The construction of (white) working-class identity in narrative literary texts and its contribution to socio-cultural and politico-financial inequality

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-15
Author(s):  
Jonathon Crewe
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Class Identity ◽  
White Working Class

Linking Moralisation and Class Identity: The Role of Ressentiment and Respectability in the Social Reaction to ‘Chavs’

2015 ◽  
Vol 20 (4) ◽  
pp. 18-32 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elias Le Grand
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Moral Panic ◽  
Class Identity ◽  
Moral Self ◽  
Social Reaction ◽  
The Social ◽  
Dialectical Process ◽  
White Working Class

This paper aims to link two fields of research which have come to form separate lines of inquiry: the sociology of moralisation and studies on class identity. Expanding on recent papers by Young (2009 , 2011 ) and others, the paper argues that the concepts of ressentiment and respectability can be used to connect moralisation processes and the formation of class identities. This is explored through a case study of the social reaction in Britain to white working-class youths labelled ‘chavs’. It is demonstrated that chavs are constructed through moralising discourses and practices, which have some elements of a moral panic. Moreover, moralisation is performative in constructing class identities: chavs have been cast as a ‘non-respectable’ white working-class ‘folk devil’ against whom ‘respectable’ middle-class and working-class people distinguish and identify themselves as morally righteous. Moralising social reactions are here to an important extent triggered by feelings of ressentiment. This is a dialectical process where respectability and ressentiment are tied, not only to the social control of certain non-respectable working-class others, but also to the moral self-governance of the moralisers.

Finding the White working class in 2016: Journalistic discourses and the construction of a political identity

2018 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 201-222
Author(s):  
Brian Creech
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
American Politics ◽  
Political Identity ◽  
Small Towns ◽  
Political Support ◽  
Economic Decline ◽  
Class Identity ◽  
Cultural Discourses ◽  
News Organizations ◽  
White Working Class

This article argues that the discourses and techniques of political journalism worked to make White working class identity sensible as an assumed norm in American politics during the 2016 US presidential campaign. Throughout the campaign, many news organizations sent journalists to small towns and various Donald Trump rallies to understand what was driving a burbling resentment among his base of White working class voters, and by interrogating the explanatory and long-form reporting produced by these journalists, we can come to understand how the White working class began to cohere as a particular political subjectivity. By documenting the economic decline and social peril borne from neoliberal policies, acts of journalism substantiate the conditions that animate White working class identity and legitimate its resentments. However, that same journalism also failed to adequately deal with the consequences of policy and the way economic conditions and cultural identities reflexively constitute one another, instead focusing on the ways class- and race-based resentments formed a well of political support, constraining any sense of agency to the discursive bounds of a political campaign. This article concludes by arguing that in order to decenter the primacy of whiteness in American politics, it is incumbent upon scholars and observers alike to attend to the various cultural discourses and techniques that render it simultaneously central and invisible.

Nationalism

Brithop ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 23-50
Author(s):  
Justin A. Williams
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Hip Hop ◽  
Rap Music ◽  
First Century ◽  
Pop Music ◽  
Class Identity ◽  
White Working Class ◽  
Dominant Narratives ◽  
English Nationalism

This chapter surveys the performance of attitudes towards English nationalism in hip-hop, from banal nationalism to ambivalent Englishness, to the role of history and tradition in constructing the national, to the localism of “hip little Englishness,” and finally to multicultural Englishness with examples from Lady Sovereign, Speech Debelle, The Streets, and others. Rapper responses to constructed “official” versions of England complicate these dominant narratives, and often create or build upon others such as English white working-class identity. By looking at these various examples and categories based on Cloonan’s types of Englishness in pop music, it provides alternative ways to think about the nation and how it is performed, overtly and subtlety, in twenty-first-century English rap music.

scholarly journals Varieties of White working-class identity: Implications for social attitudes and political preferences

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Knowles ◽  
Monica McDermott ◽  
Jennifer Richeson
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
The United States ◽  
Social Attitudes ◽  
Class Conflict ◽  
Class Identity ◽  
Political Preferences ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Qualitative Work ◽  
White Working Class ◽  
Nationally Representative

The manner in which working-class Whites in the United States exercise their considerable political power is guided by their views on immigration and race. We argue that this group’s political and social attitudes are rooted largely in their perceptions of their own position in the socioeconomic hierarchy. Our analysis reveals that White working-class identity is far from monolithic—and thus predicts immigration and racial attitudes in complex ways. Our previous qualitative work uncovered three types of identity: Working Class Patriots, who valorize responsibility, embrace national identity, and disparage the poor; Class Conflict Aware Whites, who regard social class as a structural phenomenon and attribute elitist attitudes to the middle and upper classes; and Working Class Connected Whites, who embrace working-class identity, sympathize with the poor, and feel disrespected by the middle and upper classes. This article reports a quantitative confirmation of these identity types in a nationally-representative survey of working-class Whites. We also reproduce associations, seen in our previous research, between class identities and attitudes regarding immigration and race, such that Class Conflict Aware and Working Class Connected Whites are considerably more progressive on immigration and race than are Working Class Patriots. Implications for electoral politics and race relations are discussed.

