Social Class Test

Included in the Reference Sources below is a link to a questionnaire compiled by researchers into this topic, and based on many tried and tested versions of this questionnaire, in order to try and see how close they could guage assessment used by society in general. The following is a paragraph in a section of the aims and objectives of their questionnaire, and their thoughts on movement through social circles and groups.

How To Get An Accurate Class Prediction

It is important to take the test with complete honesty. Clearly, you may prefer to be in a different class than you are. However, nobody will see your answers and the purpose of this test is to calculate which social class you are in rather than which social class you would prefer to be be in.

Will This Affect My Life Chances ?

Almost certainly. Regardless of what you may be told by the Elite, we increasingly live in a world of reduced social mobility. We could write untold paragraphs discussing how the elite 1% are using their economic, social and political positions to distance themselves further and further from everyone else. The reality is that the elite simply can’t help it and everyone else has allowed and is allowing this to happen. As the elite create more and more barriers to entry, there will eventually be just two classes – the elite and everyone else. However, the closer we get to this situation, the more unstable the world will become and eventually there will be a revolution.

At which point, this test will need to be changed and there will become a set of post-modern social classes to reflect the new society. We just aren’t sure what they’ll be yet.

This is what it truly means to be a person of colour in Britain today (and it’s pretty complicated)

A few times a day, I’m accosted with micro-aggressions I find tiring and toxic.

BY ATEH JEWEL

6 JUNE 2019

I was at a pub discussing race with a white male colleague in his 30s when he declared, “racism is dead, it’s no longer an issue”. It shocked me and irritated me in equal measures. I could understand why he would make this statement. Slavery is over, the civil right movement in the US was won with the right for everyone to vote and be counted, I have equal opportunities in the workplace and to live my life in peace with the protection of the law. However, what it truly means to be a person of colour in the UK today is far more complicated than the simply black or white of the days of the KKK or BNP/ National Front.

Unless you’ve walked in my shoes and others like me, it’s hard to describe the way prejudice, rears its ugly head in the modern 21st century. It feels like we are all running a race, all starting at the same point but I have a backpack on, filled with heavy rocks and I have to run and work twice as hard to be in the game with a chance of winning.

Some people may say the rocks are the chip on my back but the reality is, a few times a day, I’m accosted with micro-aggressions I find tiring and toxic.

It could be me entering a posh shop and the screech of a walkie talkie will go off and a security guard will come running in to monitor me at the back of a shop when other white customers had been there happily shopping unguarded.

It’s about me and another mixed heritage journalist not being let into a private members’ club for a work function for wearing trainers when we saw many of our white colleagues let in wearing the same shoes.

It’s not being given a handful of skincare samples at a counter when I’ve seen someone else ahead of me received some because to give me some would be perceived as a waste. It’s rushing to the hospital as an over anxious new parent with my baby daughter and being asked aggressively who my social worker is? As a black woman, they assumed I must be in the system and not a well educated middle class mother with a PHD.

These things seem small but in one day, these type of micro-aggressions add up. These actions constantly tell you people think you are less than, you are not worthy and it’s hurtful to your soul and takes up valuable energy you can be employing elsewhere.

People see my melanin and make assumptions about my background (poor and struggling); I grew up in Mayfair and my dad was a diplomat. Your education (limited); I studied History at university and was awarded an honorary PHD. Your behaviour (angry, animalistic and out of control); I’m happy-go-lucky and try to be kind and it’s exhausting and boring. I just want to be judged for being me.

The battlegrounds of racism have shifted and changed. Rather than fighting segregation, it’s now about whether people see me and my short, natural hair as a powerful person who could be CEO of a Fortune 500 company or someone disempowered. The feelings of racism and toxicity have shifted from black and white social politics to a landscape of grey.

Conclusions:-

How important is social class in Britain today?

(Image credit: Getty Images)

By David Robson7th April 2016

The UK is famed for the rigid distinctions between the different strata of society – but what’s the truth in the myth? And how does it compare to other countries?

Like it or loathe it, many see the class system as a quintessential element of British life, together with our obsession for tea and cake and talking about the weather.

“Class distinctions do not die; they merely learn new ways of expressing themselves,” the British sociologist Richard Hoggart once wrote. “Each decade we shiftily declare we have buried class; each decade the coffin stays empty.” A quick perusal of the foreign media would certainly paint a picture of a rigid class system, especially compared to places like the USA where ambition, talent and elbow grease are thought to be the only limits.

But how well does this stereotype really hold up? Is the British class system still as entrenched as it ever was? Or are those old distinctions a thing of the past, best left behind with the corsets and top hats of our period dramas? These questions have been difficult to answer with any certainty, but recent data has offered some surprising insights.

