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I'd be the first to agree that a lot more needs to be done to break down the problematic assumption that working class is a synonym for White and northern or White and cockney etc. She suggested that the avatar for working class people in this country should no longer be an old White man in a flat cap but a young Black woman pushing a pram.
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As Cruz says, the largest growth in numbers of working class people today is among those who are “women and non-white.” While Cruz might well be American, Reni Eddo-Lodge, the author of the incisive and necessary Why I’m No Longer Talking To White People About Race, isn’t. Plus, it is at best unhelpful me taking up too much space talking about this stuff. My stretch of working in factories, warehouses, pubs, clubs and yards as a roofer, gardener, barman, pot washer, cleaner and call centre stooge ended a quarter of a century ago this year. I haven’t lived in rented accommodation since I turned 40, I finally got out of debt by 45 and now that I’ve just turned 50, I don’t mind admitting I’m no longer a couple of missed pay cheques away from financial ruin (though this is solely due to a recent insurance payout after a road accident).
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It just felt inevitable when I ended up in a series of dead end jobs, simply because that’s what my school trained me for and I had always subconsciously expected it would happen.īut what of it? It was hardly The Road To Wigan Pier and I’m pretty much middle class now.
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My girlfriend at the time assumed my parents hated her, which was far from the truth. My birthday meal on my 16th birthday was a plate of boiled potatoes. We knew exactly when to get to supermarkets on a Saturday in order to buy marked down goods. There was a lot of sitting round in what I (but not my father) perceived to be the cold and the dark. My family were inveterate coupon clippers, unpluggers and cadgers givers of careworn, recycled Christmas and birthday gifts (not to mention reused cards and wrapping paper), and one particularly grim year the givers of no gifts at all. Shoes resoled until the leather uppers shredded and tacks pierced young feet jumble sale cardigans recycled for knitted school jumpers socks darned so many times, they ended up close to ship of Theseus-like, few threads from the original garment remaining. My childhood, spent growing up in the suburbs of Liverpool in the 1970s as part of a household financed solely by the paltry wages of a factory floor worker who had overextended simply by buying a house instead of renting, was punctuated by periods of not particularly discreet poverty by the 1980s. I can identify with much that the author says. I went through a mix of emotions recently when I read The Melancholia Of Class: A Manifesto For The Working Class, Cynthia Cruz’s highly personal polemic published this month by Repeater.