This was especially true in elite liberal communities on America’s highly segregated coasts, including the part of Connecticut where I’ve lived for the past ten years. These towns are geographically diverse — from Scarsdale, New York, to Hillsborough, California, to Short Hills, New Jersey — but they have a unique collection of traits: a highly educated, Democrat-voting population; an astounding concentration of wealth; a median home price upwards of $1 million; and, most crucially, almost no black people at all.

Needless to say, these places aren’t usually big on racial awareness, save for the occasional self-conscious acknowledgment of their homogeneity. But as the Black Lives Matter movement swept the nation, the mounting social pressure to demonstrate one’s support forced a confrontation with what had long been undiscussed: how does one demonstrate a commitment to black lives when virtually none of them are being lived in your zip code?

The result was, to put it mildly, remarkable: a rash of extremely fancy white people performing near-hysterical levels of hyperawareness for an issue that had absolutely no material bearing on their lives. Black Lives Matter signs popped up like weeds in the front yards of multimillion dollar homes, in neighbourhoods where they would be seen by approximately zero black people save for the odd delivery man. Pricey boutiques hung Black Lives Matter signs in their windows. In Darien, Connecticut, a town with a black population of less than 1% and a median household income of $365,528 that regularly ranks it on lists of America’s wealthiest communities, a sea of white people in designer sunglasses marched down the leafy main street screaming, “No justice, no peace!” before gathering politely in a local park to listen to the main speaker: a black woman who had traveled up from Brooklyn just for the occasion.

Suggested reading

Why anti-racism should be resisted

By ASRA Q. NOMANI

It’s hard to overstate the irony of a town like Darien, whose racial demographics are in part a direct result of the infamous “white flight” from nearby New York City in the Seventies, having to import people of colour from that same city in 2020 in order to demonstrate its commitment to social justice. It also speaks to the peculiar relationship that places like Darien have with more local communities of colour. The town where I live, Norwalk, is just five miles down the road from Darien and has a 15% black population — but not only did Darien not ask its black next-door neighbours to participate in its Black Lives Matter protest, they also recently rejected a plan to allow just over a dozen Norwalk kindergarteners into their top-ranked school district. And so the de facto segregation of these communities has always served to insulate them from ever truly feeling the impact of America’s racial reckonings — or from having to think about them once they’re over.

Two years after George Floyd’s murder, in some cities, ubiquitous murals, statues, and street art stand in commemoration of the moment; in others, the boarded-up remains of empty, smashed-out storefronts are a stark reminder of the revolution’s less-glorious moments. Many of the places where the movement found the most purchase are now struggling to realise its promise, with rising crime rates serving as a direct challenge to progressives’ dreams of defunding the police.

In Connecticut’s wealthy enclaves, some Black Lives Matter signs are still there — albeit faded by the sun and a bit tattered around the edges, in what seems like almost too perfect a metaphor for the legacy of BLM in elite liberal communities. But in 2020, those three words weren’t just a slogan, but a brand, as conspicuous a class signal as owning a Birkin bag and knowing which fork to use.

Long before the raised fist became an high-class accessory, writer Rob Henderson identified the rise of what he called “luxury beliefs” among privileged progressives — including the attention-seeking brand of anti-racism that became so ubiquitous that summer. “Affluent whites are the most enthusiastic about the idea of white privilege”, he wrote, “yet they are the least likely to incur any costs for promoting that belief. Rather, they raise their social standing by talking about their privilege. In other words, upper-class whites gain status by talking about their high status.”

Suggested reading

Antiracism won't save you

By Tomiwa Owolade

That a person can successfully preserve his power by flagellating himself for undeservedly having so much of it certainly goes a long way toward explaining the position that communities like Darien took vis-a-vis Black Lives Matter. (See also: the popularity of “defund the police” in communities that are safe and wealthy enough to be wholly unconcerned with crime.) One year after the peak of the protests, the New Yorker noted that all this shrill awareness-raising had been largely nothing but noise: people in positions of influence had “mastered the language of racial contrition, lamenting the conditions that nourish inequality, while doing the bare minimum to change them”.

The people who spent an afternoon parading around and shouting in their pretty town square before returning to business as usual in their comfortable, lily-white neighbourhoods may not have been consciously engaging in a cynical performance, but they nevertheless seemed to grasp the game intuitively: you can be the living, breathing embodiment of privilege, but nobody will ask you to give it up if you just make enough embarrassed noises about it — and, perhaps, if you make a generous enough donation to the cause, to the tune of the $90 million raised by BLM in 2020 alone.

