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Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

A "working class" person in the US is blue collar. "working class" is a subaltern identity in the UK, that is a victim of social pathology, probably not even actually working. See

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_to_Labour

I'd say though that culture studies today talks about "race, class and gender" but largely ignores class. I know plenty of white people who have black problems including a tendency towards meaningless but dangerous contacts with the police, but if you never got more than 50 miles from the coast you might not know there is such as thing as a hillbilly.

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It is talked about, but maybe not to the extent that it could be. For obvious historic reasons, race and class are highly correlated. I think this causes certain class issues to disguise as race issues and vice versa. To be clear, both kinds of discrimination exist, both are terrible. But people are sometimes bad at separating correlated variables intuitively. And, how do I put it, the social sciences don’t have the reputation to always use the most statistically sound methods.

I’d say it’s less “disguised” and more lack of awareness of the Venn diagram going on.

Also, people discriminate so much on class that it may not be an advantage to be of a higher class.

I can’t count the ways people invent criteria, such as “street cred”, to prefer some people upon others. “Humble”, “son of worker”, “comes from the hood” are other criteria people use to justify unfairness. Ironically, streed cred is so cheatable that the only ones we let down are the actual middle classes with strong sense of work, because they pass as supposedly rich. The middle and higher classes end up with heaps of resentment which harms society (I remember events such as a girl telling me “I ruined your reputation at school but I was wrong, you were the good guy. Oh sorry for your high school btw.”)

Class warfare is no good thing.

> probably not actually working

This is how we got the hilarious "but I don't work!" clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXZ52-XgUjA

Quite a lot of people who identify as "working class" are retired, which produces even more policy nonsense.

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