I’m so not kidding when I ask you not to take anything I say as Authentic Class Rage
the way tumblr decontextualises illustrative anecdotes and receives them as representative of your whole lived experience is really unsettling to me
my dad is working class but I am not. his life is not my life, his experiences inform me but are not mine to use to shore up my class credentials. I am a middle-class person because of my mum’s family and expectations I guess, and my family’s improved financial situation from my adolescence on. and also my education — I don’t have any truck with the idea that education in itself automatically raises you from the working classes, that actually makes me really mad, but the fact that I went to an elite university and made a lot of friends there and fit in with those social groups is really important. at the same time, there are aspects of middle-class-white-uni-student culture that continue to baffle and infuriate me, because that’s not the only thing I’m used to and I often really don’t like it. there’s a lot of weird hypersensitive attention to particular norms of behaviour and inflated sense of entitlement happening that I find it hard to talk about because those discourses have been totally stolen by the right to demonise radicals and beneficiaries of social democratic welfare bodies. also, I think a lot of people call themselves “middle class” who should actually say that they are from a professional class, wealthy, or, like, ruling-class background. there is a lot of difference between a low-to-mid-level white-collar worker with a secure but not-that-high-paying job and a partner in a law firm.
anyway, it’s weird to not be able to acknowledge those feelings and experiences without also feeling like you have to front and central choose whether to Acknowledge Your Privilege or Assert Your Identity, but I guess that’s true of everything else as well