Here, the mind boggles: not just at the sheer volume of both attention and money generated by this movement among people who have no skin in the game, but at their utter incuriosity about just where their money went. When stories surfaced earlier this year about the shady misappropriation of Black Lives Matter funds to, among other things, purchase a $6 million party house in Los Angeles, the response from donors was revealing in that there was hardly a response at all.

But of course, there was no outrage. Those donations were indulgences: a tax-deductible expense after which you, the giver, were free to keep living your privileged life. Whether the money did anything to help was immaterial. The point was to give, and to be able to say you gave.

More from this author

America's racial fairytales

By Kat Rosenfield

But then, the intersection of wealthy white Left-leaning lives with the black ones which they profess to value has always been thus. As genuinely progressive and avowedly anti-racist as these good white liberals may be, the only black people they encounter day to day are invariably paid to be there. The gardener. The maid. The personal trainer. An endlessly rotating series of cashiers and delivery people. In lieu of actual connection, transaction. In lieu of relationships, reparations.

And in lieu of using their influence to push for actual change, the most powerful people in America — the CEOs, the philanthropists, the hedge fund managers, the people who sit on boards — raise an empty fist. At home, they plant a Black Lives Matter lawn sign and write a check for the cause; at work, they sign a bigger check alongside a polished solidarity statement crafted by the in-house PR team for maximum engagement. It is all signal and no substance, designed to mask a deep and abiding investment in the status quo — as demonstrated by what happens when you ask the folks with the lawn signs how they’d feel about a low-income housing unit being built in their neighbourhood.

Which brings us to the question of what will happen now, when Black Lives Matter is no longer the hot new trend, the must-have status symbol. Already, the black-and-white BLM banner has been largely replaced in the progressive Twittersphere by the Ukrainian flag. And in a world dominated by performative activism, where causes are less about principles than they are about keeping current, this is all but inevitable. How long will it be before the conflict in Ukraine is eclipsed, too, by some shiny new tragedy?

And sometime soon, if it hasn’t happened already, the glue holding together the last Black Lives Matter sign in the front yard of someone’s multimillion dollar mansion will give way. The hedge fund manager who lives there will come home from work to find it face-down, covered in dirt, curling with damp at the corners. And maybe he’ll pause a moment before tossing it in the trash; maybe he’ll make a mental note to order a new one from wherever that was. But by the time the men who collect the garbage come to take the bin away, its contents will have been long since forgotten — as if it was never there at all.

So our rebellion, to the extent that it wasn’t just about smoking grass and listening to the Grateful Dead, tended to be about class and class guilt. Like Malcolm McDowell in the 1968 public school revolution fantasy film if…., we were on the Left. We spoke with mockney accents; one of my friends became a skinhead and slipped away to Stamford Bridge every other Saturday.

Suggested reading

What Eton taught me about power

By Sam Leith

Today’s elite public school radicalism is a very different animal. The schools no longer think of themselves as conservative institutions training a ruling class to preserve a national heritage — they are now academic forcing houses attracting and producing a global elite of the “brightest and best”. They think of themselves as academic meritocracies, albeit with a bias towards the affluent, and are often in the vanguard of the most fashionable pedagogical and social trends.

Contemporary race- and gender- based progressivism is therefore no threat at all to the people running the schools, indeed it is positively welcomed by them. One can observe this in the kerfuffle surrounding the Eton master who has been sacked for explaining, and at least partially defending, the concept of patriarchy — it was the Eton authorities who intervened, not an uprising of radical pupils, and some parents and pupils have actually been protesting against the sacking. But in my experience of speaking at London private day schools and knowing plenty of young people who have emerged from them in recent years, progressive groupthink is the norm.

I recently stumbled across an example of this in the alumni magazine of St Paul’s, another elite private school. It featured an interview with former pupil Jonah Freud, who has recently launched a petition to “Decolonise St Paul’s” that has been signed by more than 1,000 current and former students. The letter calls for “educating through a global, rather than eurocentric, curriculum” and “deconstructing the racist fabric of our society”. Jonah, who studied Race and Pop Music at the NYU Gallatin School of Individualised Study, is the son of Matthew Freud, grandson of Clement, himself the grandson of Sigmund. Interviewer Tom Adeyoola writes of the moment Freud was awakened:

“For someone already ‘woke’ it was something closer to home that compelled him to action in writing to St Paul’s; the similarity between the names of George Floyd and his older brother George Freud. In his own words, ‘I have never experienced anything of the fear that George Floyd’s family would have feared and the only reason for that is that I am white.'”

