Seems to me that you’ve misread the article. It wasnt specifically about black people or minorities, more about classes. While its possible that black people have even lower social mobility, what we know for certain is that UK in general is a country where who your parent is determines more than 50% of people’s future income. In general there is low social mobility. To say that it is the fault of any given community that they havent lifted themselves up from the ghettos is unreasonable in an economic context where there is generally low social mobility.
I never meant to say I think consumerism is a good thing. Far from it, it is one of the worst diseases of modernity, especially because if you are even slightly a part of popular culture, you are infected with it atleast a little bit. My only point is that to single out ghetto culture for crudely glamorizing consumerism and their ways of accessing it is unfair. The mainstream society glamorizes consumerism constantly. Only the means of accessing it, really accessing it in the way advertised, are much more limited for people at the margins.
This person who was part of the initial protests says it better than me:
I do know people who live in council estates, because I have to collect data from them. Almost all the people who volunteer for our studies are low-income people, and so I have a little bit of access. While I dont pretend to know their world what I do know is this: its not a cushy life [this is with regards just to quality of life].
That a minority of people manage to escape their backgrounds is never in dispute. I dont attribute it just to luck though that plays its part. Personal choices play a role. Aptitude plays a role. Intelligence plays a role. Then again, it could be argued that even those things are a part of your genetic lottery. Should stupid people be miserable in your worldview? As the role of human beings shrinks in the economy with more of it being automated, and more of it being high skilled jobs, do you see it natural and appropriate that there be a corresponding contraction in access to resources towards those who were a) unlucky in birth and b) unlucky in not being gifted? And that being the case, do you not see the danger in a society where the same resources are constantly glamorized, and constantly seen as justly denied to a growing number of people?
Lets see what the independent commission says first. The police already made the claim that they were shot at by the guy only for the commission to say theres no evidence of that. What if he had already surrendered, should he have been shot then? Theres some pretty bad figures [for this country] for the police when it comes to black people, for instance this. Im not ready just yet to say that they acted correctly.