class in the UK - how the fuck does it work?

"he's like an unemployed teacher - nae class!"

pinefox i generally agree about the simplicity of class structure and wish it were entirely true but i can't help but reflect on my own experiences of feeling othered or ignored based on cultural markers? partly this is my own internal self-doubt but i must say that broadly, it isn't. intelligence, manners, position can still be subsumed by accent and other markers in the UK, in terms of other people's attitudes to us in a work environment for example.

in the interests of honesty i don't really identify within a class. i would totally identify my mom and dad and their parents and so forth as working class but for better or worse my life has taken me into work and situations where i "pass" as middle class, and i'll accept that might make me middle class, i don't much care, but i feel that lostness of being between two tribes quite a bit

also i know whose company i tend to seek out or feel more comfortable in, even tho on an individual basis i don't care at all about somebody's self-perceived class environment

Also a thing you see in the media, which may or may not be related to pinefox’s point above, is this insistence on what counts as culturally working class vs middle class. Like the anti intellectual bent of it, like the near silence in library closures from much of the press, like the infamous HLew tweet which is so telling of that mentality. What could these people have to offer? Offer them shit, that’s all they’re interested in, after all.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EtfhjcwWgAEX2K0?format=jpg&name=900x900

oh my god between that one and the "coffee is middle class" bit she's a pure example of blinkered belonging to a specific social construct

It’s like, real working class people aren’t interested in books that aren’t Harry Potter/films with subtitles, they’re too busy working and worrying about bills. As though art hasn’t ever been an escape for all people, especially people who value their precious free time!

i go back to that comment somebody made to me at uni - it was a huge FUCK YOU that i probably should have grown out of by now but hey, lol

and yet when you think about the huge range of interests of working class people you know, when you look at the history of the working class education movement that people had to build out of nothing, the lie is right there

also there's quite a diff btw London/southern middleclass and midlands/northern middleclass

Oh here we go

srsly think accent is the least of it and the least reliable

i believe most people are contextually parrotish with accents

obv certain accents have come to connote class but generally in the lamest way?

It's reliable enough for most London based media twats

pinefox i generally agree about the simplicity of class structure and wish it were entirely true but i can't help but reflect on my own experiences of feeling othered or ignored based on cultural markers?

Yes, I think this is exactly what my own post above was saying.

seriously disagree Tom. i think people are v poor at picking up the nuances of accents from places they're not familiar with.

obv you're familiar with that milieu but like i said before, people learn to *pass*

pinefox i read your earlier post back, yes, sorry, i agree

And I agree that accent is extremely unreliable bit it isn't considered unreliable by the media - hence the whole gammon fiasco.

oh yeah agree

regional (non-RP) accents seem to connote authenticity and legitimacy of concerns only if they're expressing conservative views, otherwise they're just mocked or ignored - some kind of RP still seems to be a requirement for most kinds of "serious" political and intellectual leadership. this is definitely about class but doesn't map neatly onto it in material terms and it's hard for me to locate cause and effect more precisely here

If they express conservative views they're mocked as ignorant racist Northern proles.

both of you otm

When I first started infant school I was practically speaking in an estuary English accent that I picked up through imitation from two middle class kids my registered childminder mum was looking after for a year. But that didn't last very long. But then I got moved to a catholic school in a posher area on account of the headmaster beating my brother with a pool cue at the previous not so posh school. I was about 8 when I first fully realised the class dynamics of getting othered/judged/disparaged by children and also adults, purely on account of the the area you are from and would try not to admit that I lived in a very rough part of Deighton. But then I'd make up for it over the next 40 odd years by never shutting the fuck up about where I grew up, lol it turns you into a wittering basketcase 4 life!

when i started infant school my mom and dad didn't want me to be mates with a lad who had a strong Brummagem accent. i think that's partly cos they couldn't hear their own strong Walsall accents ffs

I had to learn to talk proper as a kid to be taken seriously after moving from e london to surrey and then I tried to unlearn it as a teen to sound more street as I lost interest in doing well and now I have the kind of generic estuary that can be more or less posh situationally but I find generally embarrassing in both directions esp when I unconsciously imitate who I'm speaking to. relatives who stayed in london sound more authentically working class than me but they're also mostly better off. this is a minefield and it can be v hard to disentangle the parts that are class from the parts that are other shit

i think the point is that we think about it yeah? like we have to think about it? say this with love