Why do people from privileged class backgrounds often misidentify their origins as working class? These interviews with British professionals from middle class backgrounds who weave stories of making against it the odds, of the obstacles they overcame, of grandparents' mobility stories, of family wealth acquired only through frugality, suggest lots of reasons.
Often, they simply find much more privileged people to compare themselves to, framing relative advantage as a story of relative disadvantage.
In the end, though, the misidentification erases privilege and enforces deep cultural beliefs in the meritocracy. The researchers explain:
We would therefore argue that these intergenerational understandings of class origin should also be read as having a performative dimension; as deflecting attention away from the structural privilege these individuals enjoy, both in their own eyes but also among those they communicate their ‘origin story’ to in everyday life. At the same time, by framing their life as an upward struggle ‘against the odds’, these interviewees misrepresent their subsequent life outcomes as more worthy, more deserving and more meritorious.
Across these interviews we see evidence that even privileged people are conscious of class advantage and disadvantage. They use their identification of/with working class backgrounds to justify their current privileges as the reward for hard work, while also distancing themselves from those from working-class backgrounds who simply decline to work so hard.
British class hierarchies are, of course, different from those in the U.S., and at the same time, I so often hear stories of working-class grandparents, of parents' frugality leveraged for children's advantage, of others being even more privileged when I have made the case at conferences and elsewhere that the structural economic inequalities navigated by poor and working-class students deserve much more academic attention. Those with considerable class privilege use their own versions of mobility stories to question the salience of class for poor and working-class students.
