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Like I've said before, class is a far more slippery descriptor than we're willing to admit. Yes, many people are wilfully facetious and enamoured with some mythical inheritance of humble roots. But apart from people sat firmly on polar ends of the wealth spectrum, it gets woolly. https://twitter.com/hettieveronica/status/1351127144244654085
Does the kid whose parents work manual labour jobs relinquish any claims to working class status as soon as he accepts a place at a grammar school and gets a well paid job? How many degrees of separation from your working class ancestors before the label expires?
Again, not interested in the instances where its clear that someone is comfortably middle class and comes from family that have been for a few generations. Yes this is obv about money, but how does social mobility, how we speak, dress & socialise intersect with notions of class?
Another thought: @JackieHagan talks about how working class artists learn to assimilate to fit into an overwhelmingly middle class industry. She has a good quip about how we shouldn't dismiss someone's class roots just cos they wear a FitBit and eat hummus.
I'd hazard a guess that none of us could give a definitive answer to what middle class is or isn't. If you can, please prove me wrong! And we have to interrogate what we hope to gain from splitting these hairs.
Much of social policy across the globe has been focused on growing the middle classes. Something that was once a widely held aim of a stable, modern society is now being spoken about with suspicion and disdain. So what do we want instead? This is a sincere question.
What are the aims of these definitions other than middle-class bashing, which may be good fun but also, to me, smacks of deflection (note this piece is in The Guardian). I see a lot of people that aren't exactly humble bricklayers engaging in it with disproportionate zeal(!)
Reminds me of certain white people loudly trying to dissociate from their own whiteness by being the first to mock stereotypically 'white' behaviour. Self awareness is a virtue, ofc, and there are plenty of working class ppl offering necessary critique of how society operates.
I should be writing the stuff that pays me instead of this meandering thread! I just wanna know where all this circuitous pointing out of the minutiae of middle class experience ultimately GOES. Where we headed, baby? Let's start from the destination and work our way back.
