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Storm Bert: forecasterse and politicians criticised after devastating floods
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Critics claim warnings and defences were inadequate but Met Office says
storm was ‘well forecast’
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PERPETRATED, ....But if Whiteness is a type of invention, then who created it? And to whose advantage does Whiteness continue to work for and serve in the present?
Writing at Metro, Quinn Morton offers the following helpful observation about America's early history.
As time went on, the labor needs of the land holders continued to grow, and desperate to cultivate the land, they were loathe to let go of their bond servants and the bondsmen and bondswomen’s children (whom they kept in bondage for a legally defined time as well). In the mean time, a growing American peasantry was proving as difficult to govern as the European peasantry back home, periodically rising up in riot and rebellion, light skinned and dark skinned together. The political leaders of the Virginia colony struck upon an answer to all these problems, an answer which plagues us to this day.
The Virginians legislated a new class of people into existence: the whites. They gave the whites certain rights, and took other rights from blacks. White, as a language of race, appears in Virginia around the 1680s, and seems to first appear in Virginia law in 1691. And thus whiteness, and to a degree as well blackness, was born in the mind of America.
As of the 18th century whites could not be permanently enslaved as they sometimes had been before, and black slaves could never work their way to freedom.
This has resulted in a system where centuries later race is still how class is lived in America.
The bargains that created Whiteness in the 17th century continue into the 21st as race continues to over-determine a given person’s life chances and economic class status.
For example, decades of housing segregation—the result of racially discriminatory federal programs in the post World War 2 era such as the Veterans Administration and Federal Housing Administration home loan programs—created wealth opportunities for whites that were denied to black and brown Americans. Those policies had a profound impact on America’s racial wealth gap where in the 21st century whites now possess at least 10 times the wealth of blacks and Latinos....../--
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