Hurrah! I am looking for a job, hmmmm Guardian Monday jobs page…aha! Great, a job that trains you to work in Art Galleries with a good chance of getting a permanent job at the end of it…PERFECT!!! Wait, for Black, Asian, Chinese or other ethnic minorities only…GODDAMIT.
Why? Why is that okay but you can’t have things just for white people?
I think this is wrong. Very very wrong. Don’t preach to me about how EM’s need greater chances because they are usually less well educated…I don’t care. I am £10 000 is debt to get an education. Frankly, I think in this instance it is really wrong, a person who has lived and been brought up in GB all their lives (and by the law of statistics is most likelly going to be white) is going to be a far better gallery curator because they will have a much better knowledge of the politics and socialogical stuff that effects the art.
The debate is open, should there be courses, jobs and other such things only open to EMs? And while we’re at it, I see BBC radio Asia and BBC Radio Cymru, Where’s BBC radio England? eh?
Not even a government, eh? Are you proposing that Great Britain stop governing minority immigrants and the like? That’d be…interesting.
For the record. a “for minorities only” addendum to a job would never fly in the United States, although minority candidates might be preffered and “minorities encouraged to apply” is pretty common. But all your “boo-hoo the white people have it so bad” is pretty ludicris, and has shot your credibility all to hell.
Theom: I believe that an add such as the one you describe would be illegal in the US. Although there are scholarships that require the recipient to be of a certain ethnic group and that appears to be perfectly legal. I’d also suspect that a college that tried to limit course attendance to only certain ethnic groups would be on the wrong side of the law, too. Perhaps one of our many lawyers will enter this thread and give us the lowdown.
This sort of affirmative action is outlawed in the UK as it is illegal to refuse anyone a job because of their ethnic background, whether they be asian, black, white, etc.
Even Sven… I was refering to the fact that Wales has an Assembly, as does Northen Ireland, Scotalnd I can live with, fair doos, they never got conquered.
Well this would certainly be illegal in Belgium where on the other hand encouraging of certain groups to apply is legal. Because that is not meant to exclude all other, but to encourage those who have a history of being turned away (also illegal but hidden racism is present all over the globe).
Whether you can live with it or not is completely irrelevant to the reasons why the various nations composing the UK have their own devolved parliaments.
I’d even venture to say that such an attitude as you’ve demonstrated is one of the very good reasons why those parliaments exist in the first place!