As Hoggart noted, writers have been ringing the death knell for the British class system since at least the early 20th Century. Writing an open letter to his friend Nancy Mitford, Evelyn Waugh claimed that “the vast and elaborate structure grew up almost in secret. Now it shows alarming signs of dilapidation.” His own novel Brideshead Revisited is itself an homage to the English nobility, which seemed to be crumbling along with the titular stately home.

But although the structure of the class system may have changed since Waugh’s day, there are still very clear strata in our society, each with different levels of social, cultural and economic capital. Considering factors like education, salary, professions, and household ownership, the BBC’s own Great British Class Survey discovered seven distinct classes in total, with an elite (representing roughly 6% of the population) residing above a wide spectrum of working and middle classes.

Writers have been hailing the death of our class system for decades – yet the distinctions have never really faded (Credit: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images)

Perhaps a more pertinent question, then, is not whether class distinctions exist, but whether it is possible to move out of one pigeonhole and into another. Just how much does your family’s background influence how well you can expect to do in life? The general consensus would seem to be that social mobility has increased with improvements in education and social welfare, but is it really that clear-cut?

One fascinating case study comes from the Up series of documentaries by Michael Apted. Picking 14 children of various backgrounds, who were all aged seven in 1964, the producers filmed them on a trip to London Zoo before following their progress every seven years after.

A few of the children have managed to change their circumstances through hard work and discipline. One boy, Nick, who grew up on a farm, is now a successful physicist living and working in America; another, Lynn, grew up in the less salubrious areas of London’s East End, but has forged a successful career as a university librarian. In general, however, the series has lacked any truly astonishing rags-to-riches tales. As the New Yorker concluded in its review of the latest edition, 56 Up: “The British class system has its protections at every level, but also – at least to American eyes – a built-in inertia. None of Apted’s subjects have become alcoholic or drug-addicted, but the predictability of most of the individual fates – working-class kids rising slightly, rich kids staying rich – makes one impatient.”

The children from Michael Apted’s 7 Up. Lynn can be seen with the long hair in the middle of the picture; Nick is to the far right (Credit: BBC)

According to a 2010 report by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, Britain is indeed among the worst countries for certain measures of social mobility, with the parents’ wealth strongly influencing the child’s prospects of higher education and a good salary.

Even so, there had been a steady average rise in the population after World War Two, with each child expecting to be slightly better off than their parents. Unfortunately, the relative proportions of people moving up or down a class now seems to be reversing. “More men and women are experiencing downward mobility and fewer of them experience upward mobility than before,” says Erzsebet Bukodi at the University of Oxford, who calls it “the dark side of the Golden Age of Mobility” – with more people at the top, more have the potential to fall.

Distant connections

A child is two-and-a-half times as likely to have a managerial job, if their grandparents were of a higher class

The trouble is, the fabric of our society has so many strands, it can be difficult to disentangle all the potential factors that could influence your status. One potential issue is that most previous studies have only examined two generations – parents and children – whereas your class may depend on many more branches of the family tree. Tak Wing Chan at University College London, for instance, has found that a child is two-and-a-half times as likely to have a professional or managerial job, if their grandparents were of a higher class. It could be that the grandparents pay for education, help with child care, or offer a network of contacts that could boost their grandchild’s work opportunities.

Does the British class system have a built-in inertia? (Credit: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images)

With these more distant ties, social class may be even less elastic than we thought – even if one generation pulls away, the next may be tugged backwards thanks to the broader connections of their family at large. “If you want to predict someone’s outcome, you don’t just look at their parents – but also their uncles and aunts, their grandparents and great-grandparents,” says Gregory Clark at the University of California, Davis. “They are all predictive.”

Clark’s own work has studied the prevalence of certain rare surnames throughout history. In the Domesday Book of 1086, for instance, you can find the names of wealthy landlords, who were most often descended from the Norman invaders, such as Baskerville, Darcy, Mandeville, Montgomery, Neville, Percy, Punchard, and Talbo.

He then examined how often such names continued to crop up in historical records during the following centuries. He scoured lists of people attending Oxford and Cambridge Universities, probate records of inheritance, and members of parliament, for instance, all of which might suggest a higher social status. If social mobility were high, you would expect those rare names to crop up less and less often, as people of other backgrounds begin to occupy those prestigious positions; if it were low, the proportion would stay roughly the same.

In fact, he found long-term social mobility to be very slow indeed, calculating that it takes around 10 generations for someone at the highest or lowest levels of society to reach the middle classes. That’s about the same rate of change you might expect from purely biological features, such as height. Most surprisingly of all, that rate of social mobility remained remarkably stable – even after the monumental changes of the Industrial Revolution and the introduction of universal education.

