Decentering the “White Working Class”

Populism ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 199-209
Author(s):  
Meghana Nayak
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Extended Analysis ◽  
Affective Experiences ◽  
White Working Class ◽  
Affective Support ◽  
Productive Engagement

AbstractThis essay is a review of William Connolly’s Aspirational Fascim, and thus an extended analysis of the intersection of affect, race, class, and democracy. Connolly explores the role of negative affective contagion in mobilizing aggrieved white working class communities and argues for more inclusive pluralistic democracy and the use of positive affective democratic contagion to resist fascism. But he limits the radical potential of his argument because he focuses primarily on the white working class, thereby paying too little attention to the negative affective experiences of the trauma of racism. He should also interrogate not only fascist but also other types of negative affective support for Trump. I frame the essay as an invitation for productive engagement and conversation with Connolly.

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.

scholarly journals Revisiting White Labourism: New Debates on Working-Class Whiteness in Twentieth-Century Southern Africa

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Duncan Money ◽  
Danelle van Zyl-Hermann
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Southern Africa ◽  
Racial Segregation ◽  
Transnational Migration ◽  
Class Politics ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
White Working Class ◽  
White Workers

Abstract This article is a contribution to and reassessment of the debate about the concept of ‘white labourism’ hosted in this journal in 2010. White labourism is a concept formulated by Jonathan Hyslop to describe an ideology combining an anti-capitalist critique with racial segregation that he argued was dominant in a transnational white working class in the British Empire in the early twentieth century. The debate about this concept has focused on the appeal and extent of this ideology in South Africa during the early twentieth century. In light of recent scholarship on Southern Africa, we take a longer-term perspective to critically examine the concept and the debate. Specifically, we make three interventions into this debate: we consider the role of white workers outside British imperial networks; we examine how radical and revolutionary ideas disappeared from white-working class politics in the mid-twentieth century; and we reassess the connection between transnational flows of people and ideas. Racial divisions in the working class and labour movement in Southern Africa were persistent and enduring. We argue that racial segregation had an enduring appeal to white workers in Southern Africa, and the sources of this appeal were more varied and locally rooted than simply transnational migration to the region.

Nontraditional in Every Way

2018 ◽  
pp. 181-193
Author(s):  
La Shonda Mims
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Working Class ◽  
First Generation ◽  
Personal Story ◽  
Historical Role ◽  
White Working Class ◽  
Transformative Approach

This chapter explores a white, working-class, southern evangelical lesbian journey through academia, and examines the varied meanings of “nontraditional” in the academy. A discussion of labor and the disproportionate role women perform in contingent, nurturing, and supportive roles suggests that in spite of feminist revolutions, the labor of nontraditional women continues to bolster tradition in academia. Although written as a personal story, this narrative highlights broad challenges faced by faculty and students who enter higher education as first-generation learners. Embracing the struggles faced by students and faculty with nontraditional identities can be a transformative approach to pedagogy, introducing students to the historical role of privilege in U.S. society.

‘A Little Crow in the Tree’: Growing Inequality and White Working-Class Politics in the U.S.

2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 133-145
Author(s):  
Lawrence Eppard ◽  
Arlie Hochschild ◽  
Richard Wilkinson
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Social Consequences ◽  
Political Polarization ◽  
Class Politics ◽  
Role Of Government ◽  
Social Fabric ◽  
White Working Class ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The U.S

There have been troubling trends in economic inequality, deprivation, and insecurity in the U.S. since the 1970s. This inequality and insecurity has left the American social fabric ‘fraying at the edges,’ in the words of Joseph Stiglitz. Scholars have recently begun focusing their attention on phenomena which are reflective of and associated with this fraying social fabric: the increasing economic insecurity and emerging ‘politics of resentment’ of the White working class in the U.S. This piece contains excerpts from interviews that Lawrence Eppard conducted with two important scholars, Arlie Hochschild and Richard Wilkinson, who have explored these issues in their work in different ways. The interviews touch on a variety of topics, including growing inequality and its social consequences, the role of government in addressing inequality, White working-class resentment, the impact of racism and sexism on White working-class attitudes and politics, the 2016 U.S. presidential election, political polarization, and dominant American notions of freedom. Much of the discussion focuses on Hochschild’s work in Strangers in Their Own Land and Wilkinson’s work with Kate Pickett in The Spirit Level.

Illegitimate Subjects?: Abject Whites, Neoliberal Modernisation, and Middle-Class Multiculturalism

10.1068/d237t ◽  
2001 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 351-370 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Haylett
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Welfare Reform ◽  
Politics Of Representation ◽  
Cultural Reconstruction ◽  
Media Politics ◽  
Reconstruction Project ◽  
White Working Class ◽  
Socially Excluded ◽  
Government Level

Political attention to the plight of the ‘socially excluded’ in contemporary Britain suggests a renewed interest in issues of class and inequality at government level. This paper addresses the nature of that engagement by analysing the dominant discourse of welfare reform as a cultural reconstruction project which references goals of modernisation and multiculturalism. The centrality of the white working-class poor to the realisation of these goals is examined as a racialised positioning, a stage in the reconstruction of nation through the reconstruction of white working-class identities. The shift from naming the working-class poor as ‘underclass’, a racialised and irredeemable ‘other’, to naming them ‘the excluded’, a culturally determined but recuperable ‘other’, is pivotal to the recasting of Britain as a postimperial, modern nation. Analysis of the modes of modernisation and multiculturalism through which new definitions of nation are being established shows the constitutive role of neoliberal and class-based interests. The use of the white working-class poor as symbols of a generalised ‘backwardness’ and specifically a culturally burdensome whiteness, is examined as a form of class racism, the product of a dominant class-based anglocentrism. The paper concludes with a consideration of class as an illegitimate discourse within the dominant representational fields of media, politics, and academia and the author argues the need for a politics of representation that can recognise difference where it may not be visibly marked, that can see class through whiteness.

scholarly journals “To Fight the Battles of the Workers”: The Emergence of Pro-strike Publications in Early Twentieth-Century South Africa

2004 ◽  
Vol 49 (3) ◽  
pp. 401-434 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wessel P. Visser
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Racial Consciousness ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Industrial Disputes ◽  
Labour History ◽  
White Working Class

The role of pro-strike newspapers during the first two decades of labour history in twentieth-century South Africa, an era of intense industrial strife, has not been researched in depth by labour historians. This article examines the emergence of a pro-strike press and examines its position on various strike issues. It served as a conduit for workers' grievances during industrial disputes, such as the strikes of 1911, 1913, 1914, and 1922. Such papers were often also the only means of communication between the strike committee and the strikers themselves. The article also discusses the extent to which such publications might have impacted upon their readership and actual strike action. It concludes that pro-strike literature in essence reflects a “white-labour” discourse and a fusion of the class and racial consciousness that prevailed among the white working class of South Africa.

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.

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.”

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