Suggested reading

The secrets of the ruling class

By Alex Renton

I don’t want to sound cynical about this; it is obviously a welcome development that young men and women, many of whom will graduate to important jobs in our society, have egalitarian instincts and are aware of their privileges. But what about the most important privilege of all: their parents’ wealth? It is rather morally convenient for them to believe passionately in every kind of equality except economic equality.

Perhaps at some unconscious level the elite progressive public school authorities and pupils feel they will get a free pass for their huge financial advantages, if only they shout loudly enough about how they are challenging all other kinds. And as the conformist young progressives agonise about their white privilege it is rather handy that this places them in the same boat as lower income white people in struggling post-industrial towns. If both groups are primarily privileged by their race, the heads of Eton and St Paul’s can with a clear conscience complain about anti-public school bias when Oxford and Cambridge colleges try to raise their quota of people from such low income backgrounds.

More from this author

What we meritocracy critics get wrong

By David Goodhart

“If you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere,” said Theresa May in 2017. It was a clumsily expressed sentiment. But isn’t this exactly what she was talking about? A financial and educational elite, including significant sections of big business, who are increasingly disconnected from the feelings and interests of the rest of the country yet regard themselves as leading the struggle for human progress.

Shaun Bailey, the Tory London mayoral candidate, talks about tackling black disadvantage and widening access to the elite as a means of strengthening the national “team”. This is the kind of language that people of all races can happily support; but a worrying aspect of the BLM protests earlier in the year was how it divided the country, between a big section of the white elite — who embraced it enthusiastically — and the white provincial majority who seemed to be looking on with some scepticism.

Surely, if elite public schools do have any justification in a modern liberal democracy, it is precisely that the people who run them are teaching their privileged pupils to think clearly, honestly and independently about social (and other) problems, not egging them on to embrace the latest fashionable cause. As the greatest of 20th century Etonians, George Orwell, put it: “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”

In ordinary times, there are correctives to inequality. Education, for example. For some children, life is roughly sketched out before they even pull on their first school uniform. According to the Sutton Trust, children from the poorest fifth of families are almost a year (11.1 months) behind middle-income families in scores on vocabulary tests by the time they are five — often because parents do not have the time or resources to read with them at home. Schools exist to reduce this gap; they give poorer children the opportunity to pull level with their better-off peers.

With Covid-19 shuttering schools, all pupils are having to ‘learn’ from home. Inevitably, those disadvantaged pupils are falling behind. Wealthier parents are more likely to have the resources to home educate their children — or pay for tutors. Meanwhile, private schools are better equipped to facilitate distance learning. According to a survey by the pollsters Teacher Tapp, 27% of teachers in private secondary schools had worked with online video conferencing, compared with just 2% of teachers at state secondaries.

Suggested reading

Brexit has exposed our education apartheid

By Matthew Goodwin

While children are losing out in lockdown, so, too, are their parents. The old class divide of the 20th century was crudely defined as existing between those who worked with their brains and those who toiled with their hands. The contemporary divide, for the foreseeable future at least, will be between those forced into potentially unsafe working environments and an office class who have the relative luxury of working from home.

Data from the ONS illustrate the gulf between these two groups. Men working in the lowest skilled occupations — security guards, bus drivers, shop workers — already have some of the highest Covid-19 death rates. While frontline healthcare professionals such as doctors and nurses do not appear to be at significantly increased risk of death from the virus, those working in social care are, with rates of 23.4 deaths per 100,000 males and 9.6 deaths per 100,000 females. These roles are low status — as one carer told me when I worked in the sector while researching my book Hired in 2016, most care workers are “treated like glorified cleaners”. Now they are classed as ‘key workers’, even as the Government fails to provide enough Personal Protective Equipment.

In other words, Covid-19 mortality is a class issue.

Suggested reading

Why are minorities so hard hit by Covid-19?

By Saloni Dattani

Boris Johnson’s dilemma is unenviable. The notion that the lockdown can go on indefinitely until a vaccine is found is a popular misconception. According to YouGov, more than a third of the population (37%) believe the Government should wait until there are no new cases of Covid-19 at all before beginning to ease restrictions. But for every month we are locked down, the economy will take years to recover.

So informing people, as the Prime Minister did, that people can work if it is safe for them to do so, isn’t some dastardly Tory plot to give the virus an opportunity to wipe out the elderly and vulnerable. It’s an attempt to keep the economy moving. It is an unhappy consequence of the crisis that the manual and professional workforces face very different levels of risk.

This is compounded by the fact that inequality affects your risk from Covid. Men born in the most deprived areas of Britain can expect almost 20 (18.6) fewer years of good health compared to those born in the least deprived areas. These inequalities are even worse when it comes to black and ethnic minority Britons. Disadvantaged groups are therefore more likely to experience complications if they catch the virus.

But getting people back to work is a necessity. So what’s the solution?

Suggested reading

'How to end lockdown' is the only story in town

By Sam Leith

One school of thought, until recently ascendant in the Labour Party, is to ‘tax the rich’. But the tab for months of lockdown is going to fall heavily on the heads of the working class — as well as on the middle-classes. It is, therefore, strange to see prominent Left-wingers crudely portraying any gradual economic re-opening as being motivated by “profit margins and shareholder returns” — rather than something that is essential to stave off economic collapse. The longer the lockdown continues, the more people are going to be squeezed during the process of recovery — including those who can least afford to be squeezed.

Rishi Sunak has — thankfully — ignored those who have called for the Job Retention Scheme to be brought to an end, and announced that it will continue until October. As the Resolution Foundation has pointed out, by paying 80% of the wages for 6.3 million jobs, the Chancellor has softened the burden of hardship significantly.

That has not stopped bad-taste disquiet about the scheme from some Tory MPs: former party leader Iain Duncan Smith said the public had been “feather-bedded by the Chancellor” and were “happy to stay at home and do nothing”. Yet that says more about Iain Duncan Smith — who once claimed a £39 breakfast on expenses — than it does about the British people.

The surest way to ensure further outbreaks of Covid-19 is to push people back into unsafe environments because the threat of poverty hangs over them. One of the most galling sights in the early days on the virus, back in early March, was that of tube carriages packed with low-paid workers who didn’t have the option to stay at home. A repeat of this would undo much of the hard work that has gone into lockdown and make further strict restrictions — with the attendant economic damage — inevitable.

More from this author

Today's liberals dream of a workerless paradise

By James Bloodworth

But how can we ensure that workplaces are safe? Since Keir Starmer took over as leader of the Labour Party, there have been calls to include senior Labour figures in the Government’s decision-making process. This is appropriate. When it comes to the pinch, politics is about material interests, and the different parties still — to some extent at least — represent the interests of different groups in society. The Labour Party remains the party of the trade unions, and anathema though it would be for many Right-wing Conservatives, the trade unions should have a bigger role in determining whether workplaces are safe for employees to return to.

The unions are already offering important advice that is not coming from elsewhere. For instance, the Independent Workers Union of Great Britain has argued, the Government should extend health and safety rights to the 1 in 10 adults working in Britain’s ‘gig’ economy. For years, employers have been claiming that gig work offers an unparalleled degree of freedom and flexibility. Surely, then, that freedom should encompass the right to refuse work in situations that might significantly endanger health — without fear of dismissal.

Nevertheless, a reassessment of our relationship with risk is going to have to take place over the coming months. Those who cannot work from home will inevitably be putting themselves at greater risk than those who can. Practical measures can be taken to ensure those workers are as safe as possible, but some level of risk is unavoidable.

Suggested reading

Will we ever take the Tube again?

By Michael Liebreich

People are born into different circumstances and politics is in part a process of correction — the long, arduous struggle to curb inequalities that, should they be allowed to flourish, invariably generate further inequalities. One mark of a civilised society is how we treat people who do the jobs the rest of us are unwilling to do — jobs that put them at greater risk. Jobs that are fundamental to the security and comfort enjoyed by the rest of us.

The slogan of a decade ago — ‘We’re all in this together’ — was, to cynical ears, code for: look after yourself, because we don’t care. As the virus sweeps across Britain, that phrase has been resurrected. Yet it retains that familiar undertone: some are suffering significantly more than others. And as ever, the deciding factor is social class.