It’s not just our parents – our whole social milieu, from our wider family to their friends and contacts, can influence our progress in life (Credit: Alan Crowhurst/Getty Images)

If these results appear to confirm the “inertia” of the British class system, it’s worth considering Clark’s studies of other countries, examining attendance at the USA’s Ivy League colleges and the State Bar Associations listings of attorneys or the American Medical Association, for instance. Despite perceptions of greater social mobility, he found that the rate of change was roughly the same as in Britain. The same turned out to be true for Sweden; although the overall differences in wealth do tend to be smaller between the rich and poor, you still find the same families occupying the more prestigious jobs – such as doctors, lawyers, or university professors.

Perhaps some families are just carrying the DNA that helps them succeed

Clark’s methods have their weaknesses; his results are based on imperfect records and he’s looking at broad trends across vast time periods; it’s possible you might reach different conclusions if you were able to accurately trace every single branch of every family tree. And his explanations for these results may raise some eyebrows. Like Chan, he considers that one possibility is purely sociological. “People are embedded in a circle of connections and that social milieu is very influential in terms of people’s outcomes,” he says. Yet Clark suspects that our genes may also play a role. Perhaps some families are just carrying the DNA that helps them succeed, he says. Such genetic determinism tends to be an unpopular idea among many scientists.

Whatever the explanation for his findings, it’s interesting to contemplate just how much our position today may depend on the people we’ve never met. “Even if you do not know who your great-grandfather was, that person will predict how well you do in life now,” says Clark.

If he’s right, the British obsession with class isn’t so archaic. Whether you live in London, Beijing, New York or Stockholm, it can be surprisingly difficult to break free from the ties of the past.

Final Thoughts

If you notice, from all those societal groups mentioned at the start (upper class, middle class etc) , and all the titles (Baronet or Knight etc) nowhere in the narrative does it mention race when researching or discussing movement or lack of through the structures.

The research has generally found that it can take many generations for someone from a high or a lower class to move to the middle class strata. It has been found in the many studies that have been carried out, that it is not enough just to look at the parents of the one being assessed, in terms of occupation held by those parents, and therefore the influence they have on their child/ren. As time has gone on it become more evident that it is important to look at wider family members, grandparents and Aunts and Uncles etc. In other words, take into consideration the circle of people that the an individual is communicating with at various points in their life, and that whole bubble/cluster of people have an impact on the choices in life that those individuals make based on their cluster of interactions.

Nowhere in the mainstream of publications did I find anyone mention Race. The UK is famous for being in denial about race, and if you have read the latest Government report on Race, you could be forgiven for believing that all is well here in the UK, when in fact that official report is wholly inaccurate, as many of the experts quoted as giving an opinion for this official report, have never been approached by anyone involved in putting this report together, and they are still waiting to be approached, after going public to make it clear that despite their name being quoted in this report, they have not actually contributed, or been asked to contribute to any aspect of this report. In my mind, that immediately takes away any credibility of this publication, yet to this day, it is still quoted by government ministers, as the wholly grail and how wonderful the UK is for people of colour. In the words of one well known actor, who is famous for clout chasing, since he professed his love of far right politics, he has denied that there is any racism in the UK, and that in fact “we are lovely”.

My response to him and to the others who are living in this fairy tale bubble is this, the majority of the British public are indeed “lovely” but they are not on the whole in positions of power that can impact on the day to day lives of many in this country. Those in those positions are shielded from the reality of the environments that too many people have to live, and those same powerful or privileged people have a perception of life that is far from the reality of many.

To repeat a section of the extracts from Akala’s book quoted from earlier, this is worthy of hearing these words again:- . What is more fascinating about British intellectual discourse is that we can see brutality ever so clearly when it wears Japanese or German or Islamic clothes, but when it comes to looking to the mirror at the empire on which the sun never set – the eighteenth century’s premier slave trader, the mother country of the Commonwealth and one of the pioneer countries in developing and then putting into practice the Enlightenment philosophy of white supremacy – so many suddenly become blind, deaf and dumb, unable to see murder as murder.”

There is so much more, but there is insufficient time to go through even 1% of that in the duration of this podcast. Not all groups of the population can move through societal groups with ease, and in fact when you take into account the family and friends clusters mentioned earlier, which then influence and dictate to a degree the types of people who a person interacts with fairly often throughout their lives, which in turn influences life choices, including work and new friendships springing from those things, which according to the research takes many generations to even begin to get a mention now. On that basis, are any people of colour surprised that so far, in these research papers that I have seen, race is not appearing enough, and if it was, when you then bring into play the family and friends clusters and the ripple effect of that, then POC are going to have an even steeper hill to climb to get into a society group above the one they are in now.

