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I was born in
Dartford’s West Hill hospital, which once provided maternity facilities for
those who lived in Slade Green. Slade Green was an area sandwiched between
Erith (which was a Borough) and Crayford (which was an Urban District), both
within the county of Kent. But by the time I was born, this part of
north-west Kent was really part of south-east London and is now legally so -
Slade Green is within the Northend ward of the London Borough of Bexley. In
other words, I lived in a place which had no real identity or boundaries.
I lived in Slade
Green from birth until the age of eight when we moved to Dartford. So you might
say that I passed half of my boyhood there, not quite a tenth of my
life. I could claim to be a boy from Slade Green which I think of as
some kind of outgrowth of Erith rather than of Crayford. The postal
address was “Slade Green, Erith, Kent” - I used it frequently to head Thank You letters to aunts and uncles - and
the nearest town for shopping was Erith.
Google can’t find
many people who claim to be or have been from Slade Green; Jade Anouka (1990 -
) was born there and that’s the only notable name I can find. For Erith as a
whole, there are well-known people who were born there including the humanist
and socialist comedian and writer Linda Smith (1958-2006) who joked that Erith isn't twinned with anywhere but it does have a suicide
pact with Dagenham - the giant red neon Ford sign prominent on the opposite bank
of the Thames. And another one:
Erith is in Kent - the "Garden of England" - I can only assume Erith is the outside toilet because it is a shit house.[1]
A 2014 post on Reddit in answer to a question from
someone thinking to move to my home territory has this to say:
“Erith is crime central, and Slade Green
has absolutely NOTHING going for it.”
That’s not untypical of what I can find
and I doubt it’s untrue. Now
to the point.
Would it make sense to say in some selected context that people from Slade Green are underepresented in that context? If you enlarged it a bit, would Erith or Crayford or even north-west Kent make sense as things which could be underepresented? I suspect not, because there are thousands of Slade Greens in the United Kingdom, thousands of places with nothing going for them and no special claim to be represented somewhere else. If someone from Slade Green became a Hollywood film actor ( Jade Anouka might) the fortuitous fact of coming from Slade Green would be of no relevance. If Jade Anouka got a part, no one would be asking the question, Are Slade Green actors under-represented (or over-represented) in Hollywood movies?
Would it make sense to say in some selected context that people from Slade Green are underepresented in that context? If you enlarged it a bit, would Erith or Crayford or even north-west Kent make sense as things which could be underepresented? I suspect not, because there are thousands of Slade Greens in the United Kingdom, thousands of places with nothing going for them and no special claim to be represented somewhere else. If someone from Slade Green became a Hollywood film actor ( Jade Anouka might) the fortuitous fact of coming from Slade Green would be of no relevance. If Jade Anouka got a part, no one would be asking the question, Are Slade Green actors under-represented (or over-represented) in Hollywood movies?
And yet if we generalise a bit more the
question no longer looks absurd. I borrow a sociological category from Trump,
D. 2018 and put it this way, Are actors from shithole places
under-represented (or over-represented) in Hollywood films? Cleaned up
to meet Sunday School sensibilities the question becomes, Are actors
from under-privileged backgrounds …?
I don’t know the answer to that question
for Hollywood, but do know that it is reckoned to make sense in many other
contexts and that the answer is that those from under-privileged / deprived /
poor backgrounds are often under-represented. Bankers, lawyers, politicians,
museum directors …. well, they don’t come from Slade Green-like places.
*
My country has a state broadcaster which
now has a website where every day there are feelgood stories of the form “
So-and-so becomes first X in Y” or (less satisfactorily) “first openly X in Y”
and “first X in Y since …” . These stories often irritate me because so many
assumptions are quietly smuggled in with the story. Why is it a good thing that
the Church of England now has its first black female bishop?
The Church of England is, from where I
stand, a small but extremely wealthy (the bishops all live in what are called Palaces)
religious organisation which attends to the needs of the highest in the land
for infant baptisms (a reprehensible practice), weddings and funerals. And
that’s about it. It has little to commend it. What is a black woman doing
selling her soul to this organisation, I wonder? Why isn’t she - let’s say - a
Quaker? (The BBC has not heard of Quakers; its website likes to keep things
simple. There are Roman Catholics - the BBC is very much in their favour - there
is the Church of England - the BBC doffs its cap - and nowadays there are Muslims - excellent chaps. But that’s it.)
The BBC would not feature a piece
claiming “First woman to head the Institute for Torturing Political Prisoners”
because it gets the point that torturing people is not very nice. The Church of
England is not very nice, but it doesn’t get that.
You can experiment with variants: Cardinals
elect first gay / first openly gay/ first…. since 1555 Pope.[2]
The context in
which I am writing this is one in which there is endless chatter about
representation, under-representation, diversity and so on but in which there
seems to be very little thought about the categories X and Y which matter and
what in the end counts as a satisfactory result.
Even at the
apparently simple level of male:female representation, there has to be some
thinking about what counts as “gender balance” though I prefer “sex balance”
since gender is a complicating factor. Fifty:Fifty looks like the right answer.
But for a large organisation which has to deal with changes in the available
labour force, the legacy of past training practices and so on, fifty: fifty is
not a reasonable target. It would force employers to take on less qualified
candidates just to keep the balance at a point in time. What might be a
reasonable expectation and aim would be to keep variation in, say, the 45 - 55 range,
either way, over a period of time. Affirmative action is then required if the
actual figures gravitate to the outer limits of the range but otherwise
everyone can just get on with their regular work.
Even then, there
are difficult cases to consider. I offer just three: midwives, coal miners,
primary school teachers.
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