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I think - I'm stealing this from Walter Benn Michaels, actually - that the class as culture can serve an ideological purpose in that it avoids discussion of class as economics and so one can happily oppose class privilege without the smallest commitment to changing the primary and economic mechanism that keeps the privilege in place.
YES YES YES STRONG TRUTH!!!1!11!
I think this unifies and makes sense of just about everything i think and feel about class...
Who Walter Benn Michaels?
As for the test, i score 10 (or 9, or 11, depending on definition-wrangling) on the original test, and 10 or 11 again on the UK-modified version - however, on both versions the majority of my points come from class-as-culture rather than class-as-economics, and for some the reasons i get the points are due to things i would see as disadvantages rather than advantages (e.g., on the UK version the question "Extended family is geographically spread-out" is more because of family violence/major fallings-out than any other factors, and on the original one unawareness of heating bills is because my parents refused to talk to me about anything to do with money). (Lurid's point about immigrant parents is another arguable example of the same thing...)
Class-as-culture, IMO, is put bluntly a pile of shite. I have a first class degree from a Russell Group uni. I'm also dole scum with no realistic prospects of ever getting a meaningful job or (unless i manage to find a disability-friendly housing co-op) not having to beg/borrow/steal every month to pay the rent. Yet, primarily because of my accent and vocabulary (and, paradoxically, things like my "non-fashionable", charity-shop-bought clothes, which i wear because a) i don't care about fashion and b) they are the cheapest option, rather than because of any kind of subcultural chic), people tend to read me as "middle class" or "privileged". (Lack of stereotypical gender presentation may well also have something to do with this.)
I think there is an argument, although i might not myself go quite as far as to actually argue it, that, due to the profound anti-intellectualism of Anglophone (particularly IME male Anglophone) culture, in which any kind of intellectualism outside an extremely narrow range of right-wing, economics-oriented intellectualism (as exemplified by the Russell Group unis, unfortunately), tends to be seen as valid reason for mockery, social exclusion and general vilification, that quite a few of the "class-as-culture" questions in these tests may actually, in everyday life, be positive disadvantages...
BTW, my presumptions were that US "college" = UK university (as opposed to FE college, which is either the precursor to university or for much more vocational, stereotypically-working-class-oriented courses), US "high school" = UK grammar or secondary school, and IRA in the US means something other than Irish Republican Army...
Oh, and IMO "grateful" isn't a useful emotion for anyone to feel about anything... but i think a concept interrogation of gratitude deserves another thread... |
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