Steel Icarus
ersatz maven
"... lucky enough" to receive a scholarship to a minor private school where I managed to completely avoid any of the values and privileges of the institution, staff or pupils
Why do people from privileged class backgrounds often misidentify their origins as working class?
- Thread starter brogdale
- Start date
Winot
I wholeheartedley agree with your viewpoint
This happens across all classes of course. My wc grandad ‘made good’ and became a bootstraps Thatcherite.
Steel Icarus
ersatz maven
I've got a mate who in the sixth form of the local comp was scoffed at by teachers when he applied to Cambridge for a laugh and to piss them off. There was no indication it was ever going to be something he should try for. (He got AAB and into Cambridge where he got pissed and a 2:2.)
mojo pixy
...שלא נמצא בשמאל
It definitely does happen sometimes, that's what gives the myth it can happen to anyone such power. Like a lottery.
Plus often, people just forget about tiny things that eased their way .. a chance meeting here, a friend-of-a-friend there...
Also in C20 a lot of social mobility came about through the wars, especially for men**.
1. lots of dead men to take the place of when it's over,
2. classes mixing on the frontlines brought opportunities later for survivors.
Some war vets no doubt succeeded after WWII due to social forces of postwar reconstruction, but credited their own selves most of all.
** EtA actually, I think for women too, especially in terms of having a job and earning an independent wage, learning professional skills etc. which was less common in 1910 than it had become by 1950.
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Pickman's model
Starry Wisdom
This social mobility by war, I wonder if you could point me to a source which explores it more deeply
chilango
Hypothetical Wanker
In fact the lack of any sort of serious Uni "prep" meant that when I arrived as a "first generation" undergrad I didn't have a clue what to expect or what to do or how to navigate this strange new world, and neither did my parents. The results were pretty catastrophic...
Chilli.s
mingling jets and statuettes
It's pronounced Barf
Pickman's model
Starry Wisdom
marty21 can adjudicate this vital question
Pickman's model
Starry Wisdom
Yeh for me too, I found the bar long before I found the lecture theatreIn fact the lack of any sort of serious Uni "prep" meant that when I arrived as a "first generation" undergrad I didn't have a clue what to expect or what to do or how to navigate this strange new world, and neither did my parents. The results were pretty catastrophic...
chilango
Hypothetical Wanker
Ditto. The pub was familiar already. I knew how to "do" pubs.
brogdale
Coming to terms with late onset Anarchism
Given what Friedman, O'Brien & McDonald say in their paper, I wonder if there are Urbz who think that they may have used an "...intergenerational understanding of family class origin in a performative manner to deflect attention away from the structural privileges they enjoy"?
I expect that some of us may have experienced others, acquaintances, co-workers etc. "misidentify their origins as working class", but I wonder if anyone here would like to reflect when, and in what sort of context, they may have done so themselves?
Might be an interesting discussion?
I expect that some of us may have experienced others, acquaintances, co-workers etc. "misidentify their origins as working class", but I wonder if anyone here would like to reflect when, and in what sort of context, they may have done so themselves?
Might be an interesting discussion?
more or less the same said to my sister. She needs carers as she uses a wheelchair and at her interview they said they would have to have some say in who those carers were because they couldn’t just have anyone going to Oxford. The whole stuffy atmosphere also put her off.
for me it helped a bit as I had lived at a residential college prior to going to university. Albeit it was a former poly and I was doing an art course. I still had never met so many middle-class people.
chilango
Hypothetical Wanker
Might be worth a separate thread?
It might need a snappier title than Have you used an intergenerational understanding of family class origin in a performative manner to deflect attention away from the structural privileges you enjoy? though
.
brogdale
Coming to terms with late onset Anarchism
Maybe, but this one was seeing quite a lot of discussion...who knows? Maybe it's a bit of stretch for folk to talk openly about it?
brogdale
Coming to terms with late onset Anarchism
Bound to end up being cheese related!20 times Urbanites have used an intergenerational understanding of family class origin in a performative manner to deflect attention away from the structural privileges they enjoy...you won't believe number 16!!!
discokermit
Well-Known Member
ive gone the other way. im trying to raise an army to take arundel castle.
Raheem
Well-Known Member
You were lucky t'ave cheese...Bound to end up being cheese related!
bellaozzydog
rolling turds in glitter
Do you put your crisps in a bowl
kebabking
Not a Girly Swot, but I like them....
I think if you remove the terms performative and deflect from that question - because, simply, it's a very leading question with some pretty crass judgements within it - and think about context and formative, childhood experience and influences - then it can be interesting discussion.
Having it on some fairly cretinous Student Grant meets Citizen Smith level however means it won't be interesting or informative.
So, for me, I am absolutely middle class: nice upbringing, decent state school with assumptions of university blah blah, but my parents didn't start out as middle class, and my grandparents - who were a big part of my childhood - certainly weren't. That's not an argument for inherited Class through DNA, but a solid belief that I am a product of the 'village' that brought me up, and a good slice of that village was WC, with WC attitudes and experiences that were related to me.
So, as an example, when I was a kid my grandad, who I spent pretty much every weekend with, took me to a village in Dorset where his family had lived from about 1600 to 1900. They were all agricultural labourers and domestic servants with grim life expectancy and all the normal indicators of poverty - 80 years after they left/died out, and despite living there for 300 years (and probably a lot longer), not one of the houses they'd lived in still stood, and not a single one of the several hundred members of that family who'd lived there had a grave marker of any type. They had, along with pretty much every other person of their class, been completely airbrushed out of existence by a system that believed they had only the temporary value of the sweat on their backs.
When I was 22 my parents had a little family party for me when I commissioned, and my Nan gave a little speech - and she said how proud she was of me, but she said that my mum and dad should take great credit for being the first generation since we'd come down from the trees who's children had never gone to bed hungry because there was no money for food. That 'family memory' of some pretty grim experiences was never far from my childhood - it was certainly used to show us the privilege we had, but also to show how quickly situations can change, and that we weren't far from dire poverty and exploitation.
So, middle class with working class roots - but we never watched blind date. Does the wrestling count?
Raheem
Well-Known Member
My OH does that sometimes. She went to a CofE secondary.
bellaozzydog
rolling turds in glitter
exactly
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