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There's also the bigger group which are more the white/all lives matter. Not fundamentally racist but pissed off at the amount of focus on this area. They won't accept the idea of white privilege as they've had a hard life and don't accept that not being white can make it harder regardless of what statistics may show.
It strikes me that these are the people addressed in the MLK letter from a Birmingham prison. Nor racist but not willing to change to allow a level playing field for people who have been systematically discriminated against. Unable to perceive their own privilege because not all of their life is perfect.
dancing james
If it's the comment I'm thinking of I think people more got "defensive" about an ill-informed commented about Burnley not having any non-white players in the team, similar to the comment from Darren Bent yesterday that Dwight McNeil wasn't too happy about.
Anyway, that's by the by. I'd say Burnley is pretty similar to a lot of working-class, industrial towns. It's gone through a few periods of huge change with various industries (cotton, mining, heavy engineering, etc) going from employing huge swathes of the population to virtually no-one. That then prompts a "brain drain" as a lot of the younger, more affluent people move out in search of jobs.
Although a lot of people in Burnley (and similar towns) are supportive of Black Lives Matter there is still a minority pushing back against it.
Some of them are just out and out racists. Tommy Robinson fanyboys who think they're in some kind of cultural "war" and are protecting "British" values (which coincidentally are just the same as their values). That's the kind of twat who sent the plane off yesterday (unsurprisingly he's already banned from going to matches) and, to be honest, I don't think much can be done to convince most of them. They're always going to be racist twats.
There's also the bigger group which are more the white/all lives matter. Not fundamentally racist but pissed off at the amount of focus on this area. They won't accept the idea of white privilege as they've had a hard life and don't accept that not being white can make it harder regardless of what statistics may show.
Realistically, I'm not sure if these people will be won over at the moment. Places like Burnley are usually in the top 10 in the country for most deprived places, educational achievement for white, working class boys is lowest out of all groups, unemployment is high, etc and a large part of the media and political establishment is telling them that this is due to immigrants, outsiders, etc coming in and taking their jobs, houses, benefits and the rest of it.
Hopefully other people will have some solutions but, without a huge shift in the country, I struggle to see this changing and I find it very depressing.