If ‘anti-racist’ white liberals feel comfortable voicing disdain for poor white people – many of whom are in similar economic, educational and political positions to those in Black communities – then their motives in the BLM movement must be questioned.
Can a working-class graduate learn to be ‘polished’, and more to the point, should they? Should they be forced to conform to social codes that are rooted in old-school ‘toffishness’ (as Boris Johnson calls it) if they wish to succeed, and should ideas of meritocracy be based upon working-class people going through a metamorphosis into, well… somebody else?
My time with her was short; two hours at most. But over that period, I learned the story of an extremely strong, phenomenal woman, who has fought to be recognised as the person that she truly is, even in the face of doctors who didn’t believe her, a socially conservative family, a discriminative police force, and people on the street in the town that she lives in, who can’t accept her for what she is: a woman.
‘Their voices are missing, and this persistent erasure or negative representation reflects […] a cultural and political violence towards these women’
Despite the many disagreements in opinion, moralising will not get rid of the demand for sex, but rather endangers and isolates sex workers further. ‘Equality’ will only exist when all women are afforded the same basic rights, and those who are now ostracised are put at the forefront of the conversation. The commodification of the sex worker by the feminist is not a new phenomenon, and women such as Sophie Walker must recognise that they, themselves, are at risk of becoming the real perpetrators of female oppression.
‘I asked her what she wanted to photograph, and she said, ‘I want to take pictures of policemen kicking children,’ and I said ‘You’re in.’ It was the shortest interview I had ever done’