Ambivalent Relationships: London's Youth Culture and the Making of the Multi-Racial Society in the 1960s

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 4-26 ◽  
Author(s):  
Felix Fuhg
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Youth Culture ◽  
Global Culture ◽  
Local Conditions ◽  
White Working Class ◽  
Ambivalent Relationship ◽  
Post War ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Class Youth

The emergence and formation of British working-class youth cultures in the 1960s were characterized by an ambivalent relationship between British identity, global culture and the formation of a multicultural society in the post-war decades. While national and local newspapers mostly reported on racial tensions and racially-motivated violence, culminating in the Notting Hill riots of 1958, the relationship between London's white working-class youth and teenagers with migration backgrounds was also shaped by a reciprocal, direct and indirect, personal and cultural exchange based on social interaction and local conditions. Starting from the Notting Hill Riots 1958, the article reconstructs places and cultural spheres of interaction between white working-class youth and teenagers from Caribbean communities in London in the 1960s. Following debates and discussions on race relations and the participation of black youth in the social life of London in the 1960s, the article shows that British working-class youth culture was affected in various ways by the processes of migration. By dealing with the multicultural dimension of the post-war metropolis, white working-class teenagers negotiated socio-economic as well as political changes, contributing in the process to an emergent, new image of post-imperial Britain.

British Television's Lost New Wave Moment: Single Drama and Race

2012 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 612-627 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eleni Liarou
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Black Population ◽  
New Wave ◽  
Audiovisual Material ◽  
British Drama ◽  
History Of ◽  
White Working Class ◽  
Written Sources

The article argues that the working-class realism of post-WWII British television single drama is neither as English nor as white as is often implied. The surviving audiovisual material and written sources (reviews, publicity material, biographies of television writers and directors) reveal ITV's dynamic role in offering a range of views and representations of Britain's black population and their multi-layered relationship with white working-class cultures. By examining this neglected history of postwar British drama, this article argues for more inclusive historiographies of British television and sheds light on the dynamism and diversity of British television culture.

Unification and Its Discontents

2016 ◽  
Vol 93 (2) ◽  
pp. 4-16
Author(s):  
Brian Kovalesky
Keyword(s):  
Public Schools ◽  
School District ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
School Districts ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Los Angeles County ◽  
The State ◽  
White Working Class ◽  
City Schools

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, during the height of protests and actions by civil rights activists around de facto school segregation in the Los Angeles area, the residents of a group of small cities just southeast of the City of Los Angeles fought to break away from the Los Angeles City Schools and create a new, independent school district—one that would help preserve racially segregated schools in the area. The “Four Cities” coalition was comprised of residents of the majority white, working-class cities of Vernon, Maywood, Huntington Park, and Bell—all of which had joined the Los Angeles City Schools in the 1920s and 1930s rather than continue to operate local districts. The coalition later expanded to include residents of the cities of South Gate, Cudahy, and some unincorporated areas of Los Angeles County, although Vernon was eventually excluded. The Four Cities coalition petitioned for the new district in response to a planned merger of the Los Angeles City Schools—until this time comprised of separate elementary and high school districts—into the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD). The coalition's strategy was to utilize a provision of the district unification process that allowed citizens to petition for reconfiguration or redrawing of boundaries. Unification was encouraged by the California State Board of Education and legislature in order to combine the administrative functions of separate primary and secondary school districts—the dominant model up to this time—to better serve the state's rapidly growing population of children and their educational needs, and was being deliberated in communities across the state and throughout Los Angeles County. The debates at the time over school district unification in the Greater Los Angeles area, like the one over the Four Cities proposal, were inextricably tied to larger issues, such as taxation, control of community institutions, the size and role of state and county government, and racial segregation. At the same time that civil rights activists in the area and the state government alike were articulating a vision of public schools that was more inclusive and demanded larger-scale, consolidated administration, the unification process reveals an often-overlooked grassroots activism among residents of the majority white, working-class cities surrounding Los Angeles that put forward a vision of exclusionary, smaller-scale school districts based on notions of local control and what they termed “community identity.”

Reflections on the Production of a Working Class Academic

Public Voices ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 91
Author(s):  
David Greene
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
White Working Class

A white, working class professor's reflections on his life and career.

scholarly journals Deflecting Privilege: Class Identity and the Intergenerational Self

Sociology ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 003803852098222
Author(s):  
Sam Friedman ◽  
Dave O’Brien ◽  
Ian McDonald
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Long Range ◽  
Upward Mobility ◽  
Extended Family ◽  
Class Identity ◽  
Origin Stories ◽  
Class Privilege ◽  
Privileged Class

Why do people from privileged class backgrounds often misidentify their origins as working class? We address this question by drawing on 175 interviews with those working in professional and managerial occupations, 36 of whom are from middle-class backgrounds but identify as working class or long-range upwardly mobile. Our findings indicate that this misidentification is rooted in a self-understanding built on particular ‘origin stories’ which act to downplay interviewees’ own, fairly privileged, upbringings and instead forge affinities to working-class extended family histories. Yet while this ‘intergenerational self’ partially reflects the lived experience of multigenerational upward mobility, it also acts – we argue – as a means of deflecting and obscuring class privilege. By positioning themselves as ascending from humble origins, we show how these interviewees are able to tell an upward story of career success ‘against the odds’ that simultaneously casts their progression as unusually meritocratically legitimate while erasing the structural privileges that have shaped key moments in their trajectory.

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