Confronting Working Class Shame - Caroline Lynch

Caroline Lynch is a PhD candidate at the University of Glasgow studying international relations. 

I read an article in the Guardian today about a female writer who quit her PhD two years in, citing her working class background as the basis of severe imposter syndrome (Article here). It would be fair to say that my reaction to this has been as complex as her reasons for doing and then quitting her PhD, I am a working class, care experienced, autistic carer who is just about to start a PhD.

 The main thing that struck me was that the author was trying to educate away her working class identity, fighting the internalised stigma of it as something a bit shameful and grubby. This internalised shame was the driver of her need to achieve, to transform her core self by attaining a status that would allow her to disavow her working class identity. While I can’t say that being working class has ever been such a stigma to me, it’s just who I am, I do understand the stigma that identity carries as a disabled and care experienced person. I am acutely aware of the life differences from my upbringing and in all that autism entails, so I have some insight into how she felt. We all face our own challenges, intersectional identity is complex and our demons are deeply personal.

 We often talk about how education is transformative, but perhaps we don’t talk enough about what transformative education means. The author expected to transform her core self-perception, from ugly working class duckling to beautiful middle class swan, but if my life has taught me anything it is that the one thing you always take with you is yourself. Class identity is something more than a mere socio-economic marker of status, it infers internalised beliefs and barriers about what we are capable of. To truly grow through education (or anything else) we need to confront our internalised shame and see it for what it is: a lie shared between self and society, created to fit us into a niche. Perhaps it is the fact of my autism that shields me from this lie, I have never fit in and so I have no expectation of that.

 If education is not changing our core self, then what does it transform? If we imagine our core self as a seed, then education is the soil. Learning makes us grow, makes our mind flower, but the essence of that seed is always there no matter where we end up. That might sound depressing for those who see their core self through the lens of stigma, but I see it as profoundly joyful. If we give that seed the right conditions, we are capable of growing every bit as tall as those who have not shared our privations, and that means that we can transform academia so that working class people like us don’t have to feel like the ugly duckling any more.

 None of this is a criticism of the author of the Guardian article. She confronted her internalised shame and realised it was pushing her to behave in ways that made her unhappy. That realisation helped her to liberate herself from her shame, and that is to be celebrated. Being working class confers barriers; economic constraints, low expectations, reduced opportunities, limits on our time to learn and barriers of belonging, stigma and shame. Internalised shame and stigma is one barrier that we have the power to overcome, and in confronting and overcoming shame we can grow. Education is one way we can achieve personal growth, not as a scourge we punish ourselves with, but a joy we immerse ourselves in.

Editor's note - It is always a treat to have a guest writer, especially one so articulate. And one who is a Threads friend. 

The Social Class Spectrum

 Will Barratt, Ph.D.

Social class categories reinforces the idea that there are discrete groups, or classes, and that we belong to one group or another group. For some people success is described as moving from one social class group to another social class group. However, the criteria for membership in each class group and the class group boundaries are at best ambiguous. I have, as a convenience, used the names of social class groups, especially Upper-Middle Class since I write about social class and post-secondary education. I have also re-named a group as the Ruling Class because we make and enforce the rules. 

There are no social class categories, and social class categories are a convenient fiction. The map is not the territory and the word is not the thing, to paraphrase Alfred Korzybski. The use of convenient categories does not make them real. On the other hand, using a spectrum is just a more accurate representation of the complex idea of social class. So many people in the USA self identify as middle class as to make that classification meaningless. To further complicate this, in which I am complicit, categories treat social class as a unitary construct rather that the complex reality of components and alternative styles and components. 

The Spectrum

I am assuming that the reader is familiar with the electromagnetic spectrum, with all of the wavelengths from short to long. Here, I will deal with a simpler version, a segment of convenience, the visible light spectrum. From red to purple. Rainbow flags are a simplified version of the visible light spectrum, creating categories of red, orange, yellow, green. blue, and purple. These color categories are a convenient fiction. These are the parts of the electromagnetic spectrum that our eyes "see".  I will avoid what the rods and cones in your eyes really "see", but human eyes are capable of discerning 1,000,000 different colors. 1 million different social class groups may make conceptual sense, but that model of a million groups is unrealistic for daily use in describing social class. 

To make matters, of course, more complex we get color saturation and hue as ways to further describe colors. Light blue and pale blue and baby blue and navy blue and midnight blue and cobalt blue are all blue. When choosing font colors on your computer screen there is a two dimensional choice, one axis from red to purple, and the second axis about hue and saturation. OK, we can deal with the fiction of a two dimensional color chart. 

But wait, it is all more complex. Marx write extensively about economic capital and Bordeaux posited using economic, social, and cultural capital as a way to explore social class. Well, these are categories of features of social class. 

My concept here is that we can assign colors, however you want to choose colors, to categories or features of social class. For example, as a professor I was in the:

• top 75% for income in the US while I was working
• top 2% for educational attainment
• top 10% for occupational prestige
• top 25% for relational social capital
• top 5% for cognitive social capital
• top 5% for structural social capital
• top 1% for linguistic capital
• top 1% for travel capital (I add this because I get a high score)
• top 10% for social media influencer capital (375,000 page views on this blog should count somehow)
• top 10% for sartorial (clothing) capital
• aspirational capital
• familial capital
• navigational capital 
• technological capital 
• resistance or ethnic solidarity
• etiquette and table manners

and the list goes on . . . 

The list of social class capital is as complex and as detailed as you want to make it. My social class spectrum color chart (with red for the low end and purple for the high end) involves a lot different blues and purples, with the occasional green. 

Homework

Make a list of those things you consider relevant to social class, and remember that there are many ways to do things within any type of capital. For example my fashion style and sense is alternative to mainstream fashion magazine ideas of what a 73 year old should wear. As I often say 'I have style, but not taste'. 

Assign a color to each of each item on your list. If you want you can use the whole electromagnetic spectrum. Who am I to tell you what to do.