I am Working Class
When I say I’m working class, I’m not describing an identity, I’m not explaining a social position, I don’t say this because I need others to place me. I live in Britain, I am a working class woman, I don’t have to tell people this because we place each other, we read each other, and I have always been read as working class.
Being working class isn’t an identity I wear in order to get funding, or a free place at a seminar, my type of working class doesn’t get these things anyway, my type of working class has come through experience and a history that has been passed down to me by generations, my values, how I see and think about the world is knowledge that has been shared with me by mother, by her mother, by her mother and her mother before her, my dad, my granddad and so on, by Mrs Bell my next door neighbour who looked after me when I was a child and her collective knowledge, being working class to me is about power, history, and experience. Being working class is about the relationship a group of people have with other groups of people, looking at each other and seeing that pain, but in turn having others look at you as ‘other’ and not one of them.
When I say I am working class it is a deep feeling of love and pain, pride and shame, it’s not an individual feeling about me, it’s a collective feeling about us. When I see and hear other working class people being abused or hurt, when they are subjected to symbolic violence, it hurts me.
This collective knowledge isn’t about nostalgia, and the past, its about the past the present and the future, a pain I inherited and a pain I have passed on. Working class people are hurt from the day they are born, even before they are born, questions are asked about our inception, about our family’s abilities, and the moral fibre of what we may become the minute our eyes are open.
We carry this, its heavy, it hurts, and sometimes that hurt turns to anger, and it should, anger is the natural response to being fucked over, looked down on, laughed at, judged, and side lined, talked over, not listened to. When we get angry and upset (the right response to any deep hurt) we are judged again, as animalistic, uncontrollable, emotional and stupid. I think of this as symbolic violence of a thousand different paper cuts a day, that wears us out, that stings it makes us tired.
I am tired of being tired, I am tired of my anger, and my experience being side lined for a better version of the working class, the ones that don’t get as angry, if they aren’t that angry are they really living a working class life? Some people are politicised and see this class pain, they don’t have to be working class to see it, but they must stand aside allow us to speak our own truths.
Who I am is not an identity to be worn, to be used to make money, or create a worthiness without the politics. I use the term working class because it connects me to a sense of belonging, and a sense of hope, being working class is not an identity it is a politics of inequality, unfairness and cruelty.
When you come across this commodification of identity, and you will know it when you see it because the politics will have been removed, the political relationship of power and class will have been removed.
Middle class people receive undeserved advantages at the expense of the undeserved disadvantages of working class people.
If that is not present and up front in the conversation, call it out for what it is, worthiness and non-political identity politics.
If class isn’t political its nothing.
The bit about anger really resonates. It's taken me nearly 40 years to channel my anger from my working class upbringing.