In defence of the white working class, by Shannon Burns.
I spent much of my childhood in a northwestern suburb of Adelaide that was, for decades, predominantly white and working class. …
When a young adult male of Asian appearance kicked me off my bicycle as I rode along the footpath near our house — behaviour that I took to be insulting but not especially scary, since I’d already been threatened with knives in the schoolyard — my parents responded in a surprising way. They made appointments with the public housing trust and lobbied hard to be moved across town. They claimed that hard drugs were being sold by our new neighbours and that “Asian gangs” had replaced the predominantly white criminals who had formerly ruled the roost. This, they believed, was reason enough to be terrified. …
At the time, I was ashamed of my parents’ deformed hostilities. But after migrating into a middle-class lifestyle, I’ve become less judgmental. Here I’ve discovered that, unlike my parents, very little is imposed on me.
I live in a predominantly white, middle-class suburb. I eat Asian food and attend cultural festivals when it suits me. The people of colour whom I call friends are all university-educated and English-rich, and they share most of my basic interests and concerns. … In short, our empathy and values are entirely untested and our livelihoods rarely, if ever, come under threat.
Immigration and class:
Levels of general hostility to migrants are, I suspect, partly contingent on class experiences such as the ones I’ve described. At one end of the spectrum, professional or middle-class migrants enlarge the dimensions of what it means to be a professional or middle-class Australian, in a relatively controlled, seamless and enriching way; at the other end, poor and criminal migrants enlarge the dimensions of what it means to be poor and criminal in Australia, in a relatively chaotic, fragmented and sometimes frightening way. …
Ethos and class:
Middle-class progressives have no qualms about exercising their natural right to determine the moral values of our world. …
The habits of progressive social and political discourse almost seem calculated to alienate and aggravate lower-class whites. I confess that if a well-dressed, university-educated, middle-class person of any gender or ethnicity so much as hinted at my “white privilege” while I was a lumpen child, or my “male privilege” while I was an unskilled labourer who couldn’t afford basic necessities, or my “hetero-privilege” while I was a homeless solitary, I’d have taken special pleasure in voting for their nightmare. And I would have been right to do so.
As an aspirational teenage lumpen, I learned to embrace a working-class ethos. It was a simple, experiential lesson: whenever I allowed myself to feel like a victim, I fell into paralysis and deep poverty; whenever I took pride in my capacity to work and endure, things got slightly better. One world view worked; the other didn’t.
Even if I was wronged or oppressed or marginalised, claiming victim status seemed absurd (since I often came across people who were more unfortunate than me), limiting (since there were other, enriching aspects of life to focus on), humiliating (because in the working-class world self-pity is reviled) and self-defeating (because if you allow yourself to think and behave like a victim, you quickly fall into lumpen despair).
At university I discovered that this ethos didn’t apply. A season of despair would not send middle-class teens spiralling into a life of drug-addled indigence; they could simply brush themselves off and enrol again next year. Strong, class-enforced safety nets meant that self-pity could be accommodated and victimhood could even form part of a functional identity.
Indeed, the willingness to expose your wounds is another sign of privilege.
Those for whom injury has a use-value will display their injuries; those for whom woundedness is a survival risk won’t. As a consequence, middle-class grievances now drown out lower-class pain. This is why the wounded lower classes come to embrace conservative discourses that ridicule middle-class anguish. Those who cannot afford to see themselves as disadvantaged are instinctively repulsed by those who harp on about disadvantage.
Language is oh-so-important to PC middle-class people:
Language is another site of class conflict. I grew up in violent environments. For people like me, “symbolic violence” or “offensive speech” were, if anything, a benign alternative to real violence and real hate. It was often registered as a joke — or, yes, banter — because we understood its relative harmlessness. When I first came across someone who reacted to something that was said to him as though something had actually been done to him, I thought he was insane. But he wasn’t. He was from a lower-middle-class family and was unfamiliar with our habits of speech. He’d never been beaten, so the words felt “violent” enough for him to react in a way that was, in our environment, laughable. …
In the working-class context, in particular, it’s what you physically do, what you make — the observable physical impression — that counts. That is the native language, the one they are fluent in and the one they trust. …
PC and class:
Those who hail from the lower classes rarely have relatives or mentors who encourage them to modify or scrutinise received ways of thinking about social issues. Many go to schools that are under-resourced, where behaviour management replaces education and where punitive controls make learning feel like abuse.
The only people they know who embrace progressive values are the vegetarians down the street, whom nobody talks to, and those who are materially better off than they are. Because of this, those values take on a particular aura: they represent the world view of those who stand above them. …
Consider who determines the standards of politically correct speech. Are they negotiated across classes and social groups or determined from above? If the latter is the case, then it would be senseless to deny that political correctness, as it stands, is a form and expression of elitism. When rules of expression are forced on people who have their own relationship to speech, and who can reasonably be expected to struggle with the constraints, it is not a fair imposition. Political correctness is hardly the evil that conservative commentators make it out to be, but as a moral burden it is clearly weighted against the lower classes, who are smart enough to recognise when they are being set up to fail. …
Perhaps the most dangerous aspect of a middle-class life is the extent to which it shields its beneficiaries from fundamental, brutal realities. Most lower-class people of all ethnicities quickly learn that universal justice doesn’t exist, and likely probably never will, yet unbridled fantasies of fairness are continually thrust upon them from above.
hat-tip Stephen Neil
