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This is an aspirational white paper.
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Aspirational whiteness is not always about hating oneself or culture, but about gaining access of white privilege.
One theory is that ethnic minority parents are more aspirational than their white British peers – seeing education as a route out of poverty and disadvantage.
(The pickup game's diversity is arguably aspirational: Southie is predominantly white, Boston ranks highly on this list of the most segregated U.S. cities, and black athletes have referred to playing in Boston as going "up South").
I spent a year researching the educational aspirations of 23 white working-class boys (aged 14-16) across three London schools, to explore how they came to understand themselves as aspirational subjects.
But take away the cute kids and the celebrity plugs, and the incidence of run-of-the-mill aspirational images involving non-white people is low.
Slamming a woman of colour and then celebrating the same career trajectory of a white woman as aspirational – for some this may sound all too familiar.
We need to change the story that aspirational content can only be white, thin, and rich.
And GapFit notwithstanding, the ballerina body that is deployed to market athleisure gear is usually a white one, and the aspirational lifestyle that is marketed via ballet-adjacent barre classes is implicitly for white women.
That includes a lot of the white working class, but also aspirational British Indians and Africans.
Anna Valentine, publishing director of non-fiction at Orion, said: "There is no doubt that cookery books have become more beautiful and aspirational objects than the practical black-and-white cookbooks of yore".
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Justyna Jupowicz-Kozak
CEO of Professional Science Editing for Scientists @ prosciediting.com