So, think then of the Duchess of Sussex, a millionaire several times over, someone with a brilliant education and university degree from a premier institution; work experience clearly demonstrating successful career climb, and the last 7 years, paying telephone number size payment per episode of a successful tv franchise, and with repeat fees coming in daily from around the world. The friendship cluster full of successful ambitious people, and whilst the family side of things was far from good, that would have been about any of those white family members if they had been taking the survey to determine social class, and yet UK media chose to regularly invite toxic white family members into their studio time to discuss negative topics, and with people who had had professional organisations in the legal system involved with them over decades, but because they were speaking against a black woman, that was deemed to be ok. No interest in doing the same with the black members of the family. So much more but it has already been said in previous podcasts, but the evidence is there that the proportion of UK and Australian media publications (tv and printed and online) has been 100% toxic, and all the people interviewing these individuals are all white and focussed on right wing topics in their programming anyway. The UK media, in particular the Royal Rota are mainly white males, and the only time that a black member of that rota was known to the majority of the Uk population, was when Prince Harry specifically asked for only one reporter from the Rota and it was preferably to be a person of colour. For that one day, the rest of the Rota were falling over themselves to speak with the said reporter, and since then, he has returned to obscurity.

I am confident that the deeds and approach to how Prince Meghan, was treated by the UK Monarchy and its partners in the media, particularly the Royal Rota, will come back to haunt them in a legal way in the future. The treatment has been disgusting, and the fact that the Sussexes now live in the USA speaks volumes. The Sussexes have stepped back from Royal duties, and are independently funded, yet this group of so called journalists write about them every day, in a hate inciting manner, which as I said will come back to haunt them. Deleting articles, or amending articles is becoming a regular activity from this group, likewise their posts on social media. It makes zero difference. Receipts exist, and one day you will all be confronted with your etchings and will feel the heat. Your two years of continued harassment and stalking and coercive control attempts on a USA citizen will also come back to haunt you all.

The fact remains that Princess Meghan was never accepted into Royal circles. There was a view formed from the beginning that that this relationship would fizzle out, and then reporters were openly reporting after the marriage took place, that it would only last 3 years, and then when the family were forced to move to the USA, Royal Rota reporters were openly writing on social media that they hoped Prince Harry would return without his wife and children.

Research has shown to move up or down to a social group can take years, and seeing that people of colour do not feature in any of the studies that I quickly looked at over the last few weeks for this podcast, then it comes as no surprise that the idea of a woman of colour, seemingly coming from nowhere, into the top group, that 96% could never enter without marriage or lots of people in their family/friendship circle holding various Titles, and all of whom are white, then the family clearly thought they could ensure that a marriage never took place. That first plan, like so many others, failed miserably, and it was clear all the other positives and impressive CV that Princess Meghan had, including involvement with a range of global charities, and a position with the United Nations in relation to women’s empowerment, were erased from their eyes. All the other Stepford clones who married into that family, at best attended the right schools, and beyond that, not much to write about, but the idea of a woman of colour, with intellect and a resume that could wrap around a corgi several times, was ignored.

The Royal Family is a societal group that one day will not exist, and current generations of people together with the history books of the future, will document how the only person of colour into the British Royal Family was treated, and unlike the official version of events, Princess Meghan was not “welcomed” into the Royal Family, and all the actions that were shown in publications and quoted when it suited to make the family look better than they are, were all standard performative actions, like 99% of everything else that is done on a daily basis.

I see it as a loss to the UK, made worse by the fact that the family lost Prince Harry into the bargain. From a Squad perspective, we celebrated when the couple made the announcement on 8th January 2020 that they were stepping back from Senior Royal Duties, and we celebrated again when the Commonwealth Service was over because we knew that the couple were now done. Meghan left shortly afterwards we understood and Harry left a week or so later. The best thing for the couple and their supporters. The level of cruelty and evil game playing backfired on all those responsible for the ill conceived in the first place. They played themselves and lost. Glorious outcome.

Now The Sussexes are operating on a global scale in global societal groups, all of which are above the top social group in the UK. The Sussex children family and friendship circle already far outweighs any they would have gained by remaining in an institution with dodgy business activity and even more questionable links to friends who operate outside the law, and who have been apprehended for such activities. No one in that circle wishes to harm the children or their parents. It is a pity that the same could not be said about family members elsewhere or associates linked to the BRF. In my opinion the Sussexes are operating in global societal groups that matter and make a difference to the world, as opposed to the self gratification of being associated with something a few minutes of the year when cameras are rolling.

People of colour WILL make entries into this research, and it will show over many generations, who occupies the top groups and why, and the same for those people who will struggle to move more than one group upwards, including people of colour. There will be changes at the top, and one group will disappear completely, just like many Monarchy groups have already, and the few remaining will disappear over the coming decades. As already been stated in research mentioned earlier, the reflection of UK people, upon looking in the mirror, will eventually change to begin to recognise reality about a whole host of things, not just people of colour. In time it will recognise respect for the working class who keep this country going, just as much as any other societal group, and the recognition of that fact is long overdue.