CLASSISM
a story of an unworthy witnesses
This is a story I heard a few days ago.
To me it is a sad reflection of whom we may be
as members of a class,
as citizens of a nation,
or as a species.
In a meeting, a person whom I know, admire and respect,
a person who has worked much of her life for good causes
was verbally assaulted.
‘Good causes’ sounds inane,
but when you work to feed the hungry,
to alleviate injustice,
to create a better, fairer world,
‘good causes’ takes on greater meaning.
In that meeting, a person not well known to her,
accused her of being incapable of doing what was right
or indeed of being able to understand the condition of poorer people,
because my friend is an educated women born into the middle classes.
The real stress and strain in my friend’s life were unknown
or perhaps disregarded by the accuser.
This attack came from a person who presumably thinks of herself
as being from and representing the working classes,
building her own class righteous and therefore moral authority.
Many of us have been accused of being inferior because we,
through no fault of our own,
were born to the ‘wrong’ class, race, religion, country etc.
I ask: ‘is classism, which this is an example of,
and which determines the value of an individual based on class origins,
any different than racism
or any self-agrandising ideological or religious mania
that seeks to reduce people to ‘otherness’?’
From my own history,
when being in a tight spot,
I would rather have a middleclass socialist next to me
than a working-class fascist.
This points out how an individual’s values
and the actions which give form to those values,
are more important than their class, race or religious origins.
I am an atheist with a deep dislike and distrust of religious institutions.
At times I have felt that I manifest greater Christian beliefs about love
(for instance)
then many devout Christians and Moslems I’ve encountered.
Again, the defining element is neither class nor religion,
but values and actions as an expression of one’s morals.
What we are born to is not necessarily what we become.
This unnecessary verbal assault reminded me of a moment in history.
At the beginning of the Russian Revolution
the Leninists decided they could not work with the social democrats
(the Mensheviks).
In so doing, from the outset they destroyed democratic plurality.
This forewarned the totalitarian direction
the Communist Party would thereafter pursue;
the same Communist Party that starved to death
three million Ukrainian people in the 1930s
to force the peasants to collectivize,
the same Communist Party that transferred all power away from the workers
to the party-run state,
the same Communist Party that arrested, tortured and murdered millions
in their endless insecure, paranoic and psychopathic purges.
For many years, it has been clear to me
how pernicious, pervasive and vicious English classism is.
It gouges a crater in the fabric of English culture and politics,
just as does racism.
When I have addressed this question in the past,
I have seen people’s eyes glaze over
or turn red with anger.
It seems it is impolite to discuss in public.
And it runs both ways, from the middle to the workers
and from the workers to the middle,
the former being aggressive and the later being defensive.
In the States, clearly the gash of racism is deep, violent
and a stain on American democracy,
and it is true that wealth creates other fissures in society,
but from my experience, classism
(which is about wealth, schools, accents and assumptions of entitlement)
is not as much a part of the fabric and identity
of American life as it is in England.
Is this simply a sad indication of what we are as a species
rather than who we are as individuals?
Is this an indication of our inability to embrace anyone
who differs in their origins?
As an American in England,
as soon as I’ve spoken sufficient words
for people to get that I’m North American,
a trainload of assumptions about what I may be
are dumped on me:
things that are far-fetched,
uneducated,
and menacingly insensitive.
As the public so often does,
it sits as judges before being a practiced witnesses.
Alas.
You can see here a film of mine which, when first shown,
drew out of the audience, profoundly nasty class-based responses.
A very thought-provoking read. Classism continues to be a rife evil that will not stop rearing its ugly head in the UK, even now, and is the basis of so many issues. It can be as problematic as racism, but a major issue in the UK is that classism and racism often go hand-in-hand This is because:
1. White people in most of Europe, particularly the UK, have already deemed those of darker skin tones lower than them and when they have been present in recent centuries, they place or treat these individuals in lower positions.
2. While white slave-owners received compensation after the abolition of slavery, Black people received nothing and had to build from scratch, lowering their wealth and therefore their class.
3. When invited over from the Caribbean, Black people were usually hired for low wage, menial, working-class jobs, not getting any of the wealth they were promised or should have been entitled to as part of the Commonwealth.
As a Black person myself, from an upper-working class family (or whatever the classes are these days), I have seen the difficulty and know I will continue to experience it, particularly in the fight to make more money to get myself on the housing ladder, which will result in me sacrificing part of myself and a lot of my time as an artist. I don't have the wealth of an upper class, or even middle class family behind me, and as a Black woman on top of that, I will always have to work twice as hard to not only get half as much, but even to have my artistic voice seen as valid in certain poetic spaces.