I can understand the argument that goes "they're horrible to me and/or people I like, so I'm horrible to them", but an awful lot of the anti-chav speak - most of it? - does seem to be fuelled by straight-forward, reptile brain disgust/snobbery, and is expressed with great relish, rather than anger. Note the number of references on that Chavscum site to 'cheap gold' and 'laughable attempts to appear wealthier than they are'.
Interesting article here, written from a North American perspective:
White Trash: A Class Relevant Scapegoat for the Cultural Elite
Michael S Gibbons
[Quote]
"While spending time with friends in professional school, I was quite interested in what seemed to me to be obvious contradictions in their thoughts and attitudes. Being inclusive and tolerant, as professionalism required, these students were modern liberals. They had progressive attitudes towards women, minorities and gays, both regarding their places in the workforce and in society in general. They listened to ABBA, and danced in gay bars. They questioned their sexuality while surrounding themselves with a racially diverse group of fellow professional students.
Missing from their cache of friends were people who were poor. There was a poverty chic to be expected among professional students, but all of their tastes and attitudes betrayed that their time in poverty was expected to be temporary. Poor blacks, Latinos, and whites, in fact all poor, were categorically different from them.
Their attitudes toward all poor people illustrated this. When discussing why they disliked or distrusted a person, that person’s cultural flaws (always related to poverty) disturbed them. If that person in question were a minority, then it was pointed out specifically that the person had some other flaws that condemned them. They were not condemned for being a minority, but rather for being ignorant or closed-minded. If the person in question was white, there was no hesitation in condemning this person for being “white trash.”
Knowing this group’s generally progressive political viewpoints gave me reason to question how it was that they were so open towards political minorities and so closed to the poor. There was no hesitation in deriding whites, and they allowed little room for poor minorities. This indicated to me that there was something specific in their liberal ideology in how it dealt with the poor of all races and poor whites in particular. I argue that their vehemence toward poor whites provided the kind of catharsis Newitz discusses in relation to movies. By denouncing poor white trash, whose attitudes are often antithetical to those inclusive ideologies of the professional elite, these individuals are denouncing the troubling part of whiteness."
© 2004, Michael S. Gibbons and Journal of Mundane Behavior
[end quote] |
