In a recent article, the Guardian columnist Zoe Williams claims the phrase “white working class” is a fiction – one that is “so widely deployed and so misleading”. However, her entire argument seems to be based on a misunderstanding of how the phrase is used (something you would have assumed would be quite obvious).
“Of course there are white people who are working class,” Williams writes, “but the class as a whole is the most diverse of any group.” Later she repeats that “the working class is diverse” – in fact, “the most diverse of all social classes”.
Err, nobody disputes there are working-class people of all ethnicities. Williams seems to believe that when people refer to the “white working class”, they mean “the working class, which is white”, rather than “the subset of working class people who are white”.
So why do people use the phrase “white working class” – why would they want to refer to the subset of working class people who are white? There are several reasons.
One is that the white working class might systematically differ from both the white middle class and the non-white working class. Take voting in the 2020 U.S. election. Two thirds of whites without a college degree voted for Trump, compared to less than half of whites with a college degree, and only a quarter of non-whites without a college degree (see below). These divergent voting patterns may reflect different interests.
A second reason why people use the use the phrase “white working class” is to push back against the notion of “white privilege”, which has become so popular in recent years – particularly in the Guardian. Consider the chart below, taken from the recent report by David Rozado and Matthew Goodwin. It shows that between 2010 and 2020, mentions of ‘white privilege’ in British newspapers increased by more than twenty thousand percent.
Indeed, the notion of “white privilege” is so absurd precisely because there’s such a thing as the white working class, whose members do not possess any kind of “privilege” insofar as that term was traditionally understood.
A third reason why people use the phrase “white working class” is because they feel that, in certain respects, white working class people have been ignored by the political establishment. The most obvious examples of this are the grooming gang scandals, where authorities failed to intervene and stop abuse of white working class girls. As the independent inquiry into Rotherham notes:
Several staff described their nervousness about identifying the ethnic origins of perpetrators for fear of being thought racist; others remembered clear direction from their managers not to do so
In other words, abuse of white working class girls was allowed to continue because it would have been “racist” to identify the perpetrators.
The phrase “white working class” is certainly not a “fiction”. In fact, there are several valid reasons why one might use it.
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The Guardian and their ilk would certainly like the white working class not to exist, and are intent on destroying it – removing their identity is but one of many ways in which they are trying to do that.
This is a war.
Isn’t the original phrase “white, working class family” as in “he came from a white, working class family” giving in one phrase a persons ethnicity, social class and familial status? Why is this any more contentious than “he came from an English, working class family”? Or “she came from a Asian, professional class family “?
The census asks for ethnicity, job and family status.
It’s not really contentious, but the Guardian are pretending to believe it is because the white working class are most likely to oppose their plans for the world.
Hate to agree with The Guardian, but… I’ve always found the phrases ‘working class’, let along ‘white working class’, pretty meaningless and/or useless as descriptors. And I’m even a product of A Level Sociology from the 70s! (And Toby’s Dad’s book – ‘Family and Kinship in the East End’ was one of my set books!)
Any attempt to categorise people is necessarily imperfect and should be used with caution, but that doesn’t mean they are meaningless, and I think the Guardian’s assault on this particular classification is nothing to do with their passion for accuracy and everything to do with the fact that the white working class (which does exist) is their enemy and vice versa.
I didn’t downvote you, btw.
“pretty meaningless”? As someone who grew up in a very working class area of Staffordshire, where games of footy down the local stretch of grass were often interrupted by gang fights involving knives, I can tell you now that the phrase is far from “meaningless”. I now work with Cambridge and Oxford grads, almost all from wealthy middle/upper class families and I can assure you the phrase “white working class” has meaning on many, many levels. Whether you like it or not – and I realise we’re an inconvenient demographic for the left – we very much exist. And proudly so.
I was born in 1952 into a White Working Class family and de facto am by origine White Working Class. Working Class meant those who did manual labour in the wealth producing sector of the economy – and still does.
We now have a large Parasitical Class that does no work but gets paid wages for doing jobs which produce no wealth.
How would you want to refer to the victims of the many Pakistani grooming gangs in the UK? Just slags who got what they deserve? White trash? Sorry, can’t see them as they don’t exist? The last one would be the Guardian phrase. So called sex work is obviously terrible and must be stamped out. But it it’s only wrong-coloured teenage girls commercially exploited by right-coloured businessmen, who cares?
And I’m even a product of A Level Sociology from the 70s! (And Toby’s Dad’s book – ‘)
A’ Level Sociology. A scientist then.
I don’t know what category I belong to but I know I have never met anyone quite like me.
If only the same could be said for the Grauniad, but it is all an all too real ghastly perversion.
Diverse apparently means ‘contains black people’… even if just one.
Diverse actually means varied, non-uniform, heterogenous – it doesn’t mean contains some black people.
Britain isn’t ‘diverse’ it is 85% White; it is reasonable to suppose the Working Class